Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Should Christians divorce their faith from public square issues?

5 Comments

I have had major problems with IVCF and Campus Crusade as an undergraduate student (IVCF) then as a graduate student (Crusade). Basically, they are totally driven by numbers and refuse to say or do anything that isn’t centered on privatized fideism. They refused to learn apologetics, take positions on economics or politics, or even to discuss the moral questions being discussed in the broader society – for fear of “offending” people. They do this because they think that being saved can be divorced from personal morality as well as engagement with society as a whole. Their focus is on “belief”, not on study, growth or practice. Whatever you believe about abortion, gay rights, environmentalism and socialism is totally fine with them, because Christianity has nothing to say about those kinds of issues.

Scott Klusendorf at the Life Training Institute assesses Campus Crusade for Christ’s decision to rename themselves “CRU”.

Excerpt:

Well, at Cal Poly SLO in May of 2008, the response of Christians to the abortion controversy did in fact turn-off at least one non-Christian, but not for reasons campus fellowship groups might expect. The ASB student leader responsible for organizing an abortion debate at that campus expressed her dismay that Campus Crusade would not attend the event or get behind promoting it with its members.

She asked me directly why I thought that was so. She thought for sure the Christians would show up and she was puzzled that they didn’t. Their refusal to get involved turned her off.

I didn’t know what to tell her. Perhaps CC had good reasons for not attending and I hold out hope it did, though it’s hard for me to imagine what those reasons might be. I suspect she is not the only secular student puzzled by CC’s non-involvement.

Indeed, according to a 2005 TIME Magazine piece, the overall trend is not encouraging. Instead of equipping students to confront the thought structures that determine culture in the first place, many of these groups help students nurture a very private and personal faith, a faith separate from the intellectual climate of the university. The TIME article states:

“But all the groups tend to go about their business quietly. “They kind of operate under the surface,” McKaig says. Josh Sanburn, editor in chief of the Indiana Daily Student, notes that the number of students in the fellowships is roughly the same as the school’s African-American student population, but unlike the Christians, “the black students on this campus are very good about making sure they’re heard.” Evangelical students, however, see their spiritual mission differently. Says sophomore CSF member Emily Hoefling: “We usually believe what affects people more than a newspaper article is to see people living Christian lives.”

Question: Since when does “living Christian lives” mean checking out of the real action on campus?

I fear that the message to Christian students and the campus at large couldn’t be clearer: Christianity is not relevant to the most pressing issues of our day. It’s fine as a personal life enhancement, but irrelevant to the real world of ideas, politics, morality, and law where the rest of the world lives.

Again, is that a good witness for Christ? As Charles Malik pointed out half a century ago, “If you win the whole world [for Christ] and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have not won the world.”

As I’ve said before, Christian leaders have it all wrong. My own experience suggests that far from turning people off, a persuasive pro-life case, graciously communicated, suggests to non-believers that maybe, just maybe, the Christian worldview has something relevant to say to the key issues of our day. But when we fail to even put in an appearance at key debates, the message to non-Christians is that we simply don’t care about the big stuff.

Including the biggest issue of all, “Christ?”

This reminds me of an article I found on Life News about Michele Bachmann.

Excerpt:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is one of the several pro-life advocates seeking the Republican nomination to face pro-abortion President Barack Obama and she cites Christian writer Francis Schaeffer as an influence on her pro-life views.

In a campaign stop to speak to local residents at a church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Bachmann shared her testimony and talked about the Christian faith she and her husband share. That faith, which has matured thanks to the writings of Schaeffer, has led Bachman to a pro-life view that has seen her compile a 100% pro-life voting record in Congress and adopt dozens of foster children.

“One thing that Dr. Schaeffer said is that [God is] not just the God of theology. He’s not just the God of the Bible,” Bachmann said, according to the Des Moines Register. “Since he is the Creator God, he’s the father of biology, sociology, of political science, of you name the subject. … And that altered our way of thinking, that God had something to say about our career.”

“Francis Schaeffer also said that life is the watershed issue of our time, and how we come down on how we view human life will impact all other issues,” she said. “And so Marcus and I decided we didn’t want to be pro-life only, just as speaking… We wanted to live a life of being about pro-life.”

The Register indicates Bachmann told the audience that, upon the encouragement to put her pro-life views into action, she and her husband began counseling and praying with single mothers and helping them get to pregnancy and adoption centers to provide further practical support instead of abortion.

One of the reasons why I started this blog is because of my experiences with the campus clubs when I was a student. In many cases, you would not find a dime’s worth of difference between the worldviews of secular leftists and these campus club organizations, at least in my experience. The ones I belonged to were thoroughly compromised by postmodernism, relativism, leftism and anti-intellectualism. They blocked me from introducing apologetics and debates every step of the way, for fear of “offending” people. I will never forget the empty-headed people who proclaimed themselves “Christian communists” or the ones who explained to me how blind faith was more genuine than rational faith, or the science student who told me that Christianity and science were completely separate, etc. Every week it was another testimony or a prayer walk. Never would they even let a scholar come in to talk about the evidence for the resurrection.

Commentary

Does Obama have a plan to solve the debt crisis?

1 Comment

A popular column by Mark Steyn on National Review.

Excerpt:

In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year-old social program is inviolable: That’s like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there’s no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians’ bus in residential streets, but nothing that can’t be worked out.

But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.

Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.

The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.

Charles Krauthammer proposes a short-term solution that will put the blame squarely on Obama in this article on National Review. I am expecting the Republicans to follow this plan – we should see it coming out this week,

Commentary

Why the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) should be rewritten

2 Comments

Phyllis Schlafly explains. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Ignoring the mountain of evidence that women initiate physical violence nearly as often as men, VAWA has more than 60 passages in its lengthy text that exclude men from its benefits. For starters, the law’s title should be changed to Partner Violence Reduction Act, and the words “and men” should be added to those 60 sections.

The law should be rewritten to deal with the tremendous problem of false accusations so that its priority can be to help real victims. A Centers for Disease Control survey found that half of all partner violence was mutual, and 282 scholarly studies reported that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men.

Currently used definitions of domestic violence that are unacceptably trivial include calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing “annoyance” or “emotional distress,” or just not doing what your partner wants. The law’s revision should use an accurate definition of domestic violence that includes violence, such as: “any act or threatened act of violence, including any forceful detention of an individual, which results or threatens to result in physical injury.”

Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie. Accused men are not accorded fundamental protections of due process, not considered innocent until proven guilty, and in many cases, are not afforded the right to confront their accusers.

Legal assistance is customarily provided to women but not to men. Men ought to be entitled to equal protection of the law because many charges are felonies and could result in prison and loss of money, job, and reputation.

Feminist recipients of VAWA handouts lobby legislators, judges and prosecutors on the taxpayers’ dime (which is contrary toSection 1913 of Title 18, U.S. Code), and the results are generally harmful to all concerned. This lobbying has resulted in laws calling for mandatory arrest (i.e., the police must arrest someone; guess who), of the predominant aggressor (i.e., ignore the facts and assume the man is the aggressor), and no-drop prosecution (i.e., prosecute the man even if the woman has withdrawn her accusation or refuses to testify).

I think this is something that most people never even think about. But we could agree that violence against women is terrible, but still not endorse the feminist-inspired VAWA law as the solution to the problem.