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Why are people like Glennon Doyle Melton and Jen Hatmaker so famous?

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I keep seeing all these people in the culture like Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, Joel Osteen getting all this support from Christians – support that the people I admire like Jay Richards, William Lane Craig, Scott Klusendorf and Ryan T. Anderson don’t seem to get.

Glennon Doyle Melton in a church
Glennon Doyle Melton in a church

First, here is Glennon being celebrated in the far-left Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Christian author Glennon Doyle Melton — known as the “ultimate confessional writer” for her honest portrayals of her struggling marriage, addiction and eating disorder — has opened up with another big revelation.

She is dating again, her new partner is a woman and that woman is celebrity soccer champ Abby Wambach.

[…]Melton’s news comes three months after she announced her divorce from Craig Melton, her husband of 14 years…

[…]Glennon Doyle Melton has reiterated for years her position affirming that same-sex marriage is not sinful and celebrating love in various forms. A few Christian writers who champion LGBT rights in the church congratulated Melton on Twitter on Sunday night. (Another Christian mom and blogger, Jen Hatmaker, came under fire last month for announcing her support of same-sex marriage for the first time.)

Melton’s coming out follows fellow inspirational author and friend Elizabeth Gilbert, of “Eat, Pray, Love” fame. Gilbert announced in September she was in a romantic relationship with her female best friend, just two months after divorcing over the summer.

Both Melton and Gilbert, who had not openly been in lesbian relationships before, first shared their news on Facebook, discussed the importance of living their truth and referred to their new partners as “my person.”

The similarities reflect what fans immediately notice: Both women value transparency and share an open-life-memoir writing style. Both have undergone spiritual journeys, separations and sexual awakenings.

[…]Melton and Gilbert have appeared on her career-making book list and popular programs. During a personable Oprah Winfrey Network interview in September, Oprah called Melton a “breath of fresh air.”

[…]Gilbert and Melton met for the first time last fall, but Melton has long admired and been inspired by Gilbert. “For the past decade she has been a minister to me,” she said.

I sent this story to a young lady I admire very much, and I was greatly comforted by her reply: “She is very deceived as to the truth. ” Thank God for women who care more what the Bible says than being popular. Just because a woman is physically fit and charismatic, that doesn’t make her a role model for Bible-believing Christians. Her book is endorsed as “epic” by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is a good sign that doesn’t mean that she is reliable where it counts – defending the moral values taught in the Bible.

Brandon and Jen Hatmaker
Brandon and Jen Hatmaker (actual photo, not Photoshopped)

Here’s an article by former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield posted at The Gospel Coalition about Jen Hatmaker and her husband Brandon.

It says:

If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker’s words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church.

[…]To be clear, I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. I didn’t swap out a lifestyle. I died to a life I loved. Conversion to Christ made me face the question squarely: did my lesbianism reflect who I am (which is what I believed in 1999), or did my lesbianism distortwho I am through the fall of Adam? I learned through conversion that when something feels right and good and real and necessary—but stands against God’s Word—this reveals the particular way Adam’s sin marks my life. Our sin natures deceive us. Sin’s deception isn’t just “out there”; it’s also deep in the caverns of our hearts.

How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem. Genesis 1:27 tells me that there are ethical consequences and boundaries to being born male and female.

[…]I only know who I really am when the Bible becomes my lens for self-reflection, and when the blood of Christ so powerfully pumps my heart whole that I can deny myself, take up the cross, and follow him.

The essential mistake that all the popular people make is that they distort the Bible in order to feel good about themselves and to be liked by other people. But sometimes, when you put being liked by other people first, you neglect the more important goal of being liked by God. Feeling good and being liked is not the same as being faithful and obedient to God. And God does not like when people misrepresent his character to non-Christians who are “looking for loopholes” in his Word. The whole point of Christianity is self-denial and self-sacrificial obedience, as modeled in Jesus, who gave up his wishes and desires by being willing to die to save others.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10: (Paul writing)

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,

10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Matthew 19:1-11: (Jesus’ view of marriage)

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.

If you want to read reflections on these teachings that honor the plain meaning of the words, then by all means, pick up Ryan T. Anderson’s “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom” and Michael L. Brown’s “Can You Be Gay and Christian?: Responding With Love and Truth to Questions About Homosexuality“. It’s more important to align your beliefs with reason and evidence than with feelings and peer-approval.

Even ordinary Christians like me who are single have to say no to our desires to have sex before we are married. Although it is fashionable in the LGBT community to say “God wouldn’t make me have desires that I couldn’t fulfill” and “it’s not fair because straight people can fulfill their desires” this is baloney. I’m straight, and I have been thwarted in fulfilling my desire for sex for decades. It’s a normal Christian life to go without something you need and to be hungry. It’s not exceptional. This is obvious to anyone who reads the Bible and accepts the plain meaning of the words. Jesus didn’t tell people things that they wanted to hear, he told them hard truths that sometimes got him into a lot of trouble with sinful people. I’m really not sure why people who claim to be Christians are attracted to the exact opposite – false teachers who say things that make them feel good and negate the need for forgiveness from God, followed by repentance from sin.

News

Why should law-abiding Americans be allowed to own handguns?

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A message from Females with Firearms
A message from Females with Firearms

Here’s a news story from the Washington Free Beacon that shows what happens when law-abiding Americans are allowed to own handguns.

Excerpt:

A Florida police officer is alive and the suspect who was beating him is dead thanks to the intervention of an armed citizen on Monday.

The incident began when Deputy First Class Dean Bardes, a 12-year-veteran of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, attempted to pull over a car. When the driver refused to stop, a high-speed chase ensued. When the suspect did finally stop, witnesses say he attacked Bardes.

“There was a lot of other lives that he was putting at risk, including mine and my daughter’s,” one witness, Nicole Ambrosini, told ABC affiliate WZVN. “I saw a car approaching me from behind at a very fast rate.”

“I saw the deputy and the suspect out of their cars with the doors both wide open and they were some type of altercation,” she continued.

The suspect appeared to gain the upper hand during the altercation.

“He just kept beating him and beating him,” a second witness, Shanta Holditch, told the news station. She said the suspect was “throwing him to the ground and punching him in all different directions.”

That is when witnesses say an armed man got out of his car and yelled at the suspect to stop hitting the officer. Holditch said the suspect “refused to get off the officer and the officer kept yelling, ‘shoot him, shoot him, shoot him.’”

Then witnesses heard three shots and saw the suspect collapse on top of the officer.

“I heard like three shots,” another witness, identified as Mr. Smith, told WZVN. “He fell down on top of the police officer. After a moment, the police officer rolled him back over, got on his mic, then rolled over back on the ground besides the guy.”

WINK News reports that the suspect may have been armed, but it is unclear if he or Bardes fired any shots during the altercation. He died after being shot by the citizen who intervened to help Bardes. That citizen holds a Concealed Weapons License, according to WINK.

Bardes was taken to Lee Memorial Hospital for treatment and has since been released.

According to this web site, Florida has some of the best gun laws for self-defense of any of the 50 states. If a policeman was attacked in a state like Illinois or New York or New Jersey, that policeman would be dead.

What would the secular leftists who oppose gun ownership say to the police officer in this situation? “Too bad” or maybe “have a nice death”. What about all the left-wing lawyers and progressive judges who have mistrust and contempt for law-abiding citizens? They’d say “let the policeman die” or “the criminal is the real victim”. It’s very fashionable in progressive circles to favor criminals over police officers. And they have no respect for a man’s traditional role to be a protector of his family and others in the community. Progressives don’t think about the real consequences of taking guns away from law abiding people. They want to feel good, and preen for others, but they don’t really aim to DO good.

Let’s go beyond feelings, though, and look at the peer-reviewed literature, so that we can have accurate beliefs about reality.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

News

Robin Collins and atheist Peter Millican discuss the fine-tuning of the universe for life

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British Spitfire and German Messerschmitt Me 109 locked in a dogfight
British Spitfire and German Messerschmitt Me 109 locked in a dogfight

You might remember Peter Millican from the debate he had with William Lane Craig. I ranked that debate as one of the 3 best I have ever seen, along with the first Craig  vs Dacey debate and the second Craig vs Sinnott-Armstrong debate.

Details:

Science has revealed that the fundamental constants and forces of the cosmos appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned to allow a universe in which life can develop. Is God the best explanation of the incredibly improbable odds of the universe we live in being a life-permitting one?

Robin Collins is a Christian philosopher and a leading advocate of the argument for God from cosmic design. Peter Millican is an atheist philosopher at Oxford University. They debate the issues.

From ‘Unbelievable?’ on ‘Premier Christian Radio’, Saturday 19th March 2016.

The debate:

MP3 file is available on the Unbelievable web site.

As usual when the atheist is an expert, there is no snark or paraphrasing in the summary.

Summary

Brierley: What is the fine-tuning argument?

Collins: the fine-tuning is structure of the universe is extremely precisely set to allow the existing of conscious, embodied agents who are capable of moral behavior. There are 3 kinds of fine-tuning: 1) the laws of nature (mathematical formulas), 2) the constants of physics (numbers that are plugged into the equations), 3) the initial conditions of the universe. The fine-tuning exists not just because there are lots of possibilities, but there is something special about the actual state of affairs that we see. Every set of laws, parameters and initial conditions is equally improbable, but the vast majority of permutations do not permit life. The possible explanations: theism or the multiverse.

Brierley: How improbable are the numbers?

Collins: Once case is the cosmological constant (dark energy density), with is 1 part in (10 raised to 120th power). If larger, the universe expands too rapidly for galaxies and stars to form after the Big Bang. If smaller, the universe collapses in on itself before life could form. Another case is the initial distribution of mass energy to give us the low entropy we have that is necessary for life. The fine-tuning there is 1 part in (10 raised to the 10th power raised to the 123rd power).

Brierley: What do you think of the argument?

Millican: The argument is worth taking very seriously. I am a fan of the argument. The other arguments for God’s existence such as the ontological and cosmological arguments are very weak. But the fine-tuning argument has the right structure to deliver the conclusion that theists want. And it is different from the traditional design argument tended to focus on biological nature, which is not a strong argument. But the fine-tuning argument is strong because it precedes any sort of biological evolution. Although the design is present at the beginning of the universe, it is not visible until much later. The argument points to at least deism, and possibly theism. The argument is not based on ignorance, it is rooted in “the latest results from the frontiers of science” (his phrase).

Brierley: Is this the best argument from natural theology?

Collins: The cosmological argument makes theism viable intuitively, but there are some things that are puzzling, like the concept of the necessary being. But the fine-tuning argument is decisive.

Brierley: What’s are some objections to the fine-tuning argument?

Millican: The argument is based on recent physics, so we should be cautious because we maybe we will discover a natural explanation.

Brierley: Respond to that.

Collins: The cosmological constant has been around since 1980. But the direction that physics is moving in is that there are more constants and quantities being discovered that need to be fine-tuned, not less. Even if you had a grand unified theory, that would have to be have the fine-tuning pushed into it.

(BREAK)

Millican: Since we have no experience of other laws and values from other universes, we don’t know whether these values can be other than they are. Psychologically, humans are prone to seeing purpose and patterns where there is none, so maybe that’s happening here.

Brierley: Respond to that.

Collins: It is possible to determine probabilities on a single universe case, for example using multiple ways of calculating Avogadro’s number all converging on the same number makes it more probable.

Millican: Yes, I willing to accept that these constants can take on other values, (“principle of indifference”). But maybe this principle be applied if the improbability were pushed up into the theory?

Collins: Even if you had a grand theory, selecting the grand theory from others would retain the improbability.

Brierley: What about the multiverse?

Millican: What if there are many, many different universes, and we happen to be in the one that is finely-tuned, then we should not be surprised to observe fine-tuning. Maybe a multiverse theory will be discovered in the future that would allow us to have these many universes with randomized constants and quantities. “I do think that it is a little bit of a promissary note”. I don’t think physics is pointing to this right now.

Brierley: Respond to that.

Collins: I agree it’s a promissary note. This is the strongest objection to the fine-tuning argument. But there are objections to the multiverse: 1) the fine-tuning is kicked back up to the multiverse generator has to be set just right to produce universes with different constants, 2) the multiverse is more likely to produce a small universe with Boltzmann brains that pop into existence and then out again, rather than a universe that contains conscious, embodied intelligent agents. I am working on a third response now that would show that the same constants that allow complex, embodied life ALSO allow the universe to be discoverable. This would negate the observer-selection effect required by the multiverse objection.

Brierley: Respond to that.

Millican: I don’t see why the multiverse generator has to be fine-tuned, since we don’t know what the multiverse generator is. I’m not impressed by the Boltzmann brains, but won’t discuss. We should be cautious about inferring design because maybe this is a case where we are seeing purpose and design where there is none.

Brierley: Can you negate the discoverability of the universe by saying that it might be psychological?

Collins: These things are not psychological. The selected value for the cosmic microwave background radiation is fine-tuned for life and for discoverability. It’s not merely a discoverability selection effect, it’s optimal for discoverability. If baryon-photon value were much smaller, we would have known that it was not optimal. So that judgment cannot be explained by

Millican: That’s a very interesting new twist.

Brierley: Give us your best objection.

Millican: I have two. 1) Even if you admit to the fine-tuning, this doesn’t show a being who is omnipotent and omnisicient. What the fine-tuning shows is that the designer is doing the best it can given the constraints from nature. If I were God, I would not have made the universe so big, and I wouldn’t have made it last 14 billion years, just to make one small area that supports life. An all-powerful God would have made the universe much smaller, and much younger. 2) The fine-tuning allows life to exist in other solar systems in other galaxies. What does this alien life elsewhere mean for traditional Christian theology? The existence of other alien civilizations argues against the truth of any one religion.

Brierley: Respond to those.

Collins: First objection: with a finite Creator, you run into the problem of having to push the design of that creature up one level, so you don’t really solve the fine-tuning problem. An unlimited being (non-material, not composed of parts) does not require fine-tuning. The fine-tuning is more compatible with theism than atheism. Second objection: I actually do think that it is likely that are other universes, and life in other galaxies and stars, and the doctrine of the Incarnation is easily adaptable to that, because God can take on multiple natures to appear to different alien civilizations.

Other resources (from WK)

If you liked this discussion, be sure and check out a full length lecture by Robin Collins on the fine-tuning, and a shorter lecture on his very latest work. And also this the Common Sense Atheism podcast, featuring cosmologist Luke Barnes, who answers about a dozen objections to the fine-tuning argument.