The Spyglass

De profundis

2011-05-11T16:34:00.003-04:00

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice. . . .
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

Lord, be . . .
Lord, be peace to calm the storm.
Lord, be enough, for I am not enough.
Lord, be strength to bear these burdens.
Lord, be wisdom to mend my folly.
Lord, be knowledge, for I do not understand.
Lord, be light outshining the darkness.
Lord, be power to raise up my weakness.
Lord, be hope when I have no hope in myself.
Lord, be goodness to draw my heart.
Lord, be love to heal me, and through me to heal others.
Lord, be grace to set me free from fear of condemnation.
Lord, be faithfulness, for I don’t know how to trust.
Lord, be joy on a bitter road.
Lord, be promise when the way ahead is dark.
Lord, be the next step, for I am lost.
Lord, be healing in the midst of pain.
Lord, be music through the discord.
Lord, be justice against the evil in my heart.
Lord, be protection from my enemies, for they are great and I am small.
Lord, be who you are and have always been, because the waters are over my head.
Please . . .
Lord, be.

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Nitric grace

2011-02-14T23:30:00.003-05:00

The gospel of grace is a universal acid that dissolves all the pretensions, presuppositions and preferences of this world order. If you're not feeling it burn, you're probably not preaching Jesus.

Credit and thanks

2010-12-31T09:32:00.002-05:00

A couple weeks ago I put up a post called "God is in the real," talking about a lesson God had been bringing home to me that week; it was a point I had seen made somewhere before, but I could not for the life of me remember where. Yesterday afternoon, my lovely wife was good enough to point me back to the original post, and indeed, the author there put it much better than I did. I'm not posting an excerpt out of respect for her posted request, but I encourage you to click through and read it, as it's well worth your time.

Impertinent question of the month

2010-12-30T23:45:00.004-05:00

When people find out my wife and I have just had a son after three daughters, most of the time we get some form of the same basic reaction: "Oh, so you kept trying until you had a boy, huh?" In a lot of cases, I suspect it's people trying to make sense on their own terms of the fact that yes, we just intentionally had a fourth child—they can't imagine themselves doing such a thing, except perhaps with some particular and significant provocation. In a sense, it's not completely false; as it happens, we picked out a boy's name years and years ago, and we rather felt that it would be sad if we never met the person to whom the name belonged. Aside from that, though, we would have been just as happy with a fourth girl. The gender isn't the point.

I don't want this to come across wrong, because I believe male/female differences are real and important and valuable; I believe the reality of our two sexes, and the deeper and more profound reality of gender of which our biological sexes are a concrete instantiation, matters more than we know. But my children are not abstractions, they are not generalities, they are not case studies—they are themselves. They are particular specific people, and the fact that three of them are girls and one is a boy is very much part of that, but it's only part of who they are as whole people, and I wanted them for themselves.

Yes, they are created in the image of God, male and female, as are their mother and I; but that's not all that defines them. They are creators and destroyers; they are accomplished sinners and saints in training; they are capable of genius and prone to folly; and so am I all of those things as well, and heaven help all of us as I try my best to do my part to raise them to be better and more faithful and more loving disciples and friends of Jesus than I am. Trying for a boy? No, as well say we were trying for a pianist (though judging by his infant fingers, we might have managed that); we were trying to welcome the child God intended to give us in trust, as his stewards, to raise in his name and for his glory, to join the others whom he had already given us in the same way. It's not about us or what we want at all, it's about him.

Though I will say, it's nice to have a baby sleeping on my shoulder again.

A new Day for the tax code?

2010-12-30T22:15:00.003-05:00

Before Stockwell Day was a screamingly ineffective campaigner for Prime Minister of Canada, he was the treasurer of Alberta; and back in those days, when I was a graduate student in BC, he came up with the simplest and best tax system I've yet run across.

Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day is proposing to de-link Alberta's provincial tax system from its federal counterpart. Instead of Albertans paying provincial tax on a percentage of their federal tax payable, a tax on a tax, they will instead pay a single rate of 11% on their taxable income, a tax on income.
This move to flatter taxation is to be applauded and Mr. Day has ensured that the move is beneficial to all income groups. [Part and parcel] with the planned move to the single rate tax is a substantive increase in the provincial basic personal exemption and spousal exemption to $11,620 up from $7,131 and $6,055 respectively. And Mr. Day has pledged to index the exemption to inflation to ensure that the hidden tax increase known as "bracket creep" is vanquished from the Alberta landscape. . . .
Alberta has now ensured that those with incomes under 11,620 pay a rate of 0% and everyone else pays 11% on their income above the basic personal exemption. So the effective provincial rate on someone earning $30,000 is 6.7% and the effective rate on someone at $100,000 is 9.7%.

Tweak the numbers to fit the current American situation, but the basic idea is right on: put all income into one bowl, exempt the first $X per person, and tax all the rest at the same rate. Cut the tax form down to a page, make the tax code transparent, drastically reduce the IRS payroll (and trim a lot of corporate bureaucracies as well) . . . what's not to like?

Oh, yeah, and boost the economy, too.

Atheism as dogmatic fundamentalism

2010-12-30T12:46:00.003-05:00

This isn't a new observation around here, of course, but it's interesting to see an atheist come out and say it—in this case, conservative commentator S. E. Cupp; and in case you think it's because she's a conservative, in my observation, conservative atheists (such as the Denver Post's David Harsanyi) are no better about this than liberal ones.

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of "The End of Faith" and "God Is Not Great," respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today's militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don't seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, "The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers." . . .
Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a "neurological disorder." His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithful's expense in the documentary "Religulous." . . .
It's these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn't seem to have much sociological meaning for them.
The truth is, folks like Maher and Silverman don't want to know about actual belief—in fact, they are much more certain about the nature of the world than most actual believers, who understand that a measure of doubt is necessary for faith. They want to focus on the downfall of a gay pastor or the Nativity scene at a mall. . . .
When the esteemed theologian David Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked C.S. Lewis when he would write another book, Lewis responded, "When I understand the meaning of prayer." It was an acknowledgment that he—a thinker with a much sharper mind than, say, Maher's—didn't know everything. I implore my fellow atheists to take this humility to heart. There's still a lot to learn, but only if you're not too busy being a know-it-all.

Size isn't everything

2010-12-30T10:30:00.005-05:00

I've mentioned before the pet store that I pass on my normal way to work. A couple weeks ago, their sign read as follows:

GUINEA PIGS

DWARF

HAMSTERS

As if hamsters don't have enough self-esteem problems as it is . . .

God is in the real

2010-12-15T23:25:00.003-05:00

I was reminded today of an observation I ran across somewhere—unfortunately, I have no idea where or whom to credit, and I know I won't be able to put it as elegantly as the original—that has been very helpful to me. God promises to give us everything we need to face every trial he sends us. He does not promise to give us strength for possible future trials we conjure up in our own imagination. If we live in the present and face the trials he sends us as they come, he is with us; if we project ourselves into the future to worry and fret about all the things that might go wrong later, we go alone. And in truth, we don't need to worry about the future, because God's in control of it—and when it becomes the present, he will be enough for us then, too.

Getting back on the horse

2010-12-07T21:04:00.002-05:00

A couple days into October, I started having significant computer problems; I wound up having to get a new laptop, and what with one thing and another, it took a while—it was over a month before I had my new computer all set up and working the way I wanted. I did have computer access during that time, but it was somewhat limited, and so some things fell by the wayside. Including, obviously, this blog. Once I had the computer up and running, I should have gotten back to it, but I was completely out of the habit, and you know how busy November and December are for pastors . . . I do need to resume the discipline, however, and I'm finally stirring myself to do so. Keep at me. :)

Not quite irrelevant

2010-10-01T10:13:00.002-04:00

Jennifer Rubin does us all a small service this morning over on Commentary’s “Contentions” blog in pointing out that at this stage, polls of GOP 2012 presidential contenders are basically meaningless. Interestingly, though, if you look closely at what she says, you realize they’re not quite as meaningless as they would normally be:

They are a function of name identification. The field is not set, the candidates have not yet engaged, and the inevitable unflattering revelations haven’t come.

While it remains true that there is much to happen between now and the 2012 primary season, that we don’t actually know who will be running, and that as Rubin says, “You actually have to see how the candidates perform and who cannabalizes whose voters,” there’s one partial exception to her argument: Sarah Palin. For Gov. Palin, those inevitable unflattering revelations have come, and been rehashed, and been beaten to death, along with a whole host of attempts to invent additional ones; there’s nothing left for enemies to dig up, it’s all out there.

Those who would marginalize her like to talk about her “baggage,” but the truth is, Gov. Palin doesn’t really have baggage. Change the metaphor, think of the sort of revelations Rubin is talking about as a political plague, and there’s a much more apt way to describe her situation: Gov. Palin has been inoculated. She’s already had that plague and survived. Yes, that has lingering effects, and yes, that will be a particular challenge for her to overcome—but the upside to that is a degree of immunity that will make it hard for rivals to take her down. The polling on them (at least most of them) is indeed before the “inevitable unflattering revelations” that will wipe some of them out and cripple others; hers is after, and well after. That is no small advantage.

You will know people best by how they handle defeat

2010-09-30T23:55:00.001-04:00

and as Jennifer Rubin pointed out recently, on the whole, the Right has a better record on this one lately than the Left:

Some liberal commentators assure us they mean “no disrespect.” Others don’t even bother. They tell us Americans are confused or crazy, racist or irrational. Maybe all of these. The left punditocracy is in full meltdown, irate at the voters and annoyed at Obama. The contrast to the aftermath of the 2008 election is instructive.
After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate—what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally?

There hasn’t been enough soul-searching and self-criticism on the Right to make me comfortable with the thought of the Republican Party apparatchiki back in power so soon, but at least there’s been enough to make a real difference; and the Tea Party taking a big broom to the party establishment has helped, too. For the sake of the good of the country, I hope we see something similar on the Left if November does in fact turn out to be the electoral tsunami it looks like being.

All God’s grace

2010-09-30T23:54:00.005-04:00

We are not kept in the faith by our own discipline and resolve,
but by the loving chains of faithful, rescuing grace.

—Paul David Tripp

Amen—and thanks be to God.

HT: Of First Importance

Barack Obama, Manichaeus, and the Pharisees

2010-09-30T21:38:00.004-04:00

President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview is deeply troubling to me, for reasons that Commentary’s Peter Wehner captures quite well. As Wehner says, Rolling Stone

paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.
For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies”—except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”
Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”
Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions—those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing”—meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing.

What really bothers me here isn’t the irony (which Wehner notes) of this kind of calumny coming from a man who promised our country, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” What bothers me is the blind, unshakeable conviction that anyone who disagrees with him must be doing so for nefarious motives. It simply isn’t possible, in his worldview as he presents it, that anyone could disagree with him for reasons which are as honorable and as sincerely concerned with the good of our nation as his own; no, anyone who opposes him must be by virtue of that fact evil, incompetent, a deluded tool of dark forces, or some combination thereof.

Wehner goes on from this point to argue that “President Obama is a man of unusual vanity and self-regard,” and that people close to him need to stage an intervention before things get out of hand. That may be true or it may not be—I’m a preacher, not a telepathic shrink, so I won’t claim to know. But as a preacher, I am at least somewhat trained as a diagnostician of human sin, and I will say that one thing I think I see here is an awful lot of self-righteousness, to a degree that looks a lot like Jesus’ enemies among the Pharisees. It’s a degree of arrogant certainty about one’s own rightness and rectitude that leaves no room for the concept of honest differences of opinion; any disagreement or opposition has to be malignant, is perceived as personal, and thus must be destroyed.

Now, I hasten to add, this is by no means unique to the President, or to liberals; rather, to my way of thinking, this kind of Manichaean self-righteousness is the great blight in American political discourse these days, at every point on the spectrum of beliefs. Among the prominent voices, I think it’s more prevalent on the left, but that’s not much more than comparing pot and kettle either way, and certainly I’ve heard some ugly comments of this nature from conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But still, to have this kind of language coming from our nation’s chief executive is an order of magnitude worse than to hear it even from prominent figures in the media and culture. When Candidate Obama said we needed to get beyond the ugly partisan spirit in our politics, this was the root of the problem at which he was pointing; to have President Obama exacerbating it instead of seeking to make it better is deeply dispiriting.

Update: Jay Cost has a great piece on this on the Weekly Standard website this morning; he makes the argument, I think correctly, that this is really the first time Barack Obama has actually had to deal in any meaningful way with actual conservatives. On that analysis, what we’re seeing is a reaction driven by disappointment (and fury?) that conservatives are not in fact proto-liberals who just need the right presentation to convince them. It’s rather like Martin Luther’s reaction when he realized that the Jews were Jews because they believed in Judaism, not because the Roman church had done such a bad job in presenting Christianity.

The air beneath our feet

2010-09-29T23:57:00.005-04:00

I’d never thought of Road Runner as an example of faith until it occurred to me in the middle of preaching last Sunday’s sermon; but really, that crazy bird is exactly that. How often does he end up escaping Wile E. Coyote by running out into thin air—and then standing there with perfect insouciance while the coyote falls to the canyon floor? Whoever he’s putting his faith in (Chuck Jones, perhaps?), that’s a perfect illustration of walking (well, running) by faith: no visible means of support, trusting entirely in his creator to keep him up.

Walking by faith, living by faith, isn’t easy; it means, as Michael Card put it, to be guided by a hand we cannot hold, and to trust in a way we cannot see, and that’s not comfortable. It means looking beyond the measurables—not basing our decisions on what we can afford or what seems practical or what we know will work, but on prayer, listening for God’s leading, and the desire to do what will please him. It means taking risks, knowing that if God doesn’t come through, we’re going to fail. And it means setting out against the prevailing winds of our culture, being willing to challenge people and tell them what they don’t want to hear—graciously, yes, lovingly, yes, but without compromise and without apology—even when we know they’re going to judge us harshly for it.

This is not a blueprint for an easy, comfortable, “successful” life; often, it’s just the opposite. It defies common sense, because common sense is rooted in conventional wisdom, and living by faith is anything but. But it’s worth it, because this is what Jesus wants from us: to live in such a way that if he doesn’t take care of us, we will fall, to live in such a way that he’s our only hope—because the truth is, he is our only hope. We just need to believe it, and live like we believe it. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it, and more than worth it; there is no better way to live, because there is no foundation more sure than the promise of God, and no better place to be than in his presence.

False obedience

2010-09-29T16:55:00.004-04:00

I really appreciated this brilliant little post from Ray Ortlund yesterday:

“The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.”
C. S. Lewis, “Dangers of National Repentance,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, 1970), page 191.
Obedience that doesn’t cost us anything may be more natural and glib than Christian. After all, self-righteousness “obeys”—and wonders impatiently what’s wrong with everyone else.

As usual, the Rev. Dr. Ortlund takes a truth I’ve been trying to express—and this is something I’ve been talking about a fair bit lately, what with one thing and another—and puts it better than I ever could.

America needs more people like Jim DeMint

2010-09-29T15:47:00.004-04:00

The junior Senator from the state of South Carolina is an ordinary barbarian loose in the corridors of power; here’s hoping he stays that way, and that his efforts to bring others along with him find great success.

DeMint is a most unlikely political crusader. For the vast majority of his life, he had little interest in politics. “I’m a normal guy,” he says with the grin that often crosses his face. He was a family man—a husband and father of four children. He owned a business in his native Greenville, S.C. He was a leader in his church. At various points he served on something like a dozen community boards because to him volunteerism was a way of life.
His profession was marketing, which led him to a career as a consultant. His clients included regional businesses, schools, and hospitals. In his work, he came to see top-down bureaucracy as the enemy of organizational success. And what worked? Empowering front-line employees.
But time would prompt him to see Washington in the same way, as an increasingly bossy and centralized bureaucracy. Complex federal regulations and taxation and expanding government programs were changing America—creating a society of dependents. When DeMint speaks, you hear echoes of the long-ago anti-big government commentaries of Ronald Reagan. . . .
When he arrived in Washington to assume his House seat, no one would have pegged him as a troublemaker. He was elected president of his House class and regularly attended seminars given by the House GOP leadership.
But something happened to DeMint in these leadership seminars that would change the course of his life. The gatherings were entirely focused on the means for concentrating and preserving political power: How to milk K Street lobbyists for political contributions; how to place earmarks into appropriations bills so they would be deemed essential to the folks back home.
One day, DeMint had had enough. He rose up in a seminar to question why representatives of the party of smaller government were so focused on earmarks and political fundraising. Why aren’t we talking about reforming the federal tax code or addressing the health care mess?
Midst laughter, someone shouted, “You’ll catch on to the system, DeMint.” But DeMint never did. . . .
Many of DeMint’s colleagues dismissed his concern over earmarks, arguing they were nickel-and-dime manifestations of traditional politics. But taking a page from the late Robert Novak, DeMint believed that the appropriations system, and the power of appropriators, was the key to runaway spending and taxation and regulation in this country. (Novak likened appropriators to the Vatican’s College of Cardinals.) Without serious appropriations reform, i.e., term limits for appropriators and full transparency for earmarks, there would be no serious tax and spending reform.
To the powerbrokers of Washington, this is political heresy—and makes DeMint a menace. This is why DeMint gives so much credit to Sarah Palin for challenging the machine of the late senator Ted Stevens, because his earmarks—most notoriously the $400 million bridge-to-nowhere—symbolized a political system rotten to the core.

Balance the budget—make the feds pay their taxes

2010-09-29T14:31:00.002-04:00

OK, not quite—but not too far off, either:

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along—unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

Read the rest of Andrew Malcolm's piece for the gory details. Granted, $1 billion is a small percentage of the deficit we're running these days, but that's still a lot of money—and a lot of hypocrisy.

Looking at this, I can't help thinking that one big place to start reining in spending is the federal payroll. If you were to downsize all non-military federal departments, agencies, etc. (excluding specific cases like the membership of Congress and the Supreme Court) by 10% at every level, then cut salary and benefits of all non-military federal employees who make more than, let's say, 200% of the poverty line by 10%, I wonder how much that would save? (I exclude the military because they've been dealing with cutbacks while the rest of the federal government has not.)

Taking junk food to a whole new level

2010-09-16T09:29:00.002-04:00

I don't know what it is about Texas, but if you'd told me that someone was going to figure out how to deep-fry beer, I wouldn't have been surprised to know it was a Texan.

Bumper-sticker social work

2010-09-16T00:31:00.003-04:00

Actually, technically speaking, it wasn't a bumper sticker—it was a license-plate frame—but it's a distinction without a difference. I followed this car for quite a while yesterday before I noticed the message: "PARENTS: PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT"—an injunction that assumes an awful lot. OK, so it's better that people who owe child support pay it, but is that really the message people need to hear? Why assume the divorce and just focus on mitigating the consequences? Wouldn't it be better to say "WORK ON YOUR MARRIAGE" or "BLESS YOUR MARRIAGE" or even (if you want to stick with the original hectoring tone) just "DON'T GET DIVORCED"?

"PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT" asks nothing of people but that they write a check once a month. A message suggesting they do what it takes to avoid getting divorced in the first place asks considerably more—things like humility, self-denial, repentance, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, and putting someone else ahead of oneself and one's own desires. The real problem isn't the percentage of people who pay child support, as significant as that is—it's the percentage of people who think divorce is all about them and what they want, and who seek their own desires at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, once you start challenging that mindset, you don't just make other people uncomfortable—you put yourself on the spot, too, because you're challenging the whole cultural system of which you're a part; it makes it a lot harder to get the frisson of superiority that "PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT" can give you effortlessly. In asking something meaningful of others, after all, you inevitably require something meaningful of yourself as well.

(To be sure, there are those who would avoid getting divorced if they could, but can't, because the divorce is driven by their spouse's behavior and decisions. They're victims of the problem, not the problem; this reality doesn't make identifying the true problem any less important.)

Divine invitation

2010-09-15T23:57:00.005-04:00

Since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart
in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience
and our bodies washed with pure water.

—Hebrews 10:19-22 (ESV)

This is the invitation to us from the word of God: Jesus has opened the way for you—take advantage! You have a great high priest in whom all your sins are forgiven—don’t be afraid! You are invited to come freely into the presence of the living God—so come! Approach God! Draw near! Don’t be afraid—in Jesus you have been washed, you have been purified, you are forgiven! God has put a new heart and a new spirit within you—his Spirit—he’s renewing you from the inside out. No matter what you’ve done, God sees you in Jesus, as he’s making you to be, and he loves you. Come to him, come close to him, with full confidence and trust, for you are welcome.

This is an invitation that should give us heart and courage, and I suspect it’s one that many of us can’t hear too often. There are some folks who are quite sure they’re just wonderful, but for those of us for whom self-doubt is a familiar companion, this is a particular blessing. It’s very reassuring to know that it’s not about self-esteem or self-worth or believing in ourselves, all of which place a great weight squarely on our shoulders; rather, it’s about believing in God and his faithfulness and the power of what Jesus has done for us, and knowing that it doesn’t matter how we feel: whether we’re up or down and whatever the Devil may be whispering in our ears, Jesus saved us, God loves us, and we are his.

Which should give us courage to hold fast to our hope in Christ, and to our open declaration of that hope—which of course we must do if we are to draw near to God through him. If we begin to lose hope, or if we become ashamed to proclaim it, then we will naturally look for alternatives, and we will not draw near to God through Christ; but we have reason to be bold, for our hope is sure and certain. We have every reason for confidence in the faithfulness of God, because we have seen it in Jesus; we have every reason to be confident that Jesus is enough, because he has already done far more than we could ever have imagined. And we have every reason to proudly proclaim our hope to all who will listen, and to keep proclaiming it even when times get hard, even when we hurt, and even when there is opposition, because Jesus has never failed us yet. He doesn’t make the road easy, but if we hang on tight to him, he always leads us through.

(Excerpted from “Draw Near”)

9/11: A reminder that freedom isn't free

2010-09-11T13:28:00.006-04:00

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime,
and the punishment of his guilt.

—John Philpott Curran

During the decade of the 1990s, our times often seemed peaceful on the surface. Yet beneath the surface were currents of danger. Terrorists were training and planning in distant camps. . . . America's response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic. The terrorists concluded this was a sign of weakness, and their plans became more ambitious, and their attacks more deadly. Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time my opponent wants to go back to. A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn't know it. . . . September 11, 2001 changed all that. We realized that the apparent security of the 1990s was an illusion. . . . Will we make decisions in the light of September 11, or continue to live in the mirage of safety that was actually a time of gathering threats?

—George W. Bush, October 18, 2004

History will not end until the Lord returns, and neither will the twist of the human heart toward evil. The idea that we can just ignore or deny this reality and go on about what we'd rather be doing, whether in domestic or in foreign policy, is the political equivalent of cheap grace; and it is no more capable of bringing what blessing our politics can muster than its theological parallel can bring salvation. It may be true, as Theodore Parker said, that the arc of the moral universe "bends toward justice," but if it is, we must remember that it's only true because God is the one bending it—taken all in all, the collective effort of humanity is to bend it the other way.

This world is fallen, and all of us are tainted by the evil that rots its core; and all too many have given in to that evil and placed their lives in its service. Most have not done so knowing it to be evil—there are very few at the level of Milton's Satan or Shakespeare's version of Richard III—but that doesn't make them any better. Indeed, the fact that people like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden do vast evil believing they serve what is right and good only makes them more dangerous, because it makes them far more effective in corrupting others, and far less likely to repent. Evil is a cancer in the human soul, and like any cancer, it will not stop growing until either it or its host is destroyed—which means that those who serve it will not stop unless someone else stops them.

Which is why the 18th-century Irish politician John Philpott Curran was right. There are those in this world who are the servants of evil, those movements which are driven by it, and those nations which are ruled by such—some in the name of religion, some in allegiance to political or economic theory, some in devotion to nation or tribe—and in their service to that spiritual cancer, they operate themselves as cancers within society, the body politic, and the international order; they will not stop until they are stopped. As Edmund Burke did not say (but as remains true nevertheless), the only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing; the logical corollary is that to prevent the triumph of evil, those who would oppose it must be vigilant to watch for its rise, and must stand and fight when it does.

Must that always mean war? Not necessarily; as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, have shown, there are times when nonviolent moral resistance is the most effective form of opposition (helped in Gandhi's case, I would argue, by the fact that the Raj was not evil). But the fact that that works in some societies doesn't mean that it works in all, because nonviolent resistance depends for its effect on the willingness of others to repent—and not everyone is willing. Some people are hard of heart and stiff of neck, unwilling to humble themselves, liable only to judgment; they will not stop unless they are forced to do so. When such people rule nations and are bent on tyranny and conquest, then sometimes, war becomes necessary. A tragic necessity, yes, but no less necessary for all that.

We have enemies who have decided in their hearts that they must destroy us, and they will not be shaken from that decision, because they have excluded anything that could shake them; they are unflinching in their resolve to building up the power and ability to do what they have committed themselves to do. This is hard for Americans to understand or accept, because—with the characteristic arrogance of our Western culture—we think that everyone, deep down, thinks and feels and understands the world as we do, and thus is "rational" on our terms, by our definition of the word. We fail to understand people and cultures that really don't value their own lives and their own individual wills and desires above all else. But there are those in this world who don't, who simply have different priorities than ours, and who consequently cannot be negotiated with or deterred or talked out of things as if they were (or really wanted to be) just like us—and who in fact have nothing but contempt for the very idea.

There are people, movements, nations, who want to destroy America and our culture (which they believe to be Christian culture, far though it is from being so), and who will not be dissuaded by any of our attempts at persuasion or appeasement. Indeed, go as far back as you want in history, you'll never find a case where appeasement of enemies has worked; rather, time after time, it only encourages them. If someone is determined to defeat you and has the ability to do so, it isn't possible for you to choose for things to be different, because their choice has removed that option; your only choice is either to let them do so, or to try to stop them.

But is it right to try to stop them? What of the morality of force? As individuals, when someone hates us, we are called to turn the other cheek and trust to the justice of God—but that's when we ourselves are the only ones at risk. When it comes to defending others from harm, the calculus is different; this is especially true of government, which bears the responsibility to defend all its citizens from evil, and has been given the power of the sword for that purpose. The decision to use force of any sort—whether it be the national military or the local police—must not be made lightly; it must be done only when there is clear certainty that the deployment of force is necessary in the cause of justice. But when it is truly necessary in order to defend the right, if that defense is properly our responsibility, then we cannot shrink back: we must stand and fight, or else allow evil to triumph.

Freedom and justice and true peace only come at a cost, in this lost and broken world of ours; they must forever be defended against those who do not value them, and would destroy them for their own purposes. This includes defending them against those who would use the fact that we value them against us—who would subvert our freedoms and use our willingness to accept a false peace, the mere absence of overt military conflict, to extort from us our own piecemeal surrender. If "peace" is achieved by craven cowering before the threats of the vicious, it is no real peace, merely a temporary and unstable counterfeit that does nothing but postpone the inevitable conflict; and if that false peace is gained through the sacrifice of freedom and justice, it is worth nothing at all. For any society willing to do so, the only epitaph has already been written by Benjamin Franklin:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

A Democratic loss is not exactly a Republican victory

2010-09-10T23:58:00.004-04:00

As the indispensable Jay Cost has been pointing out—no longer at Real Clear Politics, though, as he's moved on to write for the Weekly Standard, where among other things he's doing a column every weekday morning called "Morning Jay"—the polling numbers for President Obama and the Democrats (and doesn't that sound like a '50s rock band?) are bad and getting worse, to the point where the party is starting to throw incumbents overboard. In fact, it's gotten so bad for the Dems that expectations are starting to become a problem for the GOP, prompting some Republicans to start trying to deflate them.

And for good reason, because as big as the bullseye is across the Democrats' collective back, the electorate isn't really any happier with the Republicans. As Cost notes,

There is great turmoil that the two political parties have been (so far) incapable of handling, and the public is still casting about in search of competent leadership. I think something similar happened between 1974 and 1982. The country is unsatisfied with the state of the nation and has so far disapproved of both parties' performances. But in a two party system, there is no choice but to swing back and forth until folks finds leaders who are up to the job.

In other words, the folks who are saying that this is about an essentially conservative country coming back to the party that better represents it aren't really on the point. I do think the US tilts right of center, but not by a whole lot, and the electorate we're seeing isn't pro-Republican—it's anti-both-parties and anti-government. Any Republican politicians who are looking forward to getting back in power and going back to business as usual should think long and hard about this warning from Scott Rasmussen:

Voters are ready to deliver the same message in 2010 that they delivered in 2006 and 2008 as they prepare to vote against the party in power for the third straight election. These results suggest a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

In other words, as I've been saying, this isn't really about one party versus the other, it's about people across the ideological spectrum versus the parties. That cracking, booming sound you're hearing is the sound of the fissure widening between our rulers and the rest of us—which in our system means that they won't keep being our rulers much longer if they don't wise up. Which they probably won't . . .

On this blog in history: June 20-24, 2008

2010-09-10T23:10:00.003-04:00

There's a parable in here somewhere . . .
This isn't my story, it's Neil Gaiman's, but it bears remembering.

Radicals & Pharisees
It's not what you think.

Memo to self: don't get cocky
"Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall."

Skeptical conversations, part VII: The Holy Spirit and the Bible
On the role of both in our faith

The gospel according to Firefly
This beats The Gospel According to Peanuts all hollow.

It’s about Christ, not burning Qur’ans

2010-09-08T23:01:00.004-04:00

I’m sure you know that down in Gainesville, Florida, a church-like institution led by an individual impersonating a pastor is planning a bonfire of Qur’ans on 9/11. You probably know that his plan is opposed by public figures not just on the Left, but on the Right; I think Glenn Beck and Gov. Sarah Palin offered perhaps the best statements on the matter. Gov. Palin, I think, did a particularly good job of appealing to the better nature and judgment of Terry Jones, the guy who hatched this plan:

If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive.

However, I think she might have given him too much credit on this one, because as you may not have known, Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center are brothers-in-pickets with Westboro Baptist Church, the “God Hates Fags” people; when a group of folks from Fred Phelps’ nasty little “church” did a protest tour of Gainesville, Jones and his people used their worship time to join in.

I don't know what this guy really thinks he’s going to accomplish, but one thing he’s certainly accomplishing is giving the media-industrial complex a chance to blacken the image of Christians—hence the repeated descriptions of Jones as “an evangelical pastor.” If this guy’s an evangelical, I don’t know the meaning of the word. Heck, if this guy’s an evangelical, I'm an egg-salad sandwich. As Beregond points out, this is really a pretty dubious operation:

50 members on 20 acres that are worth more than a million and a half dollars, a charismatic church not affiliated with any denomination, and a pastor who takes no prisoners. If someone were writing about such a church in a vacuum the 20 acres, church building, ministry for women, and outbuildings would be called a “compound.” But if you have a political agenda and are willing to smear conservative Christians to further that agenda then such hints of a cult can be ignored.

Jones invokes the name of God, and talks a lot about the devil, and shows a strong focus on America; but Christ seems to be absent from his vision. How can he have the gall to call what he’s doing “Christian” when he’s not in the least about Christ? Ray Ortlund’s post nails it:

What is Christian? What makes anything Christian? Not that it has to do with theology, not that it has to do with ministry, not that it has to do with church business, and so forth. What makes anything Christian is that it reflects Christ. It is “according to Christ.”
We reach the sacred watchword here, and pause to listen to it. “Not according to Christ,” not on His line, not measured by Him, not referred to Him, not so that He is Origin and Way and End and All. The “philosophy”in question would assuredly include Him somehow in its terms. But it would not be “according to Him.” It would take its first principles and draw its inferences, a priori and from other regions, and then bring Him in as something to be harmonized and assimilated, as far as might be. But this would mean a Christ according to the system of thought, not a system of thought according to the blessed Christ. . . . It must have Him for Alpha and for Omega, and for all the alphabet between. It must be dominated all over by Him.
H. C. G. Moule, Colossians and Philemon Studies (Grand Rapids, n.d.), pages 142-143.
The further we go with this comprehensively sweeping adjustment, this all-encompassing humility before Christ, the more Christian we will be, the more it will feel like revival.

And the further we go with anything else—however noble or important we may think our goal to be—the more we may talk about revival, but the further we’ll be from ever seeing it.

Our rat-infested politics

2010-09-02T11:00:00.003-04:00

In the list of abuses of power by our government and its members, this doesn't rank high for size—but it's telling:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress members from both parties have been abusing their per diem—funds accorded them to cover travel expenses, including meals. When their expenses are picked up by other people, such as foreign government officials or U.S. ambassadors, they are expected to return the unused funds, which ultimately belong to you, the taxpayer.
In many cases, however, they don’t. Some spend the leftover cash on gifts or use it to cover their spouses’ travel expenses. Others merely put the extra money in their pocket. Not that the cash, which can add up to as much as $1,000, is exactly pocket change by most Americans’ reckoning. . . .
Among the most flagrant offenders are Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), former Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC). In an ironic twist, Rep. Butterfield is—get ready for it—a member of the House ethics committee. . . .
Perhaps the cake taker among the above-named Congress members is Robert Aderholt, who claims he isn’t sure if he keeps the money because doesn’t retain receipts.

Again, the biggest division in our politics isn't between left and right—it's between "we the people" and our governing elite—and our biggest political challenge is reclaiming our government so that it will once again truly be "of the people, by the people, and for the people." We on the Right don't need to "take back our country" from the Left, just as they didn't need to take it back from us—it's the country of the whole political spectrum, and will be for as long as it endures. But we the people, conservatives and liberals alike, do have the right and the need to take it back from those who are not truly representative of us. The unlamented Mark Souder is on that list; is it too much to ask that the U. S. Representative from northeastern Indiana should be a man of Indiana, not of the Beltway?

Gospel hope and gospel change

2010-08-31T20:21:00.007-04:00

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.

—Hebrews 6:19-20a (ESV)

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

—Hebrews 6:11-12 (ESV)

The gospel rests ultimately on the fact that God is faithful. We have hope because God who cannot lie and who cannot go back on his word made a promise, and in Jesus, he kept it. In Jesus, we need not worry about being swept away by the storms of life or capsized by their waves, for our hope in him is a soul anchor, a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul that holds us firm and steadfast where we need to be in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Nothing in this world can pull that anchor loose, because it isn’t hooked onto anything worldly: it’s hooked onto the very throne of God.

This is, or should be, our reason for holding fast to our faith in Christ and pressing on even when it’s difficult; and it’s essential for trying to live life by faith rather than by control. Unfortunately, too often in the church we undermine it, because we’re trying to build the church ourselves, our way, rather than trusting Jesus to be faithful to build it his way, and so we go looking for motivational methods that “work.” Some opt for driving people with fear, leaning heavily on warnings about sin and Hell; others push with the language of duty and obligation, speaking in the tones of command, or try to whip people along with the lash of guilt. Still others use the carrot, trying to use people’s self-interest to produce the desired behavior. These can all be effective motivators for building successful organizations; but what they can’t do is make disciples of Christ. Disciples of Christ, people of the gospel, are built by hope which is rooted in trust, grounded in the assurance of the unending faithfulness of God our Father; we are built by the transforming work of that hope, as Jesus changes us by his Holy Spirit, not from the outside in (as law seeks to do), but from the inside out.

This is one of the key differences between the religion of the gospel and any merely human religion, even if that human religion uses the language of Christianity. Human religion is all about power and effort, command and control, bribery and coercion; it seeks, by one means or another, to make people behave in a certain way. It’s primarily about the outward self, because that’s what people can see. The gospel, by contrast, is first and foremost about our hearts, because God sees us as we are, all the way down, all the way through. It’s about shifting our deepest allegiances, freeing our souls from all the idols to which we’ve given ourselves so that we can give our allegiance totally and wholeheartedly to God; it’s about purifying and redirecting our deepest desires, the wellsprings of our motivation and conduct; it’s about setting us free from our fears and healing our distorted understanding of love. The gospel breaks the shackles of sin on our lives and changes the things that drive and steer us, changing what we do by changing why we do it and what we want to gain from it. The gospel says, “Fill yourself with the love and the grace of God, fill yourself with the full assurance of hope in Christ, and the rest will follow.”

(Adapted from “Soul Anchor”)

Bill Kristol on conservative intolerance

2010-08-31T15:02:00.003-04:00

As noted, I have my reservations about the Beck rally last Saturday, but I do appreciate the opportunity it gave Bill Kristol for this comment:

So evangelical Christian Sarah Palin spent Friday night with (mostly) observant Jews, along with various Christians, including some Amish. Then on Saturday she spoke at a rally hosted by a Mormon who went out of his way in his remarks to refer to the important role of "churches, synagogues and mosques" in American life.
Early Monday morning, as it happened, I received an e-mail from (Catholic convert) Newt Gingrich from Rome, asking for contact information for a (Jewish) scholar whose book on certain (not very religious) enlightenment thinkers he was reading.
Welcome to today's intolerant, divisive, close-minded, and just plain scary American conservatism.

How's that "changing Washington" thing working?

2010-08-31T14:48:00.007-04:00

Judging by Gov. Christie's experience in New Jersey, not so well. As you may have heard, the state's Race to the Top application was disqualified, costing the state some $400 million, "because some clerk in Trenton turned in the wrong Excel spreadsheet"; out of a thousand-plus-page application, one page was incorrectly submitted, so the U.S. Department of Education threw out the whole thing. As you can probably imagine, the governor was not at all happy.

Was the administration being petty, seizing an excuse to deny funding to a political opponent? Maybe; and then again, maybe not. After all, one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained perfectly well by incompetence. Either way, though, this is exactly the sort of thing that Barack Obama promised us his administration would not be about. I don't blame him for not keeping his promise to change Washington—it was beyond human capability; but I don't think it speaks well of him that he made it, or of so many others that they actually believed it. And if preventing these sorts of occurrences is too much to ask, one would think they could at least show some sort of commitment to setting them right. (Unless, just maybe, they are in fact playing petty politics after all.)

It should be noted that the DoE did have one rejoinder to Gov. Christie: they released a video proving that NJ state education commissioner Bret Schundler had not in fact verbally given them the correct information. When the governor found out that his education commissioner had lied to him, he fired Schundler after all.

An ironic unintended consequence of Obamacare

2010-08-31T14:41:00.001-04:00

I've posted before about Obamacare and the Law of Unintended Consequences, pointing out the great potential for government aggression in the health care sector of our economy to produce exactly the opposite of its intended purpose—but I have to admit, this one surprised me anyway:

Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort. . . .
More than a fifth of the nation's 5,000 hospitals are owned by governments and many are drowning in debt caused by rising health-care costs, a spike in uninsured patients, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and payments on construction bonds sold in fatter times. Because most public hospitals tend to be solo operations, they don't enjoy the economies of scale, or more generous insurance contracts, which bolster revenue at many larger nonprofit and for-profit systems.
Local officials also predict an expensive future as new requirements—for technology, quality accounting and care coordination—start under the overhaul, which became law in March.
Moody's Investors Service said in April that many standalone hospitals won't have the resources to invest in information technology or manage bundled payments well. Many nonprofits have bad credit ratings and in a tight credit market cannot borrow money, either. Meantime, the federal government is expected to cut aid to hospitals.

Yes, you're reading that right: the expansion of government-run health care looks to be resulting in . . . less government-run health care, and more for-profit hospitals.

Would Browncoats still have been brown in the '80s?

2010-08-31T14:14:00.007-04:00

This went by a while ago, but I decided I couldn't resist posting it; as it happens, I love the real title sequence for Firefly, but this '80s-style version from the folks at i09 is a lot of fun, too; and while they only get two cheers as a result of leaving out Simon (and no, I don't buy the excuse), they get most of the third one back for the way they fixed that.

It's a shame Fox mishandled the show so badly; but I haven't given up hope. You can knock a Browncoat down . . . but keeping one down is quite another matter.

On not praying for a religious revival

2010-08-30T19:38:00.006-04:00

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.
The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

That’s Russell Moore’s brief summary of the rally Glenn Beck pulled together on the Mall in Washington, D.C. last Saturday (HT: Jared Wilson), and it seems to me to be more or less fair. It’s certainly generated a lot of praise and positive commentary for Beck from people in the American church; but it troubles me. Indeed—though I’m not one for theological purity tests in politics, like this guy seems to me to be advocating, as a precondition for working together for the common good—I have to agree with Dr. Moore: this is a scandal.

In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

This points us to the heart of the problem here, which is thinking that “religion” as such is a good thing that should be encouraged. (Actually, I’ve been starting to think lately that there might be a deeper epistemological error here, that of thinking that “religion” as such is even a thing at all, rather than merely a category for organizing our thinking . . . but that’s a post for another time.) From a biblical point of view, this is pure tripe. Religion is simply an inevitable part of human existence, because we are created for worship and wired for belief. It’s not a matter of whether we have a religion or not—it’s whether our religion is true or not, whether we’re worshiping the one true and living God or a false and dead god of our own preference and design.

Nor is it a matter of whether our religion produces moral behavior. Even if one were to begin by assuming that all the values and standards and virtues that conservatives defend are in fact right, that would not in the least mean that a religion which produced such morality must necessarily be right and good. As Michael Horton tells the story,

Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.

Satan’s main goal isn’t to make us immoral, it’s to turn us away from God in whatever direction works best. All else being equal, I would imagine Satan would prefer it if we were all engaged in making each other as miserable as inhumanly possible, but all else never is equal, and those sorts of situations have this one major drawback for the infernal one: they make the reality and gravity of human sin eye-blastingly clear, creating a desire for change. If human damnation is the goal, there are more effective and efficient ways.

The scenario the Rev. Dr. Barnhouse painted is one of them, in which the form of godliness is used to keep people from realizing the absence of its reality. In such a community, people could feel themselves perfectly good Christians without feeling in any way their need for Christ—no need for a Savior, because no apparent reason to need salvation. Such a city would be perfectly religious, in a way that would satisfy everything last Saturday’s rally seemed to be about; it would be full of the sort of religion that President Eisenhower famously declared is necessary for the American system of government to make sense. And doesn’t it look an awful lot like the vision Beck held out to his audience? And yet, it would be profoundly wrong.

This is the kind of religion that Satan loves: religion that’s all about us, that exists and is defended primarily because of its utility for human goals and purposes . . . and thus can be the means of enslaving us to those goals and purposes. That sort of religious revival would no doubt create many happy and self-satisfied churches, in the short run; but in the long run, it would bring the destruction of everything it promised. If I’m reading Beck right, this is the kind of religious revival he wants to see, and the kind of revival he’s trying to promote, because it’s a revival designed to do what he values. But it’s nothing I can get behind.

Do I want to see revival? Yes, but not of “religion” generally, or “faith” in some abstract sense. There is no value to “religion” if it’s a human religion or directed toward human purposes, and no value in faith that’s directed to anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ. Indeed, there’s no value to faith in God if we don’t immediately follow that up by saying that we mean God as revealed in Jesus. I don’t want to see anything that looks like revival if it isn’t all about Jesus as Jesus points us to the Father; I don’t want to see any kind of revival that can be created by scheduling and rallies and speakers and programs. And I most certainly don’t want any proclaimed revival that comes with, or on, a political platform. That kind of revival has the religion, but it doesn’t have the life.

The only kind of revival I want to see is one that can only be created by the Holy Spirit, who lives and breathes to talk about Jesus and the Father: the revival of the injudicious and incendiary proclamation of the radical gospel of grace, of the infinite love and unfathomable grace of God in Jesus Christ, capturing the hearts and minds of the people of God. That kind of revival—yes!—will have profound political and social consequences, should it come; but it will never be about those consequences, never be for those consequences. It won’t be about America, about restoring our honor or rebuilding our character. It will only ever be about and for glorifying and praising and giving thanks to God the Father for his Son Jesus Christ, who is ours by the work of his Holy Spirit. It will be for God and God alone.

Two years on, the Palin Revolution is gaining steam

2010-08-29T23:50:00.003-04:00

Two years ago today, Sen. John McCain threw the political world for a loop by announcing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Last August 29, I wrote this, considering the first year's fruits of that decision:

One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley's site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I've ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).
One year later, I don't take any of that back. I'm sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I'm sorry for the lies and smears she's had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she's the best leader this country has to put forward, haven't changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.
Some might say that's unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don't believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, "The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents." It's a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:
Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).
Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: "True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford." . . .
Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .
The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.
As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it's also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.
This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it's true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you're not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour's post "Who Is Sarah Palin" offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys' network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.
Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say "of course she won," but it was anything but an "of course" at the time.
Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress "All of you here need some adult supervision!" as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I'm sure he would have appreciated the line.
This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.
Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they're missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn't change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did "a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would."
This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anything that would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there's no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)
This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn't have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn't a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn't on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you're faced with having to try to transform your own party.
To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn't in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn't really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn't nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.
As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party's state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.
As such, Gov. Palin's utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, "Politically speaking, if I die, I die," but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.
Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google "Facebook 'Sarah Palin,'" and you'll get "about 9,520,000" hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go "into the wilderness"—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she's demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she'll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it's proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she's dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party's opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration's energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.
Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin's resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn't hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don't value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn't do it again if she won the White House?
The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state's executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.
One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That's leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that's a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.
And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.
The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she'll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn't as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can't count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it's necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don't.
The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she's already shown that her base won't just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.
All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It's been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it's been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.

So, another year on, how's that going? Well, from where I sit, I'd have to say it's going pretty well—but don't ask me, ask Joe Miller, who came from a long way back to an apparent close primary victory over incumbent senator Lisa Murkowski (RINO-AK). Ask Nikki Haley, who charged up from the field to win South Carolina's GOP gubernatorial primary—despite the best efforts of the state's GOP establishment to smear her; one of Haley's defeated rivals for the nomination said Gov. Palin's endorsement was "like a political earthquake." Ask Susana Martinez, who pulled an upset to win the Republican nomination for governor in New Mexico. Or ask Carly Fiorina, whom Gov. Palin's endorsement helped emerge from a three-way primary to win the GOP nod for Senate in California, or Tom Emmer, the GOP candidate to succeed Tim Pawlenty as governor of Minnesota, or . . . well, it's a long list. She hasn't hit on every endorsement, but she's hit on enough to lead LA talk radio host John Phillips to conclude, "I think it's now obvious: @SarahPalinUSA has the best political instincts in the country."

Or if you don't trust the politicians, listen to the Daily Beast's Tunku Varadarajan, not exactly a slobbering Palinite:

These have been the Palin Primaries, a fact rammed home deliciously by Alaska's Republican voters in their "refudiation," as of this writing, of Lisa Murkowski. What a potent, irrepressible woman Palin is: Only two years ago, she was plucked from obscurity to run alongside the ambling, aimless John McCain. She lit up the party briefly, infusing it with an improbable oomph for a few weeks, before McCain's handlers, spooked by her inexpert handling of a disdainful media, put her emphatically in purdah. She was a woman scorned, and what we see now is her fury playing out as a form of high-octane political energy, wreaking a form of ideological creative-destruction in places like Florida, Utah, Kentucky, Nevada, and South Carolina (to name but a few of the states where Republican politics-as-usual has come to an abrupt end).
The question facing the Republicans is how best to deploy Palin's energy for November—in effect, how best to channel the vim of the Tea Party. Midterm elections, as a rule, are base-versus-base battles: Both parties will spare no quarter or trick to get their faithful to turn out. For this task, Palin is as close to an indispensable figure as the Republicans have. . . .
She is no one’s puppet; and she is, also, no one's fool. . . .
"Of the remaining 52 percent [of independents]," Zogby continued, "two in three describe themselves as politically 'conservative' but weary of Republicans on issues like spending, civil liberties, and the war in Iraq during the Bush and Republican congressional years. So a conservative message can win their support except they don’t trust the Republicans."
That would, of course, be the Republican Establishment; and here, precisely, is where Palin can make a difference.

Or consider Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, who acknowledged in the New York Times that

Ms. Palin has spent much of 2010 burnishing her political bona fides and extending her influence by way of the Mama Grizzlies, a gang of Sarah- approved, maverick-y female politicians looking to "take back" America with "common-sense" solutions,

and warned their fellow liberals that

If Sarah Palin and her acolytes successfully redefine what it means to be a groundbreaking political woman, it will be because progressives let it happen—and in doing so, ensured that when it comes to making history, there will be no one but Mama Grizzlies to do the job.

Jennifer Rubin took note of their piece, commenting,

It's really worse than the New York Times worriers admit. Palin not only trumped the left on style but she also managed to connect on nearly every issue—ObamaCare, bailouts, Israel, taxes, American exceptionalism, and the stimulus plan—in a way the president and his liberal supporters could not. For all of her supposed lack of "policy muscle," it was she who defined the debate on ObamaCare and she who synced up with the Tea Party's small-government, personal-responsibility, anti-tax-hike message. Who's short on policy muscle—the White House or Palin? Does "engagement" of despots, Israel-bashing, and capitulation to Russia make for a meaty foreign-policy agenda? Go read a Palin foreign-policy address or two. Plenty of meat and common sense there.

But I give the Times gals credit—they know they are losing the battle to discredit Palin. Now they need to figure out what to do about it. They might start with examining whether their agenda has as much sell as hers.

So, yeah, it's not just me; what Gov. Palin needed to do and set out to do, she's doing, and she's doing it with style.

A thought on keeping faith and politics straight

2010-08-28T21:39:00.006-04:00

Musing on some of the posts I’ve read from Glenn Beck’s big D.C. rally today, I came back to an observation that occurred to me while I was writing last Sunday’s sermon. I have many times heard people give thanks that we live in a nation where we are allowed to worship God without having to worry about dying for it, and that is indeed reason to be grateful; but how often do we stop to give thanks to Jesus that we can worship God without dying for it? The fundamental freedom to worship God in spirit and in truth doesn’t come from our Constitution, it comes from Christ. Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered, because it’s only through his blood, it’s only because he allowed himself to be butchered, that we can enter the presence of God. We need to remember which is the greater gift.

Unfortunately, I think sometimes we lose sight of that, and it shifts our focus. We Americans should be proud of and grateful for our country, yes, because it’s the one God has given us, and because we’re fortunate to live here; but we should never, under any circumstances, for any reason, seek to use our faith for political purposes. We should never do anything that makes our allegiance to Christ secondary to our allegiance to any earthly flag. To do so is idolatry, and a betrayal of the one we claim to worship.

An Observation on the Importance of Humility in Planning: With Special Direction to the Inadvisability of Premature Declarations of Victory

2010-08-27T21:07:00.000-04:00

Yeah, the title's very 17th-century, but I’m in a weird mood.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

—James 4:13-17 (ESV)

Oh, well . . . I’m starting to feel better, and I think I’m actually rolling on writing again, so . . . praise God.

A call to arms: against the political machine

2010-08-27T15:08:00.006-04:00

As the French would say: Aux armes, citoyens! Aux barricades!

If you follow national politics, you probably know that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (RINO-AK) has narrowly lost a primary challenge to an Alaskan attorney, a friend and ally of Gov. Sarah Palin, named Joe Miller. You've probably also seen the news that the GOP establishment (specifically, the Alaska Republican Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee) has been actively working for Sen. Murkowski against Miller—urging her to attack him, running a phone bank for her out of Alaska Republican Party headquarters on election day, and now sending the NRSC's general counsel to Alaska to give her "guidance"; as well, Thomas Van Flein has filed a protest with Alaska's Division of Elections against Bonnie Jack, an observer with the Murkowski campaign, who "used confidential information outside the voter observation confines and called a voter to resurrect a disqualified ballot." The situation is such that Miller is now having to fight back against his own ostensible party. (Remember, the chair of the Alaska GOP is the guy who had to pay the biggest ethics fine in Alaskan history after Sarah Palin blew the whistle on him, and is also a personal enemy of Miller's, for reasons that will be referenced below.)

Riehl has some choice things to say about the whole situation:

It isn't as if Cornyn's NRSC wants another independent-minded conservative like Jim DeMint to join the club on the Hill. And when one thinks of how influential any one senator can actually be, especially within party ranks, there is far more at stake here than what some pundits seem to believe.
There are additional reasons why we may soon see what amounts to a civil war within the GOP in Alaska, one that could easily spill over nationally, infuriating the Republican base if the establishment attempts to steal this election for Murkowski. . . .
A bigger problem may be Alaskan Republican Party (ARP) Chair, Randy Ruedrich. That would be the guy who most likely ordered the phone banking for Murkowski out of the ARP HQ. He's a political enemy of both Joe Miller and Sarah Palin. That started when he resigned and later was hit with the biggest ethics fine in Alaskan history for his role on the state gas and oil commission. . . .
Ruedrich threw in with the anti-Palin old guard and the ARP became no friend to Sarah Palin—Governor, or not. And it was Joe Miller who then tried to unseat him as state party chair. See what I'm getting at here? Intra-state, intra-party civil war, with the potential to spill over into the national scene, in part, thanks to any possible NRSC meddling. . . .
The battle for the GOP may not wait until after November. There's a real possibility we start having that fight right here and right now. You can help support Joe Miller here. If the establishment is lined up against him as much as it appears, he's going to need all the help he can get.

I only disagree with Riehl on one thing: there is no "may not wait," and no "may soon see"; the battle has been joined, and in this current political climate, that means it's already national. The only thing that could have prevented this battle breaking out would have been for Sen. Murkowski to graciously concede, or at least commit herself not to seek a recount or a third-party run if Miller's lead holds—and like any party hack who's all about the position and the power, she refused to do so. Instead, she's called the war elephants in on her side, and we now have a fight on our hands. It's elephants vs. grizzly bears, and the only question is whether we're willing to recognize the fact and dig in.

This is no small matter. At this point, it seems reasonable to expect that Sen. Murkowski and her RNC/NRSC/ARP allies are going to follow the Franken/Gregoire playbook and do whatever they have to do in order to produce a final official vote count that favors her—she because she wants the seat at whatever cost, they partly because she's one of them and partly because they're afraid she'll pull a Charlie Crist and hurt their chances of getting their majority perks back in the Senate. The only question for those who support the GOP's principles rather than its perks is this: are we going to let them stay under the radar and fight in the shadows, as the Democrats did for Al Franken in Minnesota and Christine Gregoire in Washington state, or are we going to call them out and man the barricades against them?

If it's the former, Joe Miller will lose, which means we all lose (and not just conservatives, either); there's just no way the honest brokers in Alaska will be able to stand up to the combined state and national political machine. If we wait for the battle to come out in the open, we'll lose it before we ever see it start. The only way to win is to bring it out in the open ourselves: to expose the machinations of the party establishment, openly declare our opposition and our refusal to accept GOP politics as usual, and rally as big and as passionate a national response as we can possibly manage. Absent significant national exposure and pressure, the political establishment will find some way to defeat Miller; absent significant pressure and/or incentive, the Murkowskis will do whatever they can to keep from losing that seat. Only the establishment can convince the Murkowskis to back down, and that will only happen if they can be convinced that they have to back Miller 100%; and that will only happen if the GOP base across the country rises up to demand it.

Which means, we need to get people moving, and we need to do it now. Any conservative who cares at all about fair process—to say nothing about electing conservatives—needs to stand up and do everything possible to publicize this, to shine the light of day on it, and to mobilize the GOP base to tell the party machinery to take their thumb off the scales and support their own voters. Or else.

In truth, this is part of a bigger story; it's not just conservatives but liberals who should be doing everything possible to support Joe Miller against the political elites. I've been meaning to write on that anyway, but in the interests of speed and length, I'm going to save that for a follow-on post. For now, we need to recognize the key development: the Tea Party has just met its Shot Heard 'Round the World; if I may mangle the historical metaphor (and why not, since I've just conflated 1776 with 1848 anyway), it now falls to us to play Paul Revere and rouse the countryside before it's too late. The battle has been joined in earnest in Alaska—the voters of the party versus the establishment that wrecked it.

Gov. Palin hit the highest note of her political career, in my opinion, when she declared in her resignation speech, "Politically speaking, if I die, I die"; she stands in stark opposition to a political class for whom political survival is their highest (and in some cases only) creed. The only thing necessary for the triumph of oligarchy is for good voters to do nothing. Let's stand together and fight—and let's be sure to fight together, for as Ben Franklin said, "We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." There are no other options.

Ordinary barbarians of the world, unite!

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

Up periscope

2010-08-11T21:35:00.001-04:00

I thought I got a version of this posted a couple weeks ago . . . oh, well. For those who've wondered, no, nothing's wrong; I just had a very busy July, then crashed the last week leading into vacation. I didn't really have the energy to write over my week off, so I didn't—actually, I didn't do much on the computer at all last week. (That might be one of the reasons it was a restful week.) I'd intended to get back to writing earlier this week, but circumstances have not permitted; still, I have some things I'm working on. (That's actually been part of the reason for my silence as well—I've been working on some longer pieces, and gotten rather bogged down.) The future is always contingent from our point of view, but it's certainly my intent to get rolling again this week.

Homosexuality and the challenge of idolatry

2010-07-15T22:19:00.004-04:00

It would be a lot more pleasant, in some ways, to be able to support the pro-homosex position. It would certainly be easier. After all, the church is called to welcome everyone in the love and grace of Jesus Christ, and it’s a fair bit easier to make people feel welcome if one can simply affirm their choices and decisions. That’s one reason why so many churches wink at so many other sins.

Beyond that, though, in American culture these days—perhaps not here, but in our country in general—being a straight guy who supports gay rights is a pretty comfortable thing to be. After all, the bigots on the conservative side—and there certainly are some—might yell at you a little, but they save the real abuse for homosexuals; the price paid by heterosexuals who argue for gay rights is pretty minimal. Meanwhile, liberal bigots—and there are definitely those, too—will pat you on the back and tell you how enlightened you are. For that matter, so will most of the American intelligentsia, and most of our rich and famous. And if a lot of other Americans disagree with you—well, that just offers the chance to indulge the ancient vice of snobbery.

These are some of the things that would make it a lot easier to throw in the towel regarding homosexuality. And yet, I am committed to understanding the Scriptures—which means standing under them, letting them read me and control my thinking, not trying to read my thinking into them. I am committed, further, to the principle that the call of God is a radical one, that Jesus calls us to give up everything to follow him, and that anyone who hears the call of Christ and is not challenged on some point of sinfulness in their lives didn’t really hear his voice at all. As uncomfortable as it might make me, as risky as it might be, if I start backing down on the issue of homosexuality, it won’t stop there. After all, it would be a lot easier just to affirm gossips in their gossiping and liars in their lying, too.

I keep coming back to the Rev. Tim Keller’s point, in his sermon at GCNC last year, that we cannot truly preach the gospel if we aren’t identifying and confronting the idols in our churches. It’s not just a matter of confronting sin; if all we do is point out and condemn the behaviors people already acknowledge as sinful and for which they already feel shame, we aren’t doing anything but piling on. The crux of the matter, rather, is identifying the desires and behaviors and heart attitudes that people (including ourselves, no question) don’t acknowledge as sin, and don’t want to admit are sinful—not the ones people already hate and wish they could give up (the challenge there is to support and encourage them in that work), but the ones they love and to which they cling, because those areas of sin have become idols in their lives.

That’s a necessary task in ministry, but it’s one from which we too often flinch, because people usually don’t respond pleasantly to it. Try it, and you’ll be called every name in the book, and maybe even some that aren’t in there yet; and in particular, you’ll be called hateful, unloving, judgmental, and maybe even pharisaical (depending on the other person’s vocabulary). And yet, doing so isn’t unloving in the least; in truth, it’s a profound act of love. Too often, I think, we don’t love others enough to risk their anger and abuse by telling them something they don’t want to hear, even if they deeply need to hear it. Easier not to care that much, to just be quiet instead. It’s a shame, really; in fact, it’s a damned shame. Literally.

Resisting the politics of character assassination

2010-07-08T14:37:00.005-04:00

I've had a bit of an issue getting this up, but near the top of the sidebar, you'll notice a link to the Sarah Palin Legal Defense Fund. This being a congressional election year, there are a lot of demands for money out there, and a lot of worthy candidates; but if you're in a position to give political donations, I would strongly encourage you to send some money to the SPLDF.

You may remember that during and after the last presidential campaign, people with an axe to grind (whose scruples had served as the grindstone) launched a blizzard of frivolous ethics complaints against the Governor; though they were dismissed, one after the other, they still drove her legal bills up over half a million dollars. In response, she followed the well-trodden path of establishing a legal defense fund, called the Alaska Fund Trust, to raise money to cover those costs.

Apparently, however, the Obama administration and their minions couldn't bear the thought that they might not succeed in bankrupting Gov. Palin, and there was an ethics challenge filed against the AFT. Barack Obama's personal law firm, Perkins Coie, which is also counsel of record for the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Leadership Council, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (and Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard), produced an opinion declaring that fund in violation of Alaska law, which was then upheld by yet another Democrat. Said Democrat did concede that

Governor Palin was nevertheless following the express advice of one of her attorneys who told her the Trust complied with all laws and was indeed unassailable,

and thus that she wasn't guilty of anything whatsoever; in that sense, she has once again been exonerated.

However, there is a complication as the result of all this: all donations made to the AFT must be returned, and while Gov. Palin hasn't taken any money from the AFT, some of that money has gone to administrative expenses while the fund was in limbo. Also, of course, the process of returning donations will cost a noticeable amount of money. As such, it's necessary for her new legal defense fund, the SPLDF, to raise $100,000 just to comply with the terms of this settlement—and that's before they can raise any money to address any other legal costs.

If you donated to the AFT, I would certainly encourage you to take your donation, once it's returned, and re-donate it to the SPLDF; but before that, please give a little more to enable it to cover the costs of shutting down the AFT.

Some would no doubt consider this a partisan appeal, but I don't; I think this is a necessary part of standing up for citizen government, and I'd support a Democrat just as well. Our government is supposed to be a government of the people, in which issues are decided in open debate and open votes, and anything that diminishes that diminishes our nation. The attempt by some to destroy a politician by bankrupting her with spurious legal assaults sets a precedent which is detrimental to our entire political culture, and should be resisted with extreme prejudice by honest voters on both sides of the political aisle. It was wrong to do this to Gov. Palin, it would be just as wrong to do it to a Democrat, and we ought to stand up and do everything we can to ensure that the next time someone contemplates trying such a thing for political gain, they'll conclude that it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

Sarah Palin doesn't just represent conservatives over against liberals; she also represents the common people of America over against our elite. We need a lot more of the former in office, in place of some of the latter—representing both parties. I very much hope Carly Fiorina can beat Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate race in California this fall, but if Mickey Kaus had won the Democratic primary, I would have been rooting for him. I agree with him on far less than I do with Fiorina, but his independent voice within the Democratic caucus on the Hill would have been of immeasurable value.

As I wrote last year,

I firmly believe that one of the reasons why the political elite has tried so hard to marginalize and destroy this woman—elitists on the Right as well as on the Left—is that she's not one of them; she's not from the elite class, she didn't rise through any of our political machines, and so she's not beholden to them and they have no leverage on her. Our monoclonal political class likes its grip on power; sure, they have their ideological differences that reflect the differences in beliefs that exist in the rest of the country, but their deepest loyalty is to their class, their deepest commitment to business as usual. They are not truly representative in any meaningful sense.
If we want to change that, we need to elect people—liberals as well as conservatives—from outside that class, people who truly are a part of we, the people rather than "we, the Beltway." Gov. Palin isn't just a conservative politician, she's a complete outsider to the Beltway, someone who came from a normal (if somewhat uncommon) American family, upbringing, and life. As such, she's a test case for this: can any politician who is truly of the people, by the people, for the people long endure?
I don't expect many liberals to support her, much less vote for her, because like anyone else, in general, liberals should vote for people who share their political principles, and she doesn't; but I do think that liberals should be pulling for her to succeed, to thrive, to win re-election in 2010 and the GOP nomination in 2012, even if they then want her to lose in November. Why? Because if she succeeds, if she triumphs, she will show other potential citizen candidates that it can be done, and it can be endured, and it's worth doing; if she succeeds, she will be followed, she will be emulated, and we will see others—in both parties—walking the trail she blazed. If Republican and Democratic voters are going to reclaim our parties for the principles in which they're supposed to believe, it's going to require candidates who are beholden to us rather than to the structures of those parties—and if that's going to happen in our generation, it has to begin here, with Sarah Palin. We cannot let her be snuffed out if we want to see anyone else who isn't machine-approved (and machine-stamped) run for anything much above dogcatcher.
As such, I'll say it again: liberals who would like to see the Democratic Party break free of the corruptocrats who run it have just as much vested in Gov. Palin as conservatives who would like to see the GOP break free of the domination of its own trough-swilling pigs, and just as much reason to help her overcome this challenge.

Ephesians 5:18-23

2010-07-07T23:17:00.004-04:00

Don’t get drunk on wine, which leads to dissipation

but

be filled up by the Spirit

addressing each other with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
singing and playing to the Lord with all your heart
giving thanks always for everything

to God the Father
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ

submitting to one another in reverence for Christ

wives to husbands as to the Lord

because

the husband is the head of the wife

just as

Christ is the head of the church

being himself the Savior of the body

(This is my own rendering of this passage, laid out in such a way as to show the development of this one, long, classically Pauline run-on sentence. Most English translations chop the sentence up; in particular, they chop it at verse 22 and insert a heading on the order of “Wives and Husbands,” making it appear that Paul is ending one section and starting a whole new thought. In actual fact, he’s still in mid-flight—verse 22 doesn’t even contain a participle, let alone an imperative verb.)

“Acting white”/“acting girly”—whither men? (Part II)

2010-07-06T14:13:00.009-04:00

In her Atlantic article “The End of Men,” which inspired this series of posts (the introductory post is here), Hanna Rosin writes,

The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. . . .
Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.” . . .
This spring, I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent. . . .
“I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.” . . .
In 2005, [Jacqueline] King’s group conducted a survey of lower-income adults in college. Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.
The student gender gap started to feel like a crisis to some people in higher-education circles in the mid-2000s, when it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs. . . . Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away.
Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days. “Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”
Since the 1980s, as women have flooded colleges, male enrollment has grown far more slowly. And the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up, and identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire). But again, it’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.

The group dynamics Rosin is describing here have a worrisome parallel in recent American history, one described well in a review essay by Richard Thompson Ford posted yesterday at Slate:

Some black students in the 1990s had a derisive name for their peers who spent a lot of time studying in the library: incog-negro. The larger phenomenon is all too well-known. Many blacks—especially black young men—have come to the ruinous conclusion that academic excellence is somehow inconsistent with their racial identities, and they ridicule peers for “acting white” if they hit the books instead of the streets after school. The usual explanations for this self-destructive attitude focus on the influence of dysfunctional cultural norms in poor minority neighborhoods: macho and “cool” posturing and gangster rap. The usual prescriptions emphasize exposing poor black kids to better peer influences in integrated schools. Indeed, the implicit promise of improved attitudes through peer association accounts for much of the allure of public-school integration.
But suppose integration doesn’t change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck’s Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White, Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.
Buck draws on empirical studies that suggest a correlation between integrated schools and social disapproval of academic success among black students. He also cites the history of desegregation’s effect on black communities and interviews with black students to back up a largely compelling—and thoroughly disturbing—story. Desegregation introduced integrated schools where most of the teachers and administrators were white and where, because of generations of educational inequality, most of the best students were white. Black students bused into predominantly white schools faced hostility and contempt from white students. They encountered the soft prejudice of low expectations from racist teachers who assumed blacks weren’t capable and from liberals who coddled them. Academic tracking shunted black students into dead-end remedial education. The effect was predictably, and deeply, insidious. The alienation typical of many young people of all races acquired a racial dimension for black students: Many in such schools began to associate education with unsympathetic whites, to reject their studies, and to ostracize academically successful black students for “acting white.”

Ford goes on, it seems to me, to largely dismiss Buck’s thesis on the grounds that other factors were in play; no doubt other factors were in play, and continue to be, but it seems to me that he really doesn’t offer any particular reason to doubt Buck’s argument that desegregation proved, in the end, to do more harm than good. As such, while it isn’t Buck’s point at all, I think we have strong reason to worry about a similar dynamic developing among many men, perhaps to the point where we might someday see a paragraph like this:

The alienation typical of many young people acquired a gender dimension for male students: Many began to associate education with unsympathetic girls, to reject their studies, and to ostracize academically successful male students for “acting girly.”

It’s a thought which anyone should find troubling, and it’s not that far-fetched; indeed, Rosin shows that it’s already starting to happen among some older boys and young men. It’s counterproductive, even destructive, but it’s also very human—if those people over there look down on me because they’re better than me at something, the easiest way for me to protect myself from feeling shame and hurt is to decide that what they’re better at isn’t really important. Just think of Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes: the fact that I didn’t get a good grade doesn’t really mean I failed, because I didn’t really want it anyway.

The possible concern, then, is that the growing success gap between girls and boys, women and men could be increasingly reinforced among many younger males by a rejection of academic success (and perhaps social and, to some degree, economic success as well) as “girly,” something “real” men don’t waste their time on. This, obviously, is something which could have dire consequences for our society if it becomes widespread.

All about the science? Don’t be so sure

2010-07-05T22:09:00.005-04:00

We may have gotten a lot of pious talk from this administration about setting science free from political agendas, but don’t believe it. William Saletan connects the dots on one illustrative example:

Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton’s position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Conservatives think this should disqualify her from the Supreme Court. They understate the scandal. It isn’t Kagan we should worry about. It’s the whole judiciary. . . .
The basic story is pretty clear: Kagan, with ACOG’s consent, edited the statement to say that intact D&X "may be the best or most appropriate procedure" in some cases. Conservatives have pounced on this, claiming that Kagan “fudged the results of [ACOG’s] study,” “made up ‘scientific facts,’” and “participated in a gigantic scientific deception.” These charges are exaggerated. The sentence Kagan added was hypothetical. It didn’t assert, alter, or conceal any data. Nor did it “override a scientific finding,” as National Review alleges, or “trump” ACOG's conclusions, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, contends. Even Power Line, a respected conservative blog, acknowledges that ACOG’s draft and Kagan’s edit “are not technically inconsistent.” Kagan didn’t override ACOG’s scientific judgments. She reframed them.
But Kagan’s defense is bogus, too. On Wednesday, at her confirmation hearing, Hatch pressed Kagan about this episode. She replied that she had just been “clarifying the second aspect of what [ACOG] thought.” Progressive blogs picked up this spin, claiming that she merely “clarified” ACOG’s findings and made its position “more clear” so that its “intent was correctly understood.” Come on. Kagan didn’t just “clarify” ACOG’s position. She changed its emphasis. If a Bush aide had done something like this during the stem-cell debate, progressive blogs would have screamed bloody murder. . . .
By reframing ACOG’s judgments, she altered their political effect as surely as if she had changed them.
She also altered their legal effect. And this is the scandal’s real lesson: Judges should stop treating the statements of scientific organizations as apolitical. Such statements, like the statements of any other group, can be loaded with spin. This one is a telling example.
National Review, CNSNews, and Power Line make a damning case that courts mistook the ACOG statement for pure fact. In 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Nebraska's ban on partial-birth abortions, it cited ACOG: “The District Court also noted that a select panel of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluded that D&X ‘may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.’” That sentence, we now know, was written by Kagan. . . .
All of us should be embarrassed that a sentence written by a White House aide now stands enshrined in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, erroneously credited with scientific authorship and rigor. Kagan should be most chastened of all. She fooled the nation’s highest judges. As one of them, she had better make sure they aren’t fooled again.

On my read, Saletan is trying hard to underplay what Kagan actually did; I don’t think saying she “reframed” the ACOG statement is really sufficient, because the sentence she inserted was intended to deceive through misdirection. Even so, Saletan doesn’t shy away from the deceptive force of that statement, or the consequences of that deception.

Of course, this all happened under a previous administration, not the current one; but the fact that the President would appoint someone, not once but twice, to a high position who was guilty of seriously subverting science to a political agenda clearly shows that in fact he has no objection to doing so—as long as it’s his own agenda. Yuval Levin sums the matter up nicely:

What’s described in these memos is easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered. A White House official formulating a substantive policy position for a supposedly impartial physicians’ group, and a position at odds with what that group’s own policy committee had actually concluded? You have to wonder where all the defenders of science—those intrepid guardians of the freedom of inquiry who throughout the Bush years wailed about the supposed politicization of scientific research and expertise—are now. If the Bush White House (in which I served as a domestic policy staffer) had ever done anything even close to this it would have been declared a monumental scandal, and rightly so.

Or take another example, the moratorium on offshore drilling unilaterally declared by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, which didn’t pass the smell test:

In a scathing ruling . . . New Orleans-based [federal judge Martin] Feldman overturned the administration’s radical six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling—and he singled out Salazar’s central role in jury-rigging a federal panel’s scientific report to bolster flagrantly politicized conclusions. In a sane world, Salazar’s head would roll. In Obama’s world, he gets immunity. . . .
Scientists who served on the committee expressed outrage upon discovering earlier this month that Salazar had—unilaterally and without warning—inserted a blanket drilling ban recommendation into their report. As Feldman recounted in his ruling:
In the Executive Summary to the Report, (Salazar) recommends “a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs.” He also recommends “an immediate halt to drilling operations on the 33 permitted wells, not including relief wells currently being drilled by BP, that are currently being drilled using floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the Summary also states that “the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading. The experts charge it was a “misrepresentation.” It was factually incorrect.
Allow me to be more injudicious: Salazar lied. Salazar committed fraud. Salazar sullied the reputations of the experts involved and abused his authority.

You can’t downplay that one by saying Secretary Salazar “reframed” the work of the scientists his department had consulted, either, because their position was clear, unequivocal, and diametrically opposed:

A blanket moratorium is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill. We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do.

The lesson is clear: for the Obama administration, when the science conflicts with the agenda, go with the agenda.

The tree of liberty is rooted in the soil of the gospel

2010-07-04T23:26:00.000-04:00

As Calvin Coolidge put it, in a remarkable speech delivered on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence,

No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit. . . .
If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

Politicians at their worst

2010-07-03T10:00:00.002-04:00

This is unbelievable:

[Thursday] night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that “deemed as passed” a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the “deeming” document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget.
The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.
Never before—since the creation of the Congressional budget process—has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money. . . .
—This is not a budget. The measure fails to meet the most basic, commonly understood objectives of any budget. It does not set congressional priorities; it does not align overall spending, tax, deficit, and debt levels; and it does nothing to address the runaway spending of Federal entitlement programs.
—It is not a ‘congressional budget resolution.’ The measure does not satisfy even the most basic criteria of a budget resolution as set forth in the Congressional Budget Act.
—It creates a deception of spending ‘restraint.’ While claiming restraint in discretionary spending, the resolution increases non-emergency spending by $30 billion over 2010, and includes a number of gimmicks that give a green light to higher spending.

Honestly, this is a firing offense, by any reasonable standard; it is a profound evasion of responsibility on the part of the House, and a willful attempt to deceive the voters of this country, and should be rewarded with electoral defeat. I’m glad no Republicans voted for it, but I have no illusion that that was purely a matter of conservative principles, as opposed to party politics; I praise the 38 Democrats who voted against it, though I’m sure there were some who did so because Speaker Pelosi gave them permission; but any Democrat who voted in favor should be replaced by a politician with more integrity than that, whether Democrat or Republican.

Go to Human Events for more.

Happy Independence Day!

2010-07-02T23:54:00.004-04:00

John Adams, to his wife Abigail, in a letter of July 3, 1776:

Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in Town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. — This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.
But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

This is purely delightful

2010-07-01T22:02:00.002-04:00

I don't know if they were inspired by the Sound of Music stunt last year at Antwerp's Central Station, but a couple months ago, the Opera Company of Philadelphia performed "Brindisi" from Verdi's La Traviata in the Reading Terminal Market, during their Italian Festival. Just watch, this is too good for words:

Whither men? (Part I)

2010-06-30T19:10:00.007-04:00

In the course of a brilliant article on "The Greatest Change in the History of Media"—an article well worth reading and pondering for its own sake—Vin Crosbie made an interesting observation which applies far beyond the scope of his piece:

Most people’s ability to perceive change is inversely proportional to its scale. They hail superficial changes as transformative, dismiss moderate changes as inconsequential, and fail to perceive gargantuan changes.

The context for that comment is his analysis of the failure of media corporations to understand the actual change that has occurred in their business, but it's a general truth which has ramifications across the whole landscape of society; for most people, the truly massive changes that happen are too big to be seen, at least until it's too late to do much about them. Unfortunately, that inability tends to be reinforced by a general resistance to believing that such huge changes could actually be happening, and perhaps could actually happen at all; that's why so often, those who do perceive them are ignored or dismissed like so many Cassandras.

In that vein, it will be interesting to watch the response to Hanna Rosin's piece in the latest Atlantic titled "The End of Men"; Rosin has put her finger on a change that's been a long time building, and is far from done. The opening abstract sums it up well:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women's progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn't the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way—and its vast cultural consequences

I suspect that the discussion of her article will largely be unhelpful, which if so will be highly unfortunate, because the change she's identified will indeed have vast cultural consequences—and probably not ones she or anyone else can see coming. We can certainly see what's likely to produce those consequences; besides the obvious conclusion that increasingly, women will on the whole be more successful economically and socially than men, the other key result of the reversal she identifies will probably be the accelerating collapse of the institution of marriage in our culture, an issue which Rosin also considers. The hard question is, what will the results of those two things be?

Our natural tendency in forecasting the future is to use what we might call the Quisenberry model, taken from the late Dan Quisenberry's quip, "I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer." What we tend to forget is that societies are relational systems writ large (or perhaps we might say, metasystems), and that systems are elastic; stretch a system out of balance, and it will try to pull back towards equilibrium. Stress it in one direction, and you'll end up dealing with recoil from another. Backlash is built right into the structure. As such, looking at Rosin's thesis and her evidence, what we ought to be asking is, where will the snap be coming from, and what will it look like?

I have some thoughts on that—too much for one blog post, of course, since this is a very big topic; but I'm planning to take a few posts, anyway, to sketch them out as best I can. As such, look for more on this in the days ahead. In the meantime, if anyone else has any ideas they'd care to contribute, I'd be interested to hear them.

On this blog in history: June 9-19, 2008

2010-06-30T18:11:00.000-04:00

On the power of stories to teach, part II
Inspired by Dr. John Stackhouse and his evaluation of The Shack

Our Swiss-cheese Bibles
Do we read the Holy Bible, or just the holey Bible?

Reflection on Amos 5 worship, for a thoughtful friend
The importance of reading Amos 5 in light of Amos 2

Out of the past, in the present, toward the future
On time and the life of the church

In defense of the church, part IV: Jesus
Whatever else may be true, however little we may deserve it, Jesus loves his church.

Supreme Court refuses to protect Christian group

2010-06-30T16:52:00.007-04:00

I've been trying for a couple days now to figure out what to make of this, and I'm still not sure.

In a 5-4 decision this morning, the Supreme Court said that a California law school can require a Christian group to open its leadership positions to all students, including those who disagree with the group's statement of faith.
The majority opinion, issued by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said that Hastings College of the Law's "all comers" policy, which required all groups to open all positions to all students, "is a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access to the student-organization forum." The Christian Legal Society (CLS) chapter at the University of California school, Ginsburg wrote, "seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings' policy."
"Hastings, caught in the crossfire between a group's desire to exclude and students' demand for equal access, may reasonably draw a line in the sand permitting all organizations to express what they wish but no group to discriminate in membership." Ginsburg wrote.
However, Ginsburg gave some hope to CLS, which had argued that Hastings officials had selectively enforced its "all comers" policy, allowing organizations like the Latino group La Raza, but not CLS, to have rules restricting its membership. Noting that lower courts had not addressed is accusation of selective enforcement (and that the Supreme Court "is not the proper forum to air the issue in the first instance"), Ginsburg said the Ninth Circuit Court could consider the argument.

It seems to me that if this is seriously enforced, it would do serious damage to meaningful freedom of association, since the freedom to associate with those of like mind necessarily means the freedom to exclude those who are not of like mind. Obviously, we put limits on that freedom, but still, tossing it out the window entirely does not seem like a rational move. Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion may prove important here:

In it, Kennedy said that CLS would have a substantial case "if it were shown that the policy was either designed or used to infiltrate the group or challenge its leadership in order to stifle its views."

This isn't just a theoretical possibility, either.

The spectre of students organizing to take over the leadership of groups they don't like has already happened at Central Michigan University, said David French, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF's Center for Academic Freedom. It's a strong possiblity at any school with a policy like the one at Hastings, he said in a blog post.
"By emphasizing the value of dissent within groups, the Court ignores the fundamental reality of an all-comers policy: Distinct student organizations exist at the whim of the majority," French wrote. "If 'all comers' can join, then the majority can override the speech of any student group. Thus the true marketplace of ideas exists by the permission (or, more likely, apathy) of the majority. The potential for minority or disfavored groups at schools with an all-comers policy to self-censor to avoid controversy—and potential hostile takeovers—is high."

This is truly problematic, and an unhappy indicator of where the Court might be moving. But on the bright side, at least, this decision will make it hard for the Congressional Black Caucus to exclude Tim Scott when he wins his House seat this November down in South Carolina . . .

The cost of saying, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace

2010-06-28T22:25:00.003-04:00

From a great post by Ray Ortlund, “‘One anothers’ I can’t find in the New Testament”:

Humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, disapprove of one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins, intensify one another’s sufferings, point out one another’s failings . . . .
In a soft environment, where we settle for a false peace with present evils, we turn on one another. In a realistic environment, where we are suffering to advance the gospel, our thoughts turn to how we can stick up for one another.

It’s a great list, very true and very much on point; but I think that second paragraph is even more important: when we make peace with the real enemy, when we refuse to confront (or even decide to accommodate) the evils of our day, we end up treating each other as the enemy instead. We cannot have gospel unity if we have sold out gospel clarity.

Planting trees in the blight

2010-06-27T08:58:00.002-04:00

Over a decade ago now, as a seminary student, I made a foray into inner-city ministry at a street mission in Vancouver, BC's Downtown Eastside. At that time, that neighborhood had the highest rates of drug addiction, HIV infection, and deaths from both of any neighborhood in the developed world. It was a grim place to be. My time there didn't end all that well, for a variety of reasons—one of them being that I discovered I'm not well gifted for that area of ministry—but when I left, I left carrying many people in my heart. I still think about them, and pray for them, and wonder how many of them are still alive. (Given the odds, I doubt even half of them are, but I really don't know.)

Now, apparently, there's a massive development project going on right within the Downtown Eastside, putting in both high-end condos and good-quality affordable housing, combined with other efforts to turn the area around (such as cleaning up Oppenheimer Park, which boggles my mind); the National Post has one of its reporters living in one of the condos for a month, writing about the development and its effects on the neighborhood. It's a fascinating series; I've linked to the oldest page of posts, and if you have a little time, I really encourage you to check it out and follow it up to his most recent pieces. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out over time; if this sort of project can bring meaningful renewal to a neighborhood like that—well, I wouldn't have believed it possible.

A victory for the rising tide

2010-06-25T23:21:00.003-04:00

I put up a post a few months ago arguing that the effort by corporations to use copyright law as a club to try to control people's behavior is both philosophically problematic and economically counterproductive; the evidence shows, I believe, that they're better off letting the market work than trying to over-regulate it. As I noted, though, corporations would rather regulate competition out of the way than have to actually compete, and they would rather try to control the market by regulation than have to rely on making a better product or selling it more cheaply. Thus we had, for instance, Viacom suing YouTube to try to force YouTube to remove any videos that might infringe on copyright law; as Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate,

a ruling in Viacom's favor would have much wider repercussions. It would shift the balance of power between Web companies and entertainment companies, requiring sites to essentially ask permission or seek licenses from Hollywood and the music labels before innovating. Some of the world's biggest Internet companies—not just YouTube, but also Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Flickr and others—would never have been able to get off the ground had they been required, as struggling startups, to constantly police their networks for potentially infringing material.

Interestingly, though, Viacom didn't win—not at this stage, anyway; Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted YouTube's motion for summary judgment. Their policy has been to let copyright holders advertise alongside their content, and to take that content down if the copyright holder asks, and the judge decided that's good enough. Viacom appealed, of course, but Judge Stanton has given us an all-too-rare victory for common sense; here's hoping the decision stands.

Criminalizing evangelism?

2010-06-24T16:14:00.008-04:00

You've probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here's the video they took (though I'm not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

If you want to see a Muslim response to this, Allahpundit posted one, along with the above video; having watched it, I'd have to say he's being exceedingly generous in calling that attempt at a response "singularly lame," since it's a collection of repeated assertions supported by non sequiturs and a brief video clip of dubious provenance and import.

I have to say, I have two reactions to this. On the one hand, from a constitutional point of view, I find this very troubling; while I certainly don't support the "separation of church and state" read as government-mandated secularism, I'm also no believer in theocratic government—and in particular, the idea of agents of government aiding and abetting the de facto imposition of shari'a law in an American community is deeply problematic. Muslims are as welcome in America as anyone else—and they have to play by the rules, same as anyone else, that's the deal. Our history has well established that "separate but equal" isn't, that different rules for different groups is wrong, no matter the reason; Muslims have no more right to be insulated from the discord, dissent, and disagreement of a democratic society than anyone else. If they're going to argue that their faith demands otherwise—well, in that case, we have a problem.

Considered as a case of Christian witness, though, I find this video very troubling in a different way. Though the professed purpose of the folks who made it is to share the gospel with Muslims, nothing about their actions actually seems to support that purpose aside from their copies of the Gospel of John. Rather, their actions in this case seem designed to test the Dearborn police; I'm not sure it's necessarily fair to say they were trying to provoke a confrontation, but it certainly looks like they were trying to see if they would get one, and indeed that they were expecting to. From their comments during the video, and especially from the final section complaining about all the intersections where they aren't allowed to hand out copies of the Gospel, it sure sounds like their real concern is not bearing gospel witness to Muslims, but the infringement on their constitutional rights.

Which I don't deny, either as a real issue or as a fair complaint; as I say, I think there's reason for real concern here. If in fact we're starting to see Muslim communities in this country effectively seceding from the larger political and social structure, as many European countries have seen, that's bad news. But it does make the whole thing more than a little disingenuous, in my judgment. It makes this supposed attempt at evangelism look like, not a true expression of Christian discipleship and witness, but a calculated attempt to use Christian practices to make a political statement—and that, as someone has said, is a kettle of fish of a different color.

The truth is that the life of Christian discipleship isn't based on rights; as I've said elsewhere, in the Bible, "right" isn't a noun, it's an adjective. Christian doctrine certainly provided and provides the foundation and root for the political concept of human rights, and in its political implications, it requires us to stand up and defend the rights of others; but our contemporary insistence on standing on our own rights and insisting on our own rights against others is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and especially not in the example of Jesus. I can't presume to judge the hearts of David Wood and the folks with him in that video, but from what I can see of his judgment, it's pretty poor, and it looks to me like their priorities are out of whack.

In my judgment, what the folks in that video are actually advocating and bearing witness to is not the gospel, regardless of the texts they were holding; they showed none of the humility or willingness to meekly accept suffering for the gospel which Paul holds up as essential in Philippians 2, and most of what they had to say was about themselves. Rather, they were to all intents and purposes serving as advocates and defenders of a particular political and cultural position. In that role, it appears to me they succeeded, judging by the e-mails and blog posts I've seen. As evangelists . . . well, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform (just read the book of Jonah), and I'm not going to say what his Holy Spirit can and can't use—but the whole affair seems a lot more likely to turn the hearts of Muslims against Christianity than toward Christ. And shouldn't that really be the bottom line?

Hmmm . . .

2010-06-23T23:28:00.001-04:00

What was that again about "the best-laid plans of mice and men"? I was going to get last Sunday's sermon posted on the sermon blog, and I had a couple posts I wanted to put up here—and instead, I discovered that Google has created some new and interesting template options for Blogger, and I wound up spending all my time playing with them. Well, tomorrow . . . Lord willing.

Gov. Straight Talk is at it again

2010-06-22T21:51:00.001-04:00

I hope he's not even thinking of jumping into the coming presidential campaign; New Jersey needs him too badly, and he really needs to have a successful first term and win re-election before he has enough reason to be thinking about a run for the White House. But if he keeps this up, with a little luck, he could definitely make that run and win. For now, it's just really good to have someone on the national political scene willing to tell people the home truths they don't want to have to hear; there are very, very few of those, and especially few who do it as well as Gov. Christie.

"What did the President know and when did he know it?"

2010-06-22T11:28:00.003-04:00

That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,

It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.
In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.
Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."
It's also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration's help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.

If this is true, then the administration's inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It's easy to see why he's taking the "I was as surprised as you were" tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn't know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?

Can he yodel?

2010-06-21T21:40:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about the President's Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:

That wasn't surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was:

Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he's less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his "Top of the Ticket" blog:

The first two-thirds of the president's remarks read just fine . . .
But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less. . . .
Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I'm going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS' Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning—1,200 fleeting seconds—to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.
Then, he's got an important lunch with Joe "I Witnessed the World Cup's First Tie" Biden. . . .
President Obama has said he doesn't sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year. But suddenly—watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it's taken him to take charge of the spill—he thinks there’s a compelling need to spend a motorcade full of moola that the federal government doesn’t have in order to change the country’s energy habits.
And we've gotta start that right now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana that we haven't plugged and don't really understand how it broke in the first place. So let's do the electric car thing and build more windmills now.
And if, by chance, the nation’s politicians end up fighting over an energy plan during the next five months until the voting, maybe the politically damaging healthcare regrets and hidden costs will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf's still-surging oil.

Of course, no one reasonable expects the President to know how to fix the blowout. Gov. Palin isn't criticizing him for that, because she doesn't know how to fix it either. The problem is, we've gotten ourselves into a situation that nobody knows how to fix. Which means, you have to mitigate the problem, and it's there that people do have ideas and that executive leadership is needed from the White House to enable the people who have the ideas and the equipment and the experience to go to work to fix what can be fixed—and it's there that Barack Obama and his administration are not only falling down on the job, but in fact are being actively counterproductive; significant, experienced help was offered—and rejected.

I realize that most Americans don't take the Dutch all that seriously (those of us who grew up around their American descendants don't make that mistake, however), but as James Joyner pointed out,

As to the fact that the Netherlands government has a plan for this and we don't, I'm not terribly surprised. It's a small, maritime and riverine country surrounded with oil drilling.

What's more, the offer came through official channels, via the Netherlands' consul general in Houston, which means it should have been treated far more seriously and respectfully, and not just for environmental reasons:

You'd sure think taking advantage of an ally's offer of assistance would have made sense, not only in terms of the spill itself but for building better relations with Europe. Given the scale of our economies, it's rare that the Netherlands can bail us out. Why not let them when the opportunity arises?

Why not let them? Well, if you're thinking like a Chicago Democrat, it makes perfect sense:

What about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't really any foreign vessels that could help.
The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

What's more important than getting the mess cleaned up? Making sure that if there's any spending to be done, it's your supporters who get the money. And, of course, making sure that whatever else happens, all federal laws and regulations are strictly enforced—don't want to set any precedents for deregulation, now, do we?

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf's surface. Can't do that until we see if they've got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: "The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport."

Taken all in all, it's no wonder that the best thing the President can find to do about this disaster is . . . blame Congress. To be sure, he was trying to blame just Republicans; but you might have thought he would have realized a) that all such comments would do is make voters more hostile to Congress in general, and thus more likely to vote against their current federal representatives, and b) that his own party currently controls Congress, and thus would be more likely to be hurt by the effects of his comments.

Were I a Democrat, I don't think I'd be at all pleased with the way the President has shown in this situation. Since I'm not, I'll just say that more and more, he's reminding me of this guy:

On liking Jesus and building the church

2010-06-18T23:27:00.015-04:00

A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . . Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did
to the false prophets.”

—Luke 6:22-23, 26 (ESV)

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

—John 15:18-21 (ESV)

“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember
that I told them to you.”

—John 16:2b-4 (ESV)

Of course, if “they” hate you, maybe they hate you because you’re shining the light of the gospel into the darkness of their hearts, and maybe they hate you because you’re a jerk; that phrase “on account of the Son of Man” is not one we can interpret however we please. But there’s a very important question here: if people outside the church like Jesus, is that actually an opportunity, or a sign they don’t really know him? As Jared Wilson has memorably pointed out, there are a great many counterfeit Jesuses floating around our culture, all of them very likeable; just pick your favorite and go with it. The real Jesus, by contrast, ticked so many people off so badly, he ended up crucified. To the extent that people like Jesus but not the church, it may just be that both halves of that statement are unfortunate.

The bottom line here is that the American church is, with very few exceptions, deeply culturally embedded, and its self-understanding is incorrigibly capitalist and consumerist; even those congregations which don’t consciously operate in terms of “market share” and “customer satisfaction” still think of themselves in these sorts of customer-response categories. There is the pervasive subliminal assumption that we can and should measure success by whether or not our customers are happy, whether or not they come back, and whether or not they draw in new customers. Of course we want them to like us—if they don’t, we’ll go out of business, and that would be failure, and is to be avoided if at all possible. And of course they like Jesus—after all, we like Jesus, and he wouldn’t have built such a big and successful brand if he weren’t likeable, would he?

It’s a hard thing to change this sort of mindset. It has to start, I believe, with the recognition that often, the main reason we like Jesus is that we’ve picked out the parts of him that we find congenial and are working determinedly to ignore the rest; we aren’t letting him confront the idolatries of our hearts, or the cultural idolatries in which we’re enmeshed, or the areas in which we indulge sin in our lives as a comfortable old friend. I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, commenting on Jesus’ command to us to love our enemies, that the greatest of all the enemies Jesus calls us to love is God—that if we truly take him seriously as Lord and God, he will often seem like an enemy to us as he challenges, rebukes, corrects and disciplines us, working to prune away the diseased, rotten, and overgrown areas in our souls . . . and as he prunes us, he calls us to the incomprehensible spiritual discipline of loving and praising him for the pain and suffering he’s causing us.

Our message to the world is not supposed to be, and cannot be with any integrity, “Come to Jesus and get what you want”; sometimes it seems like it’s just the opposite. We worship a Lord who traded success for failure, a home for homelessness, a good job for unemployment, social approval for the scorn of the elites, and ultimately life for death—how on earth can we present him accurately to a world to which none of this makes any sense at all and expect them to applaud? If you want success in the world’s eyes, according to its categories (building, attendance, budget, media profile, etc.), the very idea is nuts; clearly, you can’t grow a church that way. And indeed, you can’t. But then, you can’t grow anything that’s truly a church any way, and neither can I, and neither can anyone else. Only God can, and this is how he is pleased to do it.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written,
“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (ESV)

If our goal is to get people to like Jesus and like us, we’ve gotten both halves of it wrong. That is not the rock on which he said he would build his church, but the shifting sand against which he warned. We can’t judge what we’re doing based on results, because we can’t assume that the results we want are the ones Jesus wants to produce in us. All we can do is proclaim the gospel of grace and seek to live by grace in a manner according to the holiness of God—and if the world looks at that and tells us we’re crazy, and that maybe they don’t like Jesus either, well, results aren’t our business, they’re God’s. Ours is to be faithful and let him take care of the rest.

Programming note

2010-06-17T06:57:00.002-04:00

I haven't gone anywhere, I'm not dead, and I'm not feeling overwhelmed by life; but I think my wireless card is going, as my connection has been sketchy, and I have been ill (though doing better today, it seems). We'll see how the day goes, but I have at least a couple things I'd like to finish up.

What is the purpose of argument?

2010-06-11T22:58:00.005-04:00

I mean that as a completely serious question. I've been mulling it recently, ever since I got tangentially involved in an argument in a comment thread on another blog. The blogger in question seems to spend the largest part of his time going after atheists, and it would appear that there are many who rise to the bait. I've never quite understood that behavior, really; I'm happy to debate issues with people who comment here—as long as the conversation seems to me to be productive, and an actual conversation—but I don't generally have a great deal of interest in going to other people's blogs just to tell them they're wrong.

I know there are vast numbers of people out there who believe very differently from me, including on issues on which I hold deep and strong opinions, but I simply don't feel the compulsion to go fight with any of them about it simply because of that fact. Yet some people do. The commenters with whom I briefly argued (on a point of historiography, not faith) seemed to have a sort of long-standing relationship with that blogger which consisted mostly of them being offended by him believing differently and expressing that fact in what seemed to me to be an intentionally provocative manner. I don't see the point in that, and I don't see the justification—on either side, really.

Sure, I have no doubt provoked people on this blog, and over the years in real life, but not with the intent of being provocative; I'm looking for something different. If you try to pick a fight, you'll get one, but you'll usually get one with people who just like fighting; if you try to generate an argument because you want to have an argument, you'll usually end up dealing with people who fight you because they're offended that people could actually be so stupid as to believe something they find completely unacceptable. That is what we've come to call (in a manner unfair to the folks who first stood up to argue for the fundamentals of the Christian faith) the spirit of fundamentalism; and while it's no doubt partly temperamental, personally, I don't have a lot of interest in arguing with diehard fundamentalists, be they conservative Christian fundamentalists, atheist fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists, liberal fundamentalists, or whomever. I tend to think of that in the spirit of the old Texas judge who advised, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It can't be done and it annoys the pig."

The key here, I think, is that folks who have that sort of attitude seem to view the purpose of argument as winning. That's why they argue, and it's what they see as the value of argument, as far as I can tell. I don't know if it's a matter of ego gratification in triumphing over other people, or if it's a defense mechanism against insecurity in their own beliefs, or what, but there really does seem to be that sort of attitude that the reason that you argue with people is to get them to admit that they're wrong and you're right.

I have a problem with that—or maybe two, but they're related. The first is that that sort of approach is all about the self—it is, at base, selfish. It's all about aggrandizing the ego, building up the self at the expense of others, and so it is not concerned about others except insofar as they provide an opportunity to show one's own superiority (because the reason for wanting to demonstrate the superiority of one's position is to prove that one is superior for holding it).

The second is that it's about the self instead of being about the truth: if you go into an argument with the goal of proving yourself to be right, then you're showing that what really matters to you is not knowing the truth, but being seen to be right and being affirmed as right. With that sort of attitude, it wouldn't really matter what you believed—indeed, you could change beliefs like some people change clothes, so long as that put you in a position where the beliefs you professed were applauded by those around you as correct. (And indeed, there are people who do exactly that.)

It seems to me that the purpose of argument ought to be to help us together to find truth. This is not to say that it ought to be timid, or half-hearted, or accompanied by qualifiers that really, whatever you believe is fine, and it doesn't matter that you and I disagree; quite to the contrary, actually. If you and I disagree, then it could mean that both of us are wrong, or it could mean that one of us is wrong and one of us is right—or even, depending on the subject, that both of us have perceived an aspect of the truth but have drawn some false conclusions from it. Whichever is the case, this is profoundly important, not as a threat to either of our egos, but as an opportunity for our growth. If I believe something which is not true and you come to me with the truth, then I need to know this information—and how am I going to learn it, except by you demonstrating it to me? And how will you demonstrate it to me except through reasoned argument?

Of course, it will never be true in this world as we know it that everyone will be selflessly concerned to know only what is true; our own sin, and particularly our pride and our selfish fear, make that impossible. I certainly can't claim it to be true for me; I want to believe only what is true, but I know that I don't always act accordingly. Scientists will tell you that this is how science works, but it isn't, not by a long shot—the desire for wealth, the desire for success, the desire to win approval from the establishment by conforming to the dogma of the day (in science, the technical term for dogma is "paradigm"), all corrupt the process, just as similar considerations corrupt it in every other discipline and every other part of society. That said, the fact that we can't perfectly reach a standard doesn't mean it isn't worth setting, and it doesn't mean it isn't worth disciplining ourselves in that direction. The purpose of argument, I believe, ought to be to discover truth—which will inevitably mean sometimes discovering that we're wrong, and learning to accept that fact not only with grace but with gratitude. May we all get better at this.

A thought on the Trinity

2010-06-09T22:12:00.003-04:00

In the course of preparing a sermon I did the other week on the Trinity, I was going through all the usual images and analogies people use to try to illustrate or explain it (a group which runs all the way from bad to incipiently heretical) when I ran across one I’d never heard before that actually has something to recommend it. Believe it or not, there are those who argue that the structure of our government was influenced by trinitarian theology. As history, I don’t know what to make of that—it’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any primary sources that support it—but as an analogy, it has its points. There is a certain hierarchy and structure to our branches of government, but none of them are dominant; each does different things; and the relationship between them constitutes our government and makes things happen. Thus, for instance, laws are passed by the legislative branch, executed and administered by the executive branch, and enforced by the judicial branch.

Of course, like any analogy, this one has its dangers (including the temptation to snipe about the tendency of government to think it’s God) and its limits: God is unlimited and perfect, while our government is limited and imperfect (though it occasionally forgets the fact) because it’s composed of limited and imperfect people. It also, however, has this advantage, that it points us to one reason why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. The structure of our government is intrinsically relational—each branch acts on the others and is acted on in turn, and it’s those actions and relationships that actually constitute the workings of our government.

Unlike the Trinity, of course, no one would ever describe the interrelationships of the three branches as a dance, but like I said, every analogy has its limits. It remains clear even so that our government is fundamentally different from what one might call a unitarian government (such as a monarchy or dictatorship)—it’s not just a different version of the same thing, but something truly different in kind. In the same way, the Triune God is profoundly different in being from any unitarian god we might imagine, and that difference is of fundamental importance.

Parenthood is disciple-making

2010-06-09T21:54:00.003-04:00

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

—Deuteronomy 6:4-7 (ESV)

That might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?

In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.

People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God—and not as a harsh taskmaster, but as the one who is love, and as the giver of grace; yes, he disciplines us, but he does so because he loves us, so that we will grow. Raise them in the gospel, to understand the gift they’ve been given, that they may learn to love the giver more than the gift. Point them to Jesus, and the rest will follow.

(Adapted from “The Ministry of Parenthood”)

Jesus didn't come to save your agenda

2010-06-07T15:50:00.005-04:00

I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret
of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things
through him who strengthens me.

—Philippians 4:11b-13 (ESV)

What we tend to miss when we take just that last verse, just that last sentence, out of context is that "I can do all things" does not mean "Jesus will help me do whatever I want." The promises of God are not promises for our worldly success, they are promises that he is just as much in control and just as much sustaining us for our good in times of disaster and pain as in times of wealth and health. As Jared Wilson sums it up in a great post titled "Kill Your Jesus Talisman,"

Jesus is no talisman. Crucify "Jesus as key to your personal achievement" and he will stay dead. But the real Jesus achieves a victory greater and far superior to any wish-dream of any man. He is life itself, and life eternal. Worship that Jesus.

Honoring the valiant

2010-06-06T19:29:00.003-04:00

means remembering both the price they paid, and the reason why that price was necessary.

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

2010-06-05T17:53:00.004-04:00

It's probably too late now, but this administration that's so fond of appointing "czars" for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

Available immediately—no point in naming someone whose appointment would only delay matters
Experienced executive, particularly in dealing with large, complex projects
Experienced politician—given the political fallout, the political complications, and the need to keep the public informed, the job would need someone used to working on the national political scene
Experience in working politically with Big Oil, but independent from them—not someone on the payroll of any of the oil companies, but someone familiar with energy issues who has a track record of keeping them honest and cooperative
Some familiarity with the Gulf states, and/or relationships with their governors—wouldn't need to be someone from that area, but someone who could reasonably expect to work comfortably and effectively with state and local governments in a manner that showed respect and appreciation for the cultures of the region
Ideally, a Republican—it isn't likely that the GOP would have objected to the establishment of such a position, but if so, naming a Republican would have drawn their fangs, and given the President a bit of a bipartisan boost; also, of the governors of the Gulf states, there are four Republicans, three high-profile (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley), and one who used to be (Charlie Crist), so naming a Republican would help in that regard

Now, it could be that I'm biased, but looking over this list, it seems to me that there's one person above all others who would fit the bill: as Jason Killian Meath pointed out a couple weeks ago over at BigGovernment, it's Gov. Sarah Palin.

Currently out of office, she could have taken the job immediately
As Governor of Alaska, she served as chair of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission and chair of the National Governors Association (NGA) Natural Resources Committee; before that, she had served as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission
In her time as governor, she pushed for and oversaw the launching of a non-producer-controlled pipeline project to bring Alaskan natural gas to the Lower 48 (standing up to opposition from BP, among others)
She pushed through tax reform, replacing the tax code that had been written by Big Oil lobbyists to the maximum benefit of the companies with one designed to benefit the state of Alaska
She pushed ExxonMobil to develop the Point Thomson oil field, instead of sitting on the lease and doing nothing as they had for a quarter-century
Her government created the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO), designed to prevent just such disasters as we have now in the Gulf of Mexico
As such, she has shown the knack of being pro-production without being in Big Oil's pocket
She's been a significant player on the national political scene for nearly two years now, enough time to begin to get comfortable, and has shown significant gifts for speaking and other forms of mass communication (government accountability via Facebook would be a significant improvement)
Though not a Southerner, she has campaigned for Gov. Perry, in his primary this year, and with Gov. Crist, during the 2008 campaign, and appears to have a solid relationship with Gov. Jindal, meaning that the necessary working relationships appear to be already in place
As President Obama's highest-profile critic on energy issues and a former campaign opponent, appointing her to such a position would be seen as indicative of his ability to put the past aside for the common good and to deal constructively with disagreement and differing opinions; it would also have put her in a position in which backing up her previous arguments and assertions against the President would have been to the benefit of the White House—a productive bit of political judo

The only downside here is that if Gov. Palin had performed well in that role, it would have boosted her political standing tremendously (though if she hadn't, it would have hurt her but still helped the President). But if it was for the good of the country, and also the administration, wouldn't that have been a price worth paying?

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

2010-06-05T09:49:00.004-04:00

The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.
Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.
The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that's consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President's policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it's starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.
America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it's not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, "He was supposed to be competent!"

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .
I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: "We pay so much for the government and it can't cap an undersea oil well!"
This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn't like about the Bush administration, everything it didn't like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush's incompetence and conservatives' failure to "believe in government." But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.
Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you're drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.
How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We're plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .
Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We're in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they'll probably get the big California earthquake. And they'll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won't wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al'Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we're in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they'd been given to solve. That's what Presidents do.

At the rate he's going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he'd never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it's unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it's his rubble now. That's part of being the president, just as it's part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it's on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren't your fault. That's life, it's happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I'm deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the "ineffective, dithering response" I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we've seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it's been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana's efforts to protect itself), the President's response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it's enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there's any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn't on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America's biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to "keep a close watch" on BP's efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don't know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren't. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who's come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I've never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I've never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what's happening to his home state.

In uncertain times, worship

2010-06-04T13:44:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.
Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.
We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Umm . . . about those “death panels” . . .

2010-06-03T22:00:00.005-04:00

The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare's shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,

an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”
Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.
Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .
With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.
To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”
And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?

A deeply troubling development on the world scene

2010-06-03T21:01:00.005-04:00

is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn't have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral legitimacy or political capital, there was no one to stand up to or counterbalance the radicals. The consequences are becoming increasingly dire:

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don't speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn't really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.
For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about "Who lost Turkey?" when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."
The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

Given this, the fact that Turkey was behind the deliberate provocation that was the Gaza flotilla is an ominous sign (though the fact that the administration, in the person of Joe Biden, was willing to stand up to them on Israel's behalf is an encouraging one); a country that was for many years a key ally of the US in the region is now well on its way to becoming another Iran—and while the Turks lack the mullahs' oil money, they are in all other ways in a far better position to damage us and our allies. If their current moves toward Iran turn into a long-term alliance, that would be an extremely difficult radical Islamic power bloc to counter; if they end up as rivals with Iran, the resulting conflict could be even worse. It's hard to see a way this turns out well.

For lack of better options, if Turkey continues to swing in an Islamist direction, maybe the US and Iraqi governments need to get together and figure out a way to strike a deal with the Kurds—see if they would be willing to make concessions to the Iraqis in exchange for all-out assistance against the governments of Iran, Turkey and Syria. After all, as nervous as the government in Baghdad is about the Kurds, at this point one would think Iraq and the Kurds could find real common cause here.

It's a great product, with one tiny flaw . . .

2010-06-03T19:07:00.007-04:00

This is the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk, available on Amazon.com for $24.95. No, this is not a joke—click on the link, it's an actual product. In the product description, it says, "For safety reasons, never use this product while driving"—which is less reassuring than it ought to be; it also makes one wonder how many people really would rather do their work in a parked car rather than sitting at a desk. Judging by the user-submitted photos, the customer-submitted tags (including "accident waiting to happen" and "alcohol accessories") and the customer reviews (some of which are quite funny), it would appear I'm not the only one dubious about the whole idea, or about how people who buy the thing are actually likely to use it. At least it was the inspiration for a great many wits (and would-be wits).

Is a Clinton-Obama war brewing?

2010-06-03T15:07:00.000-04:00

This from Politico makes me wonder:

Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.
Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.
He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.
“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.
Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.
Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.
It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”

This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.

There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.

I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.

Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.

The (possible) coming global freeze

2010-06-03T14:01:00.001-04:00

This is no certainty, but depending how things play out, we might see a short-term but serious dip in world temperatures:

In a cosmically ironic twist of fate and timing, nature may be set to empirically freeze any and all anthropogenic global warming talk: a blast of Arctic cold may encase the earth in an icy grip not seen for 200 years.
This is not alarmist fantasy or 2012 babble—several natural forces that are known to cause cooling are awakening simultaneously, raising speculation of a “perfect storm” of downward pressures on global temperature. These forces let loose one at a time can cause the Earth to cool and can bring about harsh winter conditions. If they all break free at once, the effects could be felt not just in the coming winter, but year-round, and for several years to come.

Read the whole thing for the details. As you can probably guess, we should all be watching Iceland’s volcanoes very closely.

Fly, eagle, fly

2010-06-03T11:53:00.005-04:00

Trying, frying, fragmented day. This is good:

Note: before the song proper starts, there's a (sort-of-related) spoken clip and a neat instrumental bit by Mark Gersmehl.

Worry?

2010-06-01T21:22:00.004-04:00

These are fretful days—an unprecedented ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the situation in Afghanistan is coming apart, Turkey appears to be turning from ally to enemy right before our eyes, the economy's in the tank and shows no real signs of climbing out, Iran continues to loom, and the Seattle Mariners are 19-31. (OK, so that last is nowhere near as serious as the others, but it still depresses me.) And of course, the list goes on and on, including such things as our government voting to abandon the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) to government by rape. These are not the salad days for most folks.

Which is why it was apropos, when I gathered the younger ones up to tuck them in (our eldest having uncharacteristically fallen asleep on her floor before 8pm) and pulled out the Jesus Storybook Bible to read to them before bed, to find ourselves here, at the Sermon on the Mount:

Wherever Jesus went, lots of people went, too. They loved being near him. Old people. Young people. All kinds of people came to see Jesus. Sick people. Well people. Happy people. Sad people. And worried people. Lots of them. Worrying about lots of things.
What if we don't have enough food? Or clothes? Or suppose we run out of money? What if there isn't enough? And everything goes wrong? And we won't be all right? What then?
When Jesus saw all the people, his heart was filled with love for them. They were like a little flock of sheep that didn't have a shepherd to take care of them. So Jesus sat them all down and he talked to them. . . .
"See those birds over there?" Jesus said.
Everyone looked. Little sparrows were pecking at seeds along the stony path.
"Where do they get their food? Perhaps they have pantries all stocked up? Cabinets full of food?
Everyone laughed—who's ever seen a bird with a bag of groceries?
"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that. Because God knows what they need and he feeds them."
"And what about those wild flowers?"
Everyone looked. All around them flowers were growing. Anemones, daisies, pure white lilies.
"Where do they get their lovely clothes? Do they make them? Or do they go to work every day so they can buy them? Do they have closets full of clothes?"
Everyone laughed again—who's ever seen a flower putting on a dress?
"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that because God clothes them in royal robes of splendor! Not even a king is that well dressed!" . . .
"Little flock," Jesus said, "you are more important than birds! More important than flowers! The birds and the flowers don't sit and worry about things. And God doesn't want his children to worry either. God loves to look after the birds and the flowers. And he loves to look after you, too."

Thank you, Father. That's just what I needed to hear.

Case study in educational reform

2010-06-01T21:10:00.003-04:00

This comes from the NYT article I posted immediately below; it’s of particular interest because if you wanted to design a scientific experiment in educational reform, you’d have a hard time beating this real-world example.

A building on 118th Street [in Harlem] is one reason that the parents who are Perkins’s constituents know that charters can work. On one side there’s the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there’s a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education—the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.
On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work—and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, building maintenance and even “debt service” for its share of the building.
On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.
But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.
Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument—that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that what’s good for teachers—hiring more of them—is always what’s good for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size.”

Is the pendulum swinging against teachers’ unions? (Updated)

2010-06-01T20:24:00.007-04:00

Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.

This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).

Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?

Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.

Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.

The power of grace

2010-05-31T23:42:00.003-04:00

This goes well with Friday's post on grace-driven effort; this is E. Stanley Jones, courtesy of Of First Importance:

Grace binds you with far stronger cords than the cords of duty or obligation can bind you. Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver. Like produces like. Grace makes you gracious, the Giver makes you give.

Jesus Manifesto: for those who have ears to hear

2010-05-31T18:57:00.000-04:00

Due to a combination of circumstances, I found myself this week filling in for my wife, who’s one of the book-review bloggers for Thomas Nelson (which now calls their review-blogging program, absurdly, BookSneeze), to write a review of the book Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. It’s a 179-page (plus footnotes) expansion of a ~2400 word essay they posted last summer, which I noted at the time when Jared Wilson flagged it. The essay was a powerful challenge to the increasingly Jesusless American church, but there was plenty of room to expand on each of their ten points; now, each one gets a chapter. The resulting book is not perfect, by any means—there’s room for criticism, as there is with any human work—but I’m grateful to Sweet and Viola for writing it, and to Thomas Nelson for publishing it and pushing it, because the church in this country badly needs to hear what they have to say.

I will probably come back to this book and interact with it more than once, because there’s a lot here; but for now, let me just post here what I put up on my wife’s blog. The best summary of this book comes from the authors themselves, in the last chapter, in words taken straight from the original essay:

Christians don’t follow Christianity; they follow Christ.
Christians don’t preach themselves; they preach Christ.
Christians don’t preach about Christ: they simply preach Christ.

The purpose of the book is to lay out why that’s so and what that looks like, in order to address “the major disease of today’s church . . . JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.”

Sweet and Viola do an excellent job of this; they have written a book which is truly centered on—indeed, saturated with—Jesus. Rather than resting on human wisdom, it rests solidly on Scripture, the word that contains the Word, “the cradle that contains the Christ,” in Luther’s phrase; this is not to say that they ignore the wisdom of Christians through the ages, but they only use it to expound and amplify the voice of the Scriptures as they speak of Christ. This book will make anyone who reads it with an open mind and heart aware of their hunger and thirst for Jesus; one hopes it will do the same for the American church.

Theology and discipleship

2010-05-31T11:13:00.003-04:00

Time was, I used to read a lot of systematic theology; I don't do that much anymore. Rather, I'm much more likely to read commentaries. This is not to disparage the work of systematic theology—I still have a lot of it on my shelves, and I make use of it; but I think the church, at least since Aquinas, has tended to make much too much of theological systems, to the point where we identify with and believe in them rather than in what—or rather, Who—they're supposed to point us to. Just consider the labels Protestants use: Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. (Those churches which call themselves Catholic and Orthodox are different because they defined themselves against each other—the purpose of their names is to identify them as the true church and the other as not.) I think systematic theology has a useful and important purpose in helping us to interpret Scripture holistically, in the big-picture view, with integrity; but we must always remember that it is merely a guide to understanding, not the substance of our beliefs.

It's easy to lose sight of that, but it's true, because true Christianity isn't about believing in beliefs, it's about believing in a person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom the fulness of the Triune God is revealed. Doctrines, even true doctrines, don't save us—only Jesus saves us; it matters that we believe true things, yes, but we seek to believe true things in order that we may more clearly see and know and believe in the one who is Truth.

Christ cannot be summarized in propositional statements and assertions of fact; indeed, all the true statements we can make about him and his teaching are of necessity partial. We cannot follow him by making up a list of things to do and not to do, or by identifying the things he did and trying to do them; we cannot help others know him merely by telling them things about him, even if every last one of them are true things. Christian faith cannot ultimately be explained, nor can it fully be taught, even though teaching is an important element of the work of the church. In the end, it can only be lived, Christ in us by his indwelling Holy Spirit; and the only way we can fully carry out his command to make disciples is by living in him and allowing others to live closely with us as we do so, so that we can say to them, "Follow me as I follow Christ."

That it may not be in vain

2010-05-31T09:52:00.004-04:00

I'm not sure why it had never occurred to me before to post Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for Memorial Day, but I think it's well worth doing—not least because of its insistence that the most important thing we can do to honor those who died fighting for that which is good and true and right is to take up the work and carry it on.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T06:09:00.000-04:00

Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner last year; I posted it at the time, and decided it was worth re-posting this year.

Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”
And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous might in the face of evil.

On a different note

2010-05-30T22:42:00.003-04:00

For those who might be interested, I just finished a sermon series working along the lines of the Nicene Creed (though I didn't hit everything the creed affirms) and ending up today with a sermon on the Trinity. I think that's the first time I've ever preached a full sermon on the subject. The texts are all up on the sermon blog; the audio of the sermons can be found on the church website, though at the moment only the first six are up—this morning's message will be posted tomorrow (Lord willing).

Update: OK, the audio of yesterday's message is up.

One more song

2010-05-30T22:38:00.001-04:00

just because I've been thinking about this one lately:

A little music for a Sunday evening

2010-05-30T22:20:00.003-04:00

One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to "Revive Us Again" as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland's version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn't take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it's a great version. It's also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:

As long as I'm at it, I've been meaning to post Moses Hogan's phenomenal arrangement of "The Battle of Jericho" ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it's in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now's as good a time as any.

Bill James comments on the Sestak scandal

2010-05-29T14:44:00.007-04:00

Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House's job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James' entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:

In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.
When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can't even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he's never going to be an outstanding player. . . .
But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn't see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn't participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.
This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.

I think James' argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn't much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is "perfectly appropriate" are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,

It's possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.

I believe the phrase we were looking for here is "hoist with their own petard."

What's different about Jesus (updated)

2010-05-29T09:40:00.004-04:00

Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.

The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that's the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn't accept his claims would tolerate.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven't taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.

There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus' authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.

Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.

This is depressing

2010-05-28T23:24:00.005-04:00

I haven't been over to Viola Larson's blog, Naming His Grace, for a while—in large part because, for a lot of reasons, I've been very low on energy for dealing with the internecine warfare in the PC(USA)—and now I rather wish I hadn't. Nothing against Viola in the slightest, and in fact it's a good thing that I know about this . . . I just wish it wasn't there to know about.

In an attempt to get the Presbyterian General Assembly to not receive the paper Christians and Jews: People of God the Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied about the Jewish organizations in the United States suggesting that they sent a bomb to our Presbyterian headquarters and burnt down a church. They also lied about the Jewish people in their synagogues. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied.

Why won’t more Presbyterians speak up? Surely even those Presbyterians who believe that everything Israel is doing is wrong can’t believe that lying about Jewish organizations in the United States is the right thing to do? Why isn’t there an outcry from fellow Christians about this?

The IPMN insists that the rising anti-semitism, the caricatures of Jewish people, in all countries, is caused by the Jews themselves. That is an old story. Less than eighty years ago such lies led to the death of six million Jews.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, driven by this queer alliance between the Western Left and the anti-Western wing of Islam; it's grievous to me to see people trying to use the PC(USA) to further it.

To be driven by grace

2010-05-28T22:37:00.005-04:00

My thanks to Jared Wilson for pointing out this gem from one of my favorite NT scholars,
D. A. Carson:

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

That's dead-on, but as Jared goes on to say, it does raise another question: what does grace-driven effort look like, and how is it different from all other forms of effort?

I think grace-driven effort springs from parking ourselves at the gospel and beholding. People who behold (super)naturally move into mission. . . .
We don't graduate from the gospel. We hold true to it. And it alone propels us out and empowers us to press on.
Grace-driven effort is effort that flows from the joys and wonders of worship that flows from beholding the amazing gospel of God's grace.

That's dead-on too. If you're having trouble seeing the distinction, you might say it's between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. Legalistic religion motivates by pushing and bribing, the carrot and the stick. The push may be an appeal to fear—which is a very powerful driver in most people's lives, since an awful lot of folks out there are slaves to fear in one way or another—or it may be a guilt trip, or it may play on people's sense of their own weakness and inadequacy; the bribe tends to be tailored to people's "felt needs" (hence the popular "7 Steps to a Better ________" approach). Whatever the particulars, it's all about control, both for the leader and for the followers.

The opposite to that, of course, is the drift that Dr. Carson talks about. Grace-driven effort is a wholly other thing; it is the action that springs from amazed gratitude at the unparalleled and almost incomprehensible grace of God; from joy in worship that focuses our minds and hearts on his beauty and goodness; from desire for his restful purity and undivided holiness, which frees us from our chaotic impurity and unrighteousness, which divides us against ourselves; and from whole-hearted love for him who first loved us, and who loved us that much.

The problem, I think, is that too few of us preachers actually trust that message to have any effect; it's too easy and too tempting to go for the "short cut," to go right to messages prescribing whatever efforts we deem most important. But effort which does not arise in response to the gospel of grace, even if it seems to be in the right direction, is not the right sort of effort, and in the end, it will not bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

—Philippians 3:12-16 (ESV)

Fox News and sexual hypocrisy

2010-05-27T22:49:00.005-04:00

It's my observation that Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose; he's also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it's no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, titled "Foxy News," is Wilson at his best.

Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .
A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .
Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's—with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.

Be sure to read the whole thing—it's truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like "Married . . . with Children" and, yes, "The Simpsons." (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .

Economics as a human system

2010-05-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

I have thought more than once that someone ought to try to apply systems theory to economics in a systematic way. The application of systems theory to family therapy by Murray Bowen was a huge step forward, as was Edwin Friedman's work in turning Bowen's model more broadly to congregational dynamics and leadership; Rabbi Friedman's book Generation to Generation is one every pastor should read (and periodically re-read). Systems theory helps us to understand that problems don't exist in isolation and can't be addressed as if they did; we all exist within interlocking relational systems, and the problems of any given individual relate to the problems of the systems of which they are a part (and indeed, may have more to do with the health of the system than with that individual).

As a consequence, systems theory teaches us that the brute-force approach to problems, the use of compulsion and coercion, is often not the best approach, because it attacks the symptom without doing anything about the underlying issue—and indeed, will likely make the underlying issue worse. Rather, it's necessary to address problems by changing the system. To do that, you have to identify the ways in which you are supporting the system and enabling its current dysfunction, and then change your own behavior. This changes the incentive structure within the system and shifts the stress of maintaining it off of you and on to the other members; this creates a great deal of pressure on the system which will ultimately, given sufficient time, break it, thus making real progress possible.

The same is true of our economy, which is itself a system—or perhaps one might say, a meta-system, since the "individuals" which interact are corporations, which are their own complex systems—and which is, of course, embedded in the even larger meta-system of the global economy. Problems, whether they be with companies, sectors of the economy, aspects of the economy, or whatever, don't exist in isolation, and can't be addressed as if they did. This means that the brute force approach, the attempt to compel the behavior one desires of a given corporation or industry through legislation and regulation, is at best highly inefficient and at worst actively counterproductive. It's like swatting at a mobile—you put the whole thing in motion, setting it turning in ways you couldn't have predicted, leading to results you didn't anticipate. This is why the Law of Unintended Consequences has such force.

Rather than simply trying to regulate the economy into moral behavior, we need to recognize that it's a complex interlocking system of human relationships, and to try to address corporate and economic issues accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the system is far too complex to be fully comprehended by the human mind, but taking this approach at least gets us closer to understanding the real issues. For instance, don't just look at bad behavior—whether of a rebellious teenager or a company that's cooking the books—look at the structure of incentives within the system and see what that behavior is in response to, and what's rewarding it.

This is not a new idea in the world of economic theory; in fact, it's quite important in the work of the Austrian school of thought, of folks like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. It's one of the reasons I believe they were closer to right than other economic approaches, because they understood and emphasized that the incentive structure drives economic action—that people will tend to do what they have an incentive to do, and to avoid doing what they have no incentive to do—and that when the incentives are out of whack, it will produce behavior which will be bad for the economy. One example of this is Hayek's Nobel Prize-winning theory of the business cycle, which makes clear that if interest rates are set such as to provide an incentive for highly speculative investments, people will speculate; the result will be an economic bubble which will eventually, inevitably, burst. Just check the housing market.

To try to rationalize the economy, then, to produce steady, sustainable growth, we need to understand (as best as possible) how our laws and regulations and the decisions of government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae create incentives for counterproductive behavior; and then we need to work to change those incentives to reward behavior that will produce long-term health rather than short-term big profits. This means not trying to fix the economy by regulating it more—indeed, it might well mean deregulating it to some degree, not because "business can be trusted" (it can't, but neither can government), but because deregulation simplifies the system and makes it easier to see what's actually going on.

Hayek, by the way, though an advocate of the free market, was by no means opposed to regulation; he was enough of a realist about humanity to recognize that there is a proper role for government to play in economic matters. As such, there have been those on the Right who have criticized him for not supporting the free-market system enough. From an Austrian perspective, it seems to me, the key is that the government should only regulate cautiously and with humility, out of the expectation that it knows and understands far less than it thinks it does.

Regulation to prevent clear injustice is necessary, as are efforts to insure the free flow of information, because most people will abuse the system if you give them a clear shot and a big enough reason; but regulation to try to control outcomes is almost certain to backfire. When the government tries to pick winners and losers, you end up with crony capitalism and the disasters we're seeing now. The best we can do is to try to keep the process as fair as possible, so that everybody's playing by the same rules; try to keep the structure of incentives as rational as possible, so that the market isn't tilted either towards excessive risk or excessive caution; and to remember this insight from Hayek's 1988 book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (quoted at the end of the rap video "Fear the Boom and Bust"):

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Incidentally, the odds are pretty good that you've seen that rap video, produced by filmmaker John Papola and economist Russ Roberts (of George Mason University and the blog Café Hayek, which I have in the sidebar), which envisions a rap duel between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes; after all, it's now up to nearly 1.2 million views for one version of it on YouTube alone. If not, though, unless you absolutely can't stand rap—and maybe even then—you really ought to watch it here; it's a great piece of work. Then go read the explication of the video (which I linked above) by one of the posters on Daily Kos (yes, seriously), and Jeffrey Tucker's piece on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You'll be amazed how much you can learn from a rap video. (For my own part, I'm no more a Keynesian than I ever was, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for his work now than I did.)

A Democrat not of the machine

2010-05-27T09:49:00.006-04:00

I’ve said before that I think the greatest need in American politics is more politicians who, like Sarah Palin, are independent of the party machines, and thus willing to call out and take down their own party when it deserves it—and particularly for a Democratic equivalent to Gov. Palin. There aren't many like that on the Republican side of the aisle (Nikki Haley, whom Gov. Palin recently endorsed for governor of South Carolina, is one notable exception; that would be why the GOP leadership down in Columbia is trying to destroy her before she wins the nomination), but if they're thin on the ground among Republicans, they would seem to be nearly absent among Democrats. The only real figure I can find right now is blogger Mickey Kaus, currently challenging incumbent Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California. His challenge is probably doomed to fail, which is too bad; I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg:

Kaus is way too liberal for me. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be an exhilarating addition to the Senate in the grand tradition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Moynihan, Kaus is a fearless asker of hard and unwanted questions. He may have the single most finely attuned B.S. detector of anyone in the journalism business—or any other business.

Campaign-finance reform as environmental engineering

2010-05-26T21:05:00.000-04:00

When I pastored in Colorado, one of the best people in our congregation was an environmental engineer who specialized in groundwater. A lot of his business involved wetlands in one form or another, but he also got involved in housing construction, helping builders avoid basement water problems. I remember him pointing out one house where the basement had been sunk too deep into the ground, for a combination of reasons, putting it down into an underground stream; as a consequence, whatever that family did, they had water in their basement. Seal the outside, seal the inside, nothing they could do could permanently fix the problem, because whatever you do, water always finds its way in.

When he told me about that, my mind immediately went to politics and the whole question of campaign-finance reform—which is a joke, because the whole concept is that you can keep money out of politics. Not totally, to be sure, but that you can control the inflow—that you can limit how much of it comes in, and how, and where. A lot of well-meaning people believe this, but it's ludicrously out of touch with reality. Laws are fixed, like concrete; money flows, like water; and just as the water will always find its way over, under, around, or through in the end, so too will money. The pressure is there behind it, pushing it in, and the demand is there for it, drawing it in, and so whatever laws you may write and whatever regulations they draw up, all they will succeed in doing is defining the cracks—or loopholes, if you prefer the term—through which the money will inevitably leak.

Want to reduce the importance of money in politics? Well, in the first place you might want to rethink that, since all that would likely accomplish is to further strengthen incumbents and further reduce turnover among our elected officials; but if you do, fine, more power to you. But doing it the brute-force, frontal-assault way isn't going to work, because it never has. If you want to reduce the importance of money, you're going to have to find another way. In the battle of water vs. concrete, the water wins every time.

That depends—how big a safe is it?

2010-05-26T20:06:00.000-04:00

Picking up my oldest from school today, I saw a girl walking along carrying a sign that read

KEEP PANDA'S SAFE

If you've ever read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, you'll understand why I smiled.

The mythical meme of “cutting waste and fraud”

2010-05-26T12:14:00.006-04:00

A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,

Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.

“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.

The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.

That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.

Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.

As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.

The US economy is a headless chicken

2010-05-26T09:27:00.003-04:00

Just because it's showing signs of life doesn't mean it's getting better. For those who think otherwise, here are some questions to consider. (And yes, as someone has already demonstrated, there are ways to try to explain away each question; but as any baseball fan knows, if there are a lot of "ifs" and they all have to have the "right" answer for things to go well, things probably aren't going to go well.)

We don't need to make God be good—he just is

2010-05-25T19:29:00.002-04:00

This is an excellent bit from Mark Driscoll laying out the nature of true repentance vs. the false repentance of worldly sorrow—the sort of thing we see in celebrities like Tiger Woods, who practice what he dubs "a pagan version of Catholicism."

Good work by Justice Stevens

2010-05-25T09:13:00.003-04:00

who wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in American Needle v. NFL. It was an interesting case, turning on the question of whether the NFL is a single corporate entity or a collection of competing corporations, and one with potentially huge ramifications. Had the Court upheld the NFL's claim and allowed them to act as a single corporation, it would have been an immense transfer of power to the NFL which probably would have drastically weakened the players' union; but in denying that claim (as they did, and rightly) there was the potential to significantly weaken the league. Justice Stevens' ruling, from what I can see, did an excellent job of maintaining the necessary balance, laying a clear legal foundation for the NFL as a collection of competing corporations which must by the very nature of their business act cooperatively and collectively in much of what they do. As Doug Farrar sums it up,

Stevens basically said that the Supreme Court, and any other Court, would test function rather than form and avoid absolute impingement of any collective activity taken on by the teams,. But any act in concert with an eye on the evasion of antitrust law would not be allowed or exempted. In effect, as Berthelsen intimated in his statement, the NFL must operate under the same constraints as almost any other business. It was a sound and reasoned ruling that penalized neither side.

Nice job of threading the needle, that.

Politics in the end view

2010-05-24T23:22:00.004-04:00

I don't make any apologies for blogging on political matters; I believe they’re important, and that we as Christians need to learn to see all aspects of life, including politics, with the eyes of faith. There are some things going on in our country right now that deeply concern me, and I think that concern is both warranted and appropriate. That said, there’s a risk in this, too—the risk of coming to overvalue political victories and defeats, to attach too much significance to them. It’s the risk of narrowed perspective, and it has contributed to the politicization of all too much of the American church (on both sides of the political divide).

To counter it, we need to pull back and reorient ourselves. We need to remember not only that this world isn’t all there us, but that for those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit, it isn’t even really our home. In Christ, we have been made citizens of another country, and given the life of the world to come; we don’t simply live in the present anymore—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.

Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. To be sure, we’re still waiting for the last last days—this isn’t to say that the end of the world is right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, itwill happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.

To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As my wife’s grandfather used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.

As such, we ought not get too tied up in winning victories now; after all, we worship a God who has been known to do more with earthly defeats than worldly victories anyway. We need to work for what is good and right and true to the best of our ability and the best of our judgment, but we need to remember that in the end, winning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether we win or lose, God is in control; what matters most is not that we get our way, but that we do things his way, that we speak his truth in his love, fearlessly, every chance we get. If we do that, we can let the chips fall where they may, because by his sovereign will, he controls every last one of them.

(Adapted from “The Life of the World to Come”)

Politics by thuggery returns to the US

2010-05-24T22:13:00.003-04:00

Erick Erickson is right, this is profoundly disturbing:

In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.
A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.
500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.

Yeah, you read that right. The man in question, Greg Baer, is one of the senior corporate lawyers for BoA. He's also a Democrat, but like animals, some Democrats are more equal than others.

Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.
Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.
The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.

Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, "Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate"—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to "play politics" with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn't irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won't say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.

If it isn't surprising, though, it's still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:

When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.
Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.

Going for the political jugular

2010-05-24T21:54:00.001-04:00

One doesn't usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It's a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate's personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don't count; that's just boilerplate.)

The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in '08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn't even have his party's nomination yet. It's a good way to go, I think.

Song of the Week

2010-05-23T22:02:00.002-04:00

This song gets me every time.

Legacy

I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who's Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn't matter much.
I won't lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an "Atta boy" or "Atta girl."
But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world
I want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.
I don't have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It's an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.
Chorus
Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
"Well done, good and faithful one."
Chorus
Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman