Entries from June 2008 ↓

Thanks to Lutheran Kantor and Dan at Necessary Roughness for mining the data in that Pew Survey we blogged about, which gives some embarrassing data about Missouri Synod Lutherans. From Atheists That Believe in a God and Lutherans That Don’t:

Gene Veith blogs on the recent Pew Religion Survey (full report PDF):
My favorite fact of the study:

One out of five ATHEISTS believe in God or a universal spirit. And nearly half of all AGNOSTICS (defined as someone who does not know whether or not God exists) report believing in God or a universal spirit.

That’s worth a chuckle, but the Lutheran Kantor finds disturbing numbers:

The survey classified the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) to be an Evangelical denomination. Based on the survey results of the 588 LCMS respondents, the LCMS is very open minded and tolerant. So open minded and tolerant that 78% of the LCMS respondents believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life.” We beat the national average! That’s not something to be proud of.

Other statistics about the 588 surveyed:
Only 84% are absolutely certain there is a god; 12% are fairly certain.
9% seldom go to church; 2% never do.
Only 42% said the Bible should be taken literally.
28% believe there is one correct way to interpret scripture.

For all our efforts to divide the human populace between “churched” and “unchurched” for programmatic and spending purposes, this data shows that we cannot take the beliefs of the “churched” for granted.

You non-Lutheran readers may be sick of the Lutheran triumphalism sometimes evident on this blog, though I’ve also been criticized for airing the LCMS dirty laundry in my writings. I do think Lutheran theology gets it right–comprehending the best of every other Christian tradition–and is the quintessential EVANGELICAL theology, in which the Gospel of salvation through Christ on the Cross is central to every other article. If Lutherans would become Lutherans, maybe others would.

Our discussion of movie reviewing has generated both light and heat, with lately Mark Moring, the movie review editor of Christianity Today Online joining the fray, challenging Ted Slater of Focus on the Family, the two principals of the controversy. (Gentlemen, go ahead and thrash it out if you wish, but this blog has high standards of discourse that you must adhere to.) You can follow the argument in the post “The Vocation of the Movie Critic,” below.

But I would like to propose an exercise: Consider this review of the “Sex and the City” film in The New Yorker.

It is a strongly negative review of that film. It too invokes moral reasons, though it says nothing about sex and nudity.

How is it different from BOTH the positive and the negative reviews from Christian critics? Do the latter exhibit similarities, for all their being at each other’s throats, that set them apart from this secularist reviewer? Are there things that Christian critics can learn from this secularist reviewer about critiquing movies and how to write a negative review?

At Jamestown, I bought a reproduction of John Gadsby Chapman’s “Baptism of Pocahontas.” Imagine my surprise when my family toured the Capitol building to see the original painting, all 12 feet by 18 feet of it, prominently featured in the Rotunda, right next to John Trumbull’s famous rendition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence!

America’s founding and the monuments to that event are NOT just matters of enlightenment neo-classicism or mere civil religion, despite my recent observation about our “shrines” and the graven images within them. In Washington, D.C., are many tributes that are explicitly Christian.

I hope it isn’t censored and put into storage once complaints materialize about the uniquely Christian and thus impermissibly sectarian nature of baptism or that the painting’s theme has to do with the imperialistic proseletyzing of native Americans.

An exhibit in Canada explores the history of the eugenic movement and does not shrink away from who its major advocates were; namely, left wing intellectuals. Read this review, entitled Socialists made eugenics fashionable. The author, Michael Coren, summarizes the utopian plans of the still-respectable H. G. Wells:

“People throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the big-scale conditions of the new time. A naturally and informally organised educated class, an unprecedented sort of people.” A strict social order would be formed. At the bottom of it were the base. These were “people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition”, including “the black, the brown, the swarthy, the yellow.” Christians would also “have to go” as well as the handicapped. Wells devoted entire pamphlets to the need of “preventing the birth, preventing the procreation or preventing the existence” of the mentally and physically handicapped. “This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.”

The people of Africa and Asia, he said, simply could never find a place in a modern world controlled by science. Better to do away with the lot. “I take it they will have to go” he said of them. Marriage as it is known would have to end but couples could form mutually agreed unions. They would list their “desires, diseases, needs” on little cards and a central authority would decide who was fitted for whom.

Population would be rigidly controlled, with forced abortion for those who were not of the right class and race. Religion would be banned, children would be raised in communes and all would be well. The old and the ill would, naturally, have to be done away with and doctors would be given the authority to decide who had a right to live, who had a duty to die.

The exhibit also exposes the eugenic agenda of George Bernard Shaw, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and a plethora of socialists and Marxists. It’s interesting to learn that these luminaries would also sterilize Christians.

Note that these arguments, derive, in essence, from an application of Darwin’s theory of evolution. I’m waiting for an exhibit that documents THAT.

UPDATE: Along these lines, read Jonah Goldberg’s piece on Margaret Sanger from his excellent book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

In most countries through history, the people have had to grovel to their rulers. In the U.S.A., the rulers have to grove to their people.

Where else could eight ordinary folks from a small town in Oklahoma–one of whom (whose identity I will not reveal to preserve our family honor–my brother) was wearing an Aloha shirt and short pants–walk right up to the office of their elected Congressman (Dan Boren), who pulls an intern (Benjamin) from important duties of state to give these ragtag constituents a tour of the Capitol building?

If you go to Washington, D.C., instead of waiting in line and taking the mass tour of the Capitol building, be sure to contact the office of your Congressional representative or senator a few weeks before your visit to arrange for the staff led tour. It will remind you of the glory of democracy, which, far more than these sublime buildings, is really what America is all about.

(More on what I learned next time.)

There is a new Pew survey of Americans’ religious beliefs. For the full report go here.

Much of it confirms what other polls have noted: 92% of Americans believe in “God or universal spirit”; 40% of Americans say they attend a religious service every week.

There are some additional facts I had not known before: 20% of Americans speak in tongues. 60% pray daily. 63% believe their holy book is the word of God. 79% believe in miracles.

The biggest revelation, as it were, is that for all of Americans’ religiosity, some 70% believe that people who hold to other religions can find salvation.

My favorite fact of the study: One out of five ATHEISTS believe in God or a universal spirit. And nearly half of all AGNOSTICS (defined as someone who does not know whether or not God exists) report believing in God or a universal spirit.

The non-believing community, like other religious groups, needs to better teach and enforce their doctrinal orthodoxy. Or at least stop calling their adherents “brights.”

Why don’t politicians just not say anything about theology, rather than speechifying about it and getting it wrong? James Dobson of Focus on the Family is jumping on things Barack Obama said in an attempt to get Christians of all stripes to come around to his candidacy. Read Dobson accuses Obama of ‘distorting’ Bible. Excerpts:

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”
“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament. “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said. . . .

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people. . . .

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Surely Obama displayed a surprising Biblical illiteracy in his handling of Scripture. Didn’t Rev. Wright ever get around to explaining the difference between Old Testament laws and the Gospel of Christ? Or that the latter is not just a more radical law?

According to this article, Americans–bothered by economic uncertainty, high prices for food and fuel, scary-bad weather, and all kinds of other insecurities–feel that everything is spinning out of control. Do you feel that way? Are things really that bad?

My parents, my brother and sister with their families, and one of our daughters are here visiting, a good time being had by all. We went into D.C. yesterday for some sightseeing.

At the Jefferson memorial, a sense of recognition flashed upon my mind. The building, along with the Lincoln memorial, is a Greco-Roman temple. Where the ancients would put a graven image of their deity, we have a statue of a statesman.

These are, literally, shrines (the word is often used here for our monuments) to our civic religion. (In making this observation, I intend to take nothing away from the individuals being honored nor from the magnificence of these buildings.)

These shrines are also inscribed with religious sayings. I was struck by the quotes from Jefferson, whom I didn’t think of as a religious man. But he really was. Deists can also have great piety. I liked these:

“I have sworn upon the altar of God Eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind.”

“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that this justice cannot sleep forever.”

He was referring here to slavery, with which this man, for all of his greatness and high ideals, was himself deeply complicit. But the quotation can refer to other things as well. Notice that Jefferson may have believed in a religion of reason and reason alone, but his version owes much to Christianity, including not only the righteousness of God but that He, unlike the deity of orthodox Deism, interferes in his creation.

Washington, D.C., has an elaborate monument, prominently located, to the man who invented the ship propeller. So where is the memorial to John Adams, arguably the Founding Father who did more than anyone to get this country started? And where is the memorial to James Madison, who basically wrote the Constitution? They deserve “shrines” too, if anyone does.

Would you like an example–or, better yet, a model–of a sermon that powerfully applies the Law and then powerfully applies the Gospel? Here is what Pastor Douthwaite preached yesterday, on the text of Romans 6:12-23.

It isn’t just the deconstruction of marriage we are facing, it is the deconstruction of the family, with its constituent authorities and responsibilities, with the state taking its place. Consider this from Canada, Court overturns father’s grounding of 12-year-old:

A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.

The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling. . . .

According to court documents, the girl’s Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.

HT: Don S