I saw it this past weekend, and I really liked it. A lot of people hate Ronald Reagan. The secular left has this crazy idea that religion, free market economics and patriotism will start World War 3. Well, Reagan had a degree in economics, used to teach Sunday school, and he definitely thought that America was better than communism. And he beat the communists, without firing a shot.

Let’s see a movie review, from Focus on the Family:

But whether you’re young or old, whether you lived through the tumultuous latter days of the 20th century or not, Reagan, the movie, reminds us why courage and vision, tenacity and faith remain vitally important character qualities in our leaders.

And even though I did live through a portion of that era, Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of Ronald Reagan here shines a light on chapters of this actor-turned-politician’s life that I had little knowledge of myself.

Along the way, we see how the faith of a mother and the love of a devoted wife played huge roles in shaping the heart and soul of a failed actor into a president whose tenacity arguably bent the course of history.

When I walked out of the theater, my head was spinning from the way that Reagan’s mother Nellie and his second wife Nancy had treated him in the movie. I don’t have any personal experience with mothers looking after their children like this. Taking them to church. Giving them Christian books to read. Having a plan for them. Teaching them right from wrong. My mom didn’t do any of those things. And I am always surprised when I see a wife investing in her husband and supporting him, and getting upset when he cannot achieve everything he was mean to achieve.

Here’s a bit about his mother Nellie:

During Reagan’s youth, we see that his mother, Nelle, takes him to the First Christian Church in Dixon, Illinois. In one service there, we hear 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (KJV).

Nelle drills into her young son a sense of divine purpose and calling on his life—lessons that form the bedrock of Reagan’s sense of identity in some tough moments. “God has a purpose for your life,” Nelle instills into her impressionable boy. “Something only you can do.” Elsewhere she reminds him, “Remember to listen to that small, soft voice” when he’s alone and quiet, and to give it his “full attention.” She offers this exhortation as well: “Remember who you are and Whose you are.”

My mother never treated me like that, so I was really just lost taking in all this good mothering. I wondered what I could have been, if I had a mother, too. My mother’s god was money, and she certainly didn’t see me the way that Nellie say her son Ronald. I think a lot of women today want to have children, but if all they want to do is throw them into daycare and public schools, what’s the point of a man signing up to have other people raise his kids? Conversely, it might be worth it to have kids, if the man got to see a very good woman his children about God, and train them to achieve something in the world that respects God.

The review also talks about his second wife Nancy:

[H]is first wife, Jane Wyman, finds Reagan’s flirtation with politics disdainful. “Is there anything worse than an actor with a cause” she quips. And then she adds, scornfully, “You are an actor. That is your job. Not politics.”

Given that discrepancy of values, it’s no surprise that Reagan’s first union doesn’t last. His marriage skids toward the rocks about the same time his career does, prompting Reagan to tell his mother, “I lost a child, I lost my marriage, I lost my career.” That’s one of the points at which she encourages him with strong spiritual counsel (which we’ll unpack in the next section).

Here’s a bit more about his second wife, Nancy:

Near the end of his acting career, when he’s more involved with SAG than actually making movies, Reagan meets Nancy Davis. As their connection deepens, he says of himself, “I’m what you call damaged goods,” noting that he’s divorced, broke and has children from a previous marriage. Nancy gently counters, “We’re all damaged goods, Ronnie.” That prompts him to say, “I just want to do something good in this world, to make a difference.”

In the years that follow, of course, Reagan seeks to make good on that desire, with Nancy constantly encouraging him at his side—first in his run for the governor of California, then his first failed presidential campaign in 1976 (where he lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford) and finally in his sunset years as the specter of Alzheimer’s disease looms.

I’ve never had the feeling from any woman that my dreams were important, and that it was important to help me to achieve them. So again, I was just looking at all this excellent wife-ing, and thinking “wow, so that’s what it must be like to have a good wife”. Today, I see a lot of non-traditional women demanding that traditional men give them things, but they don’t want to be traditional wives. They don’t want to help men at all.

Honestly, I think this movie will make self-centered feminists very uncomfortable. It shows women treating boys and men well.

The movie also has some policy, diplomacy and history in it. But it’s at a high level. They talk a lot about religious liberty and about the need to deter aggression with strength. So, it’s a good introduction to conservative ideas. I think you’ll really like the movie. If you go see it, be sure to leave a comment telling me what you thought of it.

Are you having any conversations about transgenderism these days? It seems like there is a big push for transing kids, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies and their allies in the public schools. They believe that children should be able to request drugs and surgeries based on their feelings. Even if parents disagree. But what if children’s discomfort with their biological sex is temporary?

Take a look at this study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

There’s a nice article about this study over at the left-leaning UK Daily Mail:

The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study.

Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.

Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness’ to varying degrees.

But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.

The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’

This paragraph was interesting:

According to the findings, females were more likely to report being unhappy with their gender and both increasing and decreasing ‘non-contentedness’ were associated with lower self-reported self worth, more behavioral problems and an increase in emotional struggles.

If you are raising daughters, you might want to have a plan to counter this. I think the best way to build up a girl’s self-esteem is to give her interesting things to do, and help her to excel at them. And I mean things like writing code, reading Thomas Sowell, learning self-defense, shooting guns, fixing machines, understanding classical literature, etc. Useful stuff. Girls need to do useful things together with their Dads, that way, when they have bad feelings, they can think of all the things that they know how to do, and all the people that ask them for help. It’s hard to feel bad when you know how to achieve results. And you know that you are good at achieving results. I’m not an expert in women, but it seems to me that they have trouble when they dwell too much on their own feelings, and too much on what other people think about them, or what other people are doing. Girls should just not care about all that. Girls should just be good at doing things that matter. Girls should know how the world works.

The conclusion of the Daily Mail article features Christian scholar Dr. Jay Richards, was also interesting:

Dr Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, told DailyMail.com: ‘We’ve known for over a decade that most kids who experience distress with their sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty.

‘Indeed, we can infer from the DSM 5 [2013] and other sources that as many as 88 percent of gender-dysphoric girls and as many as 98 percent of gender-dysphoric boys in previous generations desisted if allowed to go through natural puberty.

‘These two facts make it clear why “gender-affirming care” on minors is such an outrage. It leads, in the end, to sterilization and in many cases to a complete loss of natural sexual function.

‘There is no good evidence that this helps minors long term. Moreover, it medicalizes what could very well be temporary psychological symptoms.

‘History will judge this medicalized “gender-affirming care” on minors as we now judge eugenics and lobotomies.’

I was pretty impressed with Jay. Of all the people they could have quoted, they went to Jay Richards, who has put a lot of effort into understanding these issues.

Do you know what would be wonderful? If children who take these drugs and submit to these surgeries could then sue all the people who told them to do it. They’re being told one thing, but getting something else entirely. If a child gets hit with sterilization or loss of sexual function, then they should be able to clean out the bank accounts of the people who did this to them. Public school teachers, nurses, doctors, drug manufacturers, etc. Just bankrupt them. Because children shouldn’t be lied to by adults, who know better.

I like to follow the work of Megan Basham on Twitter and Daily Wire, because she takes the Bible seriously on moral and spiritual issues. So I was very interested to read her latest article evaluating Christianity Today. On the surface, Christianity Today presents itself as a Christian publication. But are their beliefs really consistent with what the Bible teaches? Let’s see.

Here’s the article from Daily Wire:

The media has long framed Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham in 1956, as America’s most influential Christian news outlet. The Washington Post, for instance, regularly describes it as evangelicalism’s “flagship” magazine,” as does The New York Times. A review of federal election records, however, indicates that the views of the magazine’s leadership and staff may be far out of step with ordinary evangelicals.

Between 2015 and 2022, nine Christianity Today employees made 73 political donations. All of them went to Democrats. This tally includes President and CEO Timothy Dalrymple, who gave $300 in two separate payments to failed Georgia Senate candidate Sarah Riggs Amico.

Amico’s platform, which includes protecting abortion “without exception” and repealing the Hyde Amendment to allow federal tax dollars to fund abortions, contrasts sharply with the views of evangelicals who overwhelmingly say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. She is also at odds with traditional Christian beliefs when it comes to gender, sexuality, and religious liberty.

Along with declaring herself a “staunch LGBTQ ally,” Amico promised to support the Equality Act, a bill that The Heritage Foundation warns would threaten parental rights over children who believe they’re transgender. The conservative think tank has also said the bill would decimate conscience rights for medical workers and “cancel[s] religious freedom.” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler put the Equality Act in even starker terms, saying it “represents the greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States in our lifetimes” and would “totally transform the United States as we know it.”

Dalrymple was not the only member of the magazine’s executive ranks to donate to Democrats. Natalie Lederhouse, Vice President of Advertising and Partnerships, contributed $50 to the 2020 Biden Victory Fund. The Federal Election Commission has no records of any Christianity Today executive giving to the GOP since 1991.

You might remember the Equality Act discussed in previous posts on this blog. Basically, the legislation would have made it impossible for Christians to advocate for Biblical positions on sexual issues. Not only individual Christians, but Christian businesses and charities. They would all have had to comply with the secular left’s views on sexual issues.

Megan also found this about a former NEWS EDITOR at Christianity Today:

Between October 2019 and November 2020, news editor Daniel Silliman made eight donations to five different pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ candidates, among them, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. In addition to possessing a perfect voting score from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, Warren supported shutting down crisis pregnancy centers across the country, and her platform included requiring schools to admit biological men into women’s sports and single-sex spaces. She also pledged to allow a gender dysphoric nine-year-old to approve anyone she appointed as education secretary.

Silliman also donated to Renee Hoyos, Tennessee Democrats’ nominee to the U.S. House; Moe Davis, House candidate from North Carolina; Blair Walsingham, House candidate from Tennessee; and former Senator Doug Jones (D-AL).

As news editor, he would have been in charge of all of Christianity Today’s coverage of political stories.

More:

In another article in the run-up to the 2020 election, Silliman spotlighted President Biden’s Catholicism and quoted progressive theologian Richard Mouw opining that “[Biden] is viewed as having an authentic faith… when he talks about his faith, it rings true.” Silliman then tied Mouw to conservative Christian icons, Chuck Colson and J.I. Packer.

[…][Silliman] also covered the Fairness for All Act, a proposal that would have granted special privileges to people who identify as LGBTQ. It was opposed by conservative legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom for “undermin[ing] human dignity by threatening the fundamental freedoms of speech, religion, and conscience.” Approximately three-quarters of Silliman’s report on the bill was devoted to those who favored the legislation.

You might remember that Mouw is one of these “evangelicals for Biden”. Now that we know the truth about Biden’s business dealings and connections to foreign governments, it’s easier to understand what sort of morality Mouw supports.

The new editor-in-chief of Christianity Today is Russell Moore, who seems more focused on promoting the Democrat party platform than with defending policies consistent with the Bible.

The root cause of the problem with these “evangelicals for Biden” is that they have never adopted Christianity on the basis of studying the evidence, and forming their own views. Progressive Christians form their views socially not intellectually. When they are young, they put on the cloak of Christianity as a way of seeming virtuous to their parents and those around them. They didn’t choose Christianity because it was the best description of reality. They were born into it. It’s not a worldview to them, it’s an act.

Progressive Christians don’t make a case for core Christian beliefs using evidence to non-Christians. They simply don’t know how to do it, because they didn’t do it in order to “become” a Christian in the first place. They don’t have any work to show, because they never did the work. And their policy views are the same. They don’t form their views based on reason and evidence. They don’t read scholars like Thomas Sowell, or John Lott, or Ryan Anderson, or Scott Atlas, or Robert George. They just believe whatever will make people like them – just like they did when they were children.