Today is Columbus Day. Please honor the occasion by gathering around your family, talking to your friends and neighbors, and mentioning to your casual acquaintances that it isn’t true that people believed that the world was flat until Columbus proved them wrong! The ancients believed that the world is round and so did the people of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle talk about the sphericity of the earth, as did the medieval theologians and scholars. For the easiest proof of that, just read Dante! Furthermore, the sailors and navigators of the Middle Ages knew the world was round, and the maps and navigation techniques of the time demonstrate that beyond all doubt. The Columbus myth came from Washington Irving, the 19th century American writer, who wrote a not very scholarly biography of the explorer. If you still don’t believe me, read this: Myth: “In the days of Christopher Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat.”

I continue to be astonished when I hear this scholarly howler repeated by people who should know better. Today, strike a blow for truth by pointing this out to everyone you can. Maybe we can begin the process of stamping out this urban legend.

The number of Amish has grown 84% since 1992, to a total of some 231,000. To deal with that growth–and also to escape the suburbanization that has encroached on some of their traditional rural settlements in the Midwest–Amish are migrating, buying land, and establishing settlements in seven new states: Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Washington and West Virginia. See Surging Amish Spreading Out.

Why the church growth? With their rejection of automobiles, electricity, computers, and other conveniences of modern life, they aren’t winning many converts. But they have, on the average, five children per family. And though the children have a choice of whether or not to stay with the church when they grow up–getting to spend their late teen or early adult years sampling the outside world–a larger number of them, 85%, are staying with the church.

Strangely, contemporary churches don’t seem to credit bringing your children to faith as evangelism. And, sadly, many evangelicals I see who were raised in strong Christian homes and knew Christ for their whole lives sometimes doubt their salvation, not having had the dramatic conversion experience many of their friends claim. But God blesses the evangelism that takes place in vocation, and He is powerfully at work in the vocation of parents when they bring their children to Christ–via Baptism, going to church, the day to day teaching and example that goes on in ordinary families. Actually, I am pretty sure that this is the way MOST Christians have come to faith, so it is not to be despised.

What we need to work on is KEEPING young people in church. One of my students told me recently that of all the kids in his youth group–which focused on emotionalism and superficial games–he is the only one who is still in the faith. He credited his interest in apologetics and his realization that Christianity is TRUE. We need to admit that what I have called the stupid youth group tricks have failed and that we need to give our teenagers and young adults a Christianity that stands up to their lives. A good model is Higher Things.

UPDATE: By the way, I am NOT minimizing the importance of evangelizing non-believers. We need to do that. And I would say the same thing to the Amish. (I think that lame attempts to make Christianity fun are just as ineffective with non-believers as they are for youth in our church, and that presenting Christianity in its truth, in its depths, would be more effective for both.)

. . .we wouldn’t be having this financial meltdown! Washington Post columnist Ross Douthat puts the blames our current financial meltdown on George Bailey, of Frank Capra’s masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life:

Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it’s even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn’t quite afford to buy.

This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Potter is against easy credit and the suburban dream, against the rabble moving out of his tenements and buying homes, while the Bailey Building and Loan exists to make suburbia possible.

The Bailey vision is economic and moral all at once. In a mid-movie peroration, the hero lectures Potter and a gaggle of local entrepreneurs on the virtues of democratizing homeownership: “You’re all businessmen here,” he presses them, sounding for all the world like a politician defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac against their critics in 2004 or so. “Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? . . . What’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? . . . Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?”

In the movie, George Bailey has God on his side, but a real-life Bailey would have had Uncle Sam. “It’s a Wonderful Life” debuted in 1946, more than a decade after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Housing Act kicked off a half-century of federal policymaking aimed at making it dramatically easier for working-class Americans to buy and keep their homes.

It’s true that the same lenders people are condemning as “predatory” were praised not long ago for devising ways to allow lower-income people to buy their own homes. Douthat does say that George Bailey’s goal was an admirable one and worth making possible, but still, such well-intentioned schemes helped bring down the economy.

In a case we have blogged about in the past, a Canadian human rights tribunal has acquitted columnist Mark Steyn of the charge of “hate speech” for criticizing Islam. See Mark Steyn acquitted in Canadian sharia case.