Moral Gospel Christianity

How to Leverage Moral Outrage for the Gospel

By Michael C Sherrard

It is good to acknowledge the appropriateness of ones anger in the midst of evil and pain. It is right to be angry over injustice. It is right to be sick at crimes against children. It is good for you to feel a hole in your stomach as you look upon the devastation and loss of life caused by a natural disaster. It is right to think, “This is not how life is supposed to be.” The key is for anger to be directed rightly whereupon your steps follow the right path of action.

Acknowledging an individual’s sense of justice can lead them to repentance. When we are angry at evil, we are acknowledging that life has purpose. We are recognizing that there is a difference between good and bad. We are affirming that bad should be punished. But what does that mean for my bad actions? And from where did my sense of justice come in the first place?

If life is the result of an accident, how can life have a purpose? And if life has no purpose, why am I angry at what I think is unfair? My sense of oughtness is an indication that I believe in a standard of life. But what standard, an arbitrary one set by changing cultures driven by natural selection or a transcendent one that never changes even though societies might? Mankind’s sense of justice can point them to the good Judge. Affirm their outrage and direct it properly.

If you take people down this road, you will see how mankind’s universal sense of justice is to the gospel’s advantage. There is only one worldview that provides a justification for belief in inherent human value and thereby true morality. It is theism. A transcendent creator is needed for our sense of justice to have any value. Existence must have been intentional for life to have intrinsic and objective worth. And simply, when we look at the world and say, “That is wrong!” there has to be an eternally fixed “right” for our moral indignation to have any value. Leverage this understanding that all naturally possess and direct them toward the One who is not only the standard of life, but its very essence.

This blog was originally published at MichaelCSherrard.com

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Christians and Donald Trump

Christians and Donald Trump: Our Meeting with Him

I was asked to participate in a meeting between Donald Trump and about 35 Christian leaders Friday night in Charlotte.  There was no requirement for participants to endorse Mr. Trump. Instead, it was a chance to exchange ideas with Mr. Trump on issues especially important to the Christian community, such as life, judges, and the growing problem of the government coercing religious people to violate their religious beliefs.

Christians and Donald Trump

As he did in a similar meeting I attended in New York a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Trump affirmed his commitment to protect life, appoint conservative judges vetted by the Federalist Society, and to work with Christians on religious freedom issues.  While I don’t endorse candidates, I am encouraged by Mr. Trump’s willingness and openness to personally discuss these issues and express his agreement with the positions I support.

For those Christians who think it’s wrong to meet with someone like Mr. Trump, I ask them to take off their Pharisee robes for a minute to see whom Jesus met with and ministered to.  Meeting with Mr. Trump is not only biblical, it’s an opportunity to do good. When one of the two people who will be President of the United States asks for your opinion, why wouldn’t you provide it?  It’s a dereliction of duty to not speak the truth on issues that directly affect lives and our ability to preach the Gospel and live our faith!

Mr. Trump’s team reached out to me and other Christians.  I’d meet with Mrs. Clinton if she requested my opinion (I’ve only heard crickets so far. And I doubt there are any evangelical Christians expecting her call since she wants to use the force of government to change our beliefs, and her party has demonstrated hostility to biblical Christianity for the past eight years).

For those of you who see no good choice in this presidential election, remember that you are not just voting for one person— you are actually voting for thousands of people that come along with the top of the ticket, some of whom will affect our country for generations. There are literally thousands of political appointees at several levels of government, including Supreme court judges and about 300 other judges, whom the President will appoint. Those people will attempt to make America in the image of their party platform. Those are two radically different images and two radically different futures for you and your children.

To see how radically different they are, take a look at this very helpful chart that quotes directly from the two party platforms.  It shows where the Democrats and Republicans stand on issues important to most Christians.  Given this knowledge, it is also a dereliction of duty when you fail to vote.

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The Constitution Is My Speech Permit

The Constitution Is My Speech Permit

My former attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) recently filed a lawsuit they never should have had to file. In the suit, they are representing a Christian student group at North Carolina State University (NCSU). At issue is an NCSU policy requiring a permit for any kind of student speech or communication anywhere on campus. This policy is a direct affront to the First Amendment, which is the only permit needed to speak on a public university campus.

The policy itself is outrageous. To make matters worse, NCSU only selectively enforces the policy as they did against the plaintiffs, Grace Christian Life, which is a registered student organization. Elevating audacity to a Zen art form, petty university officials told these Christians that they needed a permit to speak with other students in, of all places, the student union.

The controversy began in September of 2015 when NCSU officials demanded members of Grace Christian Life stop approaching other students in the Talley Student Union to engage in religious discussions or even to simply invite them to attend Grace Christian Life events. So the group cooperated and obtained a permit to set up a table in the student union in January.

When Grace Christian Life set up its “approved” table they were told that they could speak with other students either from a) behind the table or b) anywhere in the room. However, when the students left the table on the permitted date, a member of the Student Involvement Office approached them and told them they must stick with option “a” and remain behind the table.

The legally insurmountable problem for NCSU is that the university has not placed the same restriction on any other group. Grace Christian Life members observed and wisely documented other groups freely speaking with other students and handing out literature. These groups have done so either without a permit or outside of the area reserved by their permit. The suit alleges that the groups have done so in full view of the very same officials that stopped Grace Christian Life from engaging in their First Amendment protected activity.

NCSU claims authority to do this under University Regulation 07.25.12, which requires a permit for speech the policy defines as “any distribution of leaflets, brochures, or other written material, or oral speech to a passersby (sic)….” Furthermore, the policy specifies that any person “wishing to conduct any form of solicitation on University premises must have the written permission of Student Involvement in advance.”

The NCSU policy is so broad that it makes no distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech such as the religious speech at issue in the case at hand. To borrow a phrase from the late Justice Scalia, if this policy is narrowly tailored it is by the standards of Omar the Tentmaker rather than Versace.

The NCSU speech permit controversy is just the latest in a seemingly endless string of embarrassing episodes on our nation’s campuses. Each episode is just another pathetic re-run with precisely the same plot:

A university policy says ones thing. The Constitution says another. The university maintains that their handbook trumps the Constitution. The court rules that the Constitution trumps the handbook. In the wake of an embarrassing defeat brought on by willfully uneducable educators, the public is left footing the bill for attorney fees and damages.

To make matters worse, this incident never could have taken place at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). After years of trampling the First Amendment, UNC-CH got rid of all of its unconstitutional policies – thus earning a “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The people at FIRE only give these ratings to schools without any policies that threaten free speech. Sadly, only 22 of our nation’s universities have earned that “green light” distinction.

It is a sad irony that a progressive campus like UNC-CH now shows greater tolerance for Christian speech than a more conservative university like NCSU. For that reason alone, alumni should demand that NCSU administrators stop defending the indefensible and tarnishing the school’s reputation.

After years of reporting on campus free speech cases, I have come to realize that most college administrators need to be sent back to high school to take basic civics. Those who still don’t get it need to be schooled in a court of law.

 

Dr. Mike Adams is a Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and author of several books including Letters to a Young Progressive:  How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand.

This column was originally published at TownHall.com: http://bit.ly/2DRJQV8

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Six Reasons North Carolina Got It Right

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Lies are born the moment someone thinks the truth is dangerous. Apparently, a good number of business and sports executives think the truth about North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” (HB2) is dangerous, that’s why they are lying about it. Well, perhaps I should be a bit more charitable: some may not be overtly lying about it, but they are expressing their disapproval without knowing what the bill actually does.

On Monday Lt. Governor Dan Forest, who helped call the special session to pass HB2, called the executive in charge at one large protesting company and simply asked if him if he or anyone there had a actually read the bill.

He admitted they had not. They just labeled it “discriminatory” without even reading it.

Who needs the truth when you make so much “progress” by ignoring the truth and engaging in the very bigotry and name-calling you claim to oppose?

The truth is they, like other companies who haven’t bothered to read the bill, are simply taking their marching orders from the misnamed “Human Rights Campaign,” who have the audacity to claim that men have a human right to have access to women and girls in public bathrooms, and that any acknowledgement of the biological differences between men and women is somehow discrimination against people who prefer same-sex relationships.

In the name of diversity, I’d like to offer a different view in six points:

1. All good laws discriminate against behaviors not people. No one is being discriminated against with HB2, which discriminates against the behaviorof a man using the women’s restroom. If any law is wrongly discriminatory it is the bad law passed by the Charlotte City council to create this controversy. It actually discriminates against women and children by making public restrooms unsafe for them. (The ACLU has already filed a lawsuit alleging HB2 does not provide “equal protection” to some folks. Ironically, it’s only because of HB2 that women and children get “equal protection” from predators in public bathrooms!)

2. People are equal, but their behaviors are not. Good laws treat all peopleequally, but not all of their behaviors equally. In fact, the very reason laws exist at all is because all behaviors are not equal and must be treated differently for the benefit of individuals and society. HB2 discriminates against no one who identifies as LGBT. The law merely sets a safe public bathroom use (behavior) for everyone, and keeps employment law consistent across the state (more on this below).

3. Your identity is not in your feelings but your biology. I can’t believe there is actually a need to say this, but many on the Left are living in their own invented reality and they are demanding that we live in it too. The reason we’ve always had separate bathrooms is because of biological sexual differences, not because of feelings or “gender identity.” HB2 simply says that people will use public bathrooms that align with their biological sex as found on their birth certificate.

How could this possibly be controversial? Are we to risk the safety of millions of women and children in public restrooms because an extremely small number of people are experiencing a mismatch between their psychology and their biology? Good public policy does not risk the physical safety of women and children because an extreme few have a preference for a different bathroom.

Moreover, HB2 actually accommodates people who have had so-called “sex change” operations. They can use the bathroom of their choice provided they’ve had their birth certificate changed. It also affects only public restrooms. Companies and other private organizations can adopt any policy they want for their workplace. Does the NBA and the NFL allow men in women’s bathrooms? Does Apple? Cisco? Marriott? Lowes? Then why are they insisting the government force everyone to do so? Why do they think North Carolina is wrongly discriminating when they are doing exactly the same thing in their businesses?

And why aren’t these holier-than-thou folks threatening to pull their business from Iran and Saudi Arabia where they are actually murdering homosexuals? Their moral outrage is not only misdirected, it shows that they’re willing to put women and children at risk by kowtowing to a deceptive special interest group, but they’ll sacrifice nothing to save the people they say they care about by confronting real evil abroad.

4. The danger is real from sexual predators in women’s restrooms. If you don’t think so, then watch this video. Just the first six minutes are chilling enough.

5. Race and LGBT are not the same: Race is not a behavior and race has no impact on someone’s behavior. But homosexuality is a behavior and LGBT political goals are all about imposing certain leftist behaviors on others, from forcing people to participate in same sex marriage ceremonies to allowing men in women’s restrooms.

The Human Rights Campaign also wants to use the strong arm of government to force companies to give employment preference to a long list of sexual orientations. This would mean that someone who claimed a homosexual orientation—or someone who exhibited the behavior of cross-dressing at work for example—would have more job security than John or Jane Doe. How so? Because if a company has to downsize, who are they going to let go—one of the helpless Does, or the person who can bring a costly lawsuit alleging “discrimination”?

6. Opposition to harmful behavior is not bigotry. It is wise. Unfortunately, some on the Left and in business falsely equate opposition to a behavior as prejudice toward people who engage in that behavior. That’s the central fallacy in virtually every argument the Human Rights Campaign puts out—if you don’t agree with every aspect of LGBT behavior or their political goals, you are somehow bigoted against people who identify that way. If political opposition is bigotry, then the activists at the Human Rights Campaign are bigots for opposing conservatives. The truth is conservatives have good reasons based in public health and safety for not wanting to advocate same-sex marriage or men in women’s bathrooms. But it’s much easier for the Human Rights Campaign to ignore those arguments and call people names.

The truth is just too dangerous.

 

 

Six Reasons North Carolina Got It Right is also featured at TownHall.com

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Scalia

Scalia Defended Democracy: Liberals Subvert It

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“I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy,” wrote Justice Scalia in his dissent from last year’s Supreme Court decision, where five unelected judges imposed same-sex marriage on all 320 million citizens.

“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Exactly.

“A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”

Right again.

In fact, Justice Scalia was nearly always right. And what he called “originalism” is the only judicial philosophy that protects the American ideal that the people have the right to govern themselves.

“Well, there are many legitimate philosophies of judicial review,” you say.

Not if you believe in democracy, or a representative republic. Only originalism, which insists on interpreting the Constitution by its original meaning, protects democratic rule. The people spoke when they originally passed the Constitution. And they can speak again through the amendment process.

But when justices take it upon themselves to amend the Constitution from the bench, then “we the people” no longer govern ourselves. We are, instead, governed by unelected justices who bypass democracy to impose their will on the rest of us.

“Oh, but the Constitution is a ‘living’ document!” say the liberals.

If it is, then we have no Constitution at all. Why have a written Constitution if justices can interpret it anyway they want? Why have red lights if drivers are free at anytime to interpret them as green lights?

Actually, in one sense the Constitution is a living document, but not in the sense liberals advocate. The Constitution is “living” through the amendment process built into the document itself. It is not living through the whims of liberal justices.

“Ah, but the amendment process is too arduous,” you say.

It’s supposed to be arduous because changing the highest law of the land can have serious negative consequences. When the court unilaterally changes the Constitution, it not only subverts democracy, but it often moves important fences without considering why they were placed there in the first place. Their cavalier changing of abortion and marriage laws, for example, is killing or hurting millions of innocent children.

Moreover, the separation of powers created by our Constitution recognizes the fact that power tends to corrupt — another reason why no one branch should be able to unilaterally alter the law.

As Justice Scalia put it, “If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.”

“Oh Frank,” you say, “Scalia was so extreme. Why can’t we take a moderate interpretation of the text?”

Justice Scalia had a brilliant response to that as well: “What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?”

You want it to mean something else? You can change the meaning, as Justice Scalia observed, by convincing your fellow citizens at the ballot box!

In fact, that’s how it’s been for most of our country’s history. To show you how much our country long-believed what Justice Scalia championed — that the people, not judges, are the legislators — consider the fact that even moral no-brainers, such as the right not be enslaved, and the rights of blacks and women to vote, were enshrined in the Constitution by the amendment process, not by judges legislating from the bench.

A hundred years ago, no judges thought that the Fourteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote. A Constitutional amendment had to be passed to recognize the right. Yet, today five justices think that the Fourteenth Amendment somehow grants a woman the right to marry another woman. (Newsflash: if the equal protection clause didn’t guarantee a woman the right to vote when it was passed, it certainly doesn’t guarantee her right to marry another woman today!)

If you’re for so-called same-sex marriage (really genderless marriage), you might like the result of that decision. But you should be very afraid of the process by which that result was achieved. For if justices can evolve the Constitution according to their own whims, one day they might declare that your rights have “evolved” in a direction you don’t like.

Consider the “right” to abortion invented in 1973. If you’re a liberal, is that “right” subject to “evolution”? What if a judge comes along one day and declares that the U.S. Constitution has “evolved” to guarantee the unborn a right to life. Would you accept that idea of constitutional evolution?

And what’s to stop liberal justices from unilaterally “evolving” the Bill of Rights, so your rights to free speech, religion, association, and to bear arms are diminished? The only way to stop them is to put more Justice Scalias on the court. Indeed, only originalist judges should be confirmed on the Court. After all, you don’t need to worry about losing your freedoms to a judge’s political preferences if he is an originalist because his political preferences have nothing to do with his job! On the other hand, liberals are not committed to the defending the Constitution; they are committed to inserting their own “reasoned judgment” into the Constitution. They don’t trust the people or the democratic process but subvert them through judicial activism.

A liberal Supreme Court is not only a threat to democracy; it’s a threat to stability. If we don’t respect the rule of law, we will slip further into a state of corruption and instability common in so many other countries, where people rule by intimidation and political paybacks rather than adherence to the law as written. To maintain America we must respect the process by which we make, interpret and apply law.

Antonin Scalia consistently did that, even ruling against his own policy preferences when the law demanded he do so. He was a witty, winsome, articulate and unwavering defender of the most American of ideals — that we have the right to govern ourselves.

Please pray for his family. And pray for our freedoms that have become less secure with his passing.

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Dead Things Don’t Grow

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Author’s Note: The debate discussed in this blog post can be seen at the bottom article.

Many who hold the pro-choice position subscribe to a postmodern worldview. They are not arguing that we can kill the unborn because a woman’s right to choose trumps the right to life of the unborn. They are arguing that ambiguity on the question of when life begins supplies adequate justification for abortion on demand. The argument from ambiguity was central to former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s presentation when I debated her recently on the campus of Oregon State University (OSU).

I was pleased that Nadine’s opening argument relied heavily on the claim that we cannot know when life begins. This played into the strategy I had chosen prior to the onset of the debate. Nadine did two other things I had hoped she would do in her opening statement: 1) Argue that Roe v. Wade was a moderate decision that balanced the competing interests of the individual and the state, and 2) argue that the Roe decision was necessary to stop the deaths of women who were dying as a result of unsafe abortions. In my own opening argument, which followed hers, I tried to establish two things:

1. There is clear consensus in the science of embryology that life begins at conception. Scientifically speaking, the unborn are distinct, living, whole human beings actively involved in the process of developing themselves from within from the very point of conception.

2. There is no difference between the adults we are today and the unborn humans we once were that would justify killing us at an earlier stage of development. In other words, there is no essential difference between a “human” and a “person.” Furthermore, any effort to justify abortion with philosophical distinctions among the living would invite systematic human inequality. At the end of the day, our society must choose between human equality and abortion. We simply cannot have both.

After we presented our opening statements, Nadine had an opportunity to offer a rebuttal. In that rebuttal, she challenged my claim that there was an absolute consensus among embryologists that life begins at conception. She quoted a source saying that the question could not be answered conclusively. This was a good tactic for Nadine to employ. She was obviously prepared. Fortunately, I had fully anticipated her move.

In my rebuttal, which followed hers, I drew on the work of Francis Beckwith. As Beckwith has previously written, Roe v. Wade concedes that the question of the parameters of a woman’s right to abortion is inextricably bound to the question of when life begins. Therefore, if someone is agnostic on the question of when life begins, they are also agnostic on the parameters of a woman’s right to choose. I began my rebuttal by establishing this crucial point.

Rather than conceding that there was a legitimate doubt about when life begins, I decided to reassert the point that the matter was settled. I did this by firing off numerous sources. Among them, I included former Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher and Princeton Philosopher Peter Singer. I wanted to establish the fact that many honest pro-choice advocates conceded the point. In fact, they have done so for decades.

Fortunately, OSU Socratic Club debates are structured in such a way as to allow opponents to have an informal half-hour exchange following the opening statements and rebuttals. During that exchange, Nadine came across as cordial and well informed. She also impressed me as sincerely interested in my views on a number of issues related to the debate topic. She was a worthy and articulate opponent.

One downside to Nadine’s choice of questions was that they sometimes gave the appearance of trying to divert the issue from the question of the status of the unborn. When Nadine interjected the phrase “potential life” into our discussion I tried to seize the moment to refocus the debate. I asked her whether by using the phrase “potential life” she meant to deny that the unborn were humans (in a biological sense) or persons (in a philosophical sense). Her answer was “both.”

Having established that the unborn have separate DNA and that there is cell division and metabolism from the point of conception, I replied with the following: “But, Nadine, dead things don’t grow.” In fact, I said it twice during the exchange.

That statement ended up being the takeaway line from the entire debate. In fact, nearly everyone who saw the debate and spoke to me afterwards quoted that one line. It was effective because Nadine and I were in danger of getting into a war of quoting texts no one has ever read. But “dead things don’t grow” was an unmistakable appeal to common sense that I believe solidified my central thesis and allowed the pro-life position to prevail in the overall exchange.

Therefore, I would like to conclude this column by thanking my friend Jay Watts for supplying me with that line, which I saw in a recent episode of “Life is Best” – a series hosted by my friend Scott Klusendorf. That series may be the best thing Scott has ever done for the pro-life movement – and that is really saying something.

My advice to pro-lifers debaters who wish to compete (and prevail!) in debates on hostile turf is twofold. First, read everything Francis Beckwith writes on the topic of abortion. Second, watch every video, speech, and debate featuring Scott Klusendorf speaking and teaching on the topic of abortion.

The best place to start is right here: http://www.lifeisbest.tv.

 

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The Universal Problem We Don't Want to Admit

The Universal Problem We Don’t Want to Admit

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How do we fix a world filled with murder, rape, betrayal, adultery, fraud, theft, sexual exploitation, pornography, bullying, abortion, terrorism, cheating, lying, child abuse, racism, assault, drugs, robbery, and countless other evils?

There will be no solutions unless we are honest about their underlying causes. Although we don’t want to admit it, the truth is that every one of those world problems can be traced back to a problem with the human heart.

No one knows that better than an honest cop. My friend Jim Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective in California. He’s been featured four times on Dateline for solving crimes that are decades old. He’s noticed that every crime he has ever solved can be traced back to one or more of these three motives: financial greed, relational lust, or the pursuit of power (money, sex and power). We want these things so much that we are willing to use immoral means to get them.

In other words, the sick condition of our world is preceded and caused by the sick condition of our hearts.  That’s why we won’t improve the external world until we first improve our internal worlds.

You might think that this doesn’t really apply to you. After all, you may be congratulating yourself because you haven’t committed any of the crimes listed at the top of this column.

“Well, not most of them anyway,” you say. “Who hasn’t lied or stolen something?   But I’m better than most people!”

Maybe so. But your very act of self-justification proves the point—instead of admitting our faults, our natural inclination is to minimize them or cover them up while claiming moral superiority.

We don’t want to admit this because it hurts our pride, which is also a heart issue. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong! You’re offending me! You’re hurting my feelings!”

It’s no wonder free speech is under attack in the culture and on campus. To channel Jack Nicholson, we “can’t handle the truth” because the truth exposes the fact that we are not really as good as we claim we are. We can’t bear the fact that we are broken, narcissistic creatures who find it much easier and more natural to be selfish rather than selfless.

This affects even people who deny real right and wrong. For example, leading atheist Richard Dawkins has declared, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”

But Dawkins doesn’t act like he actually believes that. He recently insisted that a woman has the right to choose an abortion and asserted that it would be “immoral” to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome. According to Dawkins, the “right to choose” is a good thing and giving birth to Down syndrome children is a bad thing.

Well, which is it? Is there really good and evil, or are we just moist robots dancing to the music of our DNA? If there is no objective morality, then there is no “right” to anything, whether it is abortion or the right to life.

And if there is no objective morality, then why does everyone, including atheists, try to justify their own immoral behavior? As C.S. Lewis observed, “If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so— that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.”

Ironically, when we try to shift the responsibility for our immoral actions, we often appeal to other moral principles to justify ourselves:

  • I used my expense account for personal items because I work harder than what they pay me, and it’s unjust that my boss makes so much more than me.
  • I ran off with my assistant because she really loves me, unlike my wife who doesn’t give me the attention I deserve.
  • I don’t have time for my kids because I’m too busy working hard to provide for their future.
  • I had an abortion because it’s immoral to give birth to a Down syndrome child.

Even our excuses show that we really, deep down, believe in objective morality. We often deceive ourselves into believing that something immoral is really moral (like abortion), but, as Thomas Jefferson famously declared, certain universal moral truths are “self evident.” All rational people know this. Unfortunately, our tendency for moral self-deception is also universal. We know what’s right, but we make excuses for doing wrong by trying to appeal to what is right!

Where does all this leave us?

There is hope. Regardless of what you believe about the Bible, what can’t be denied is that the Bible nails the truth about human nature and our deceptive human hearts. The book of Genesis admits that “every intent of the thoughts of [mankind’s] heart was only evil continually.” Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful and wicked, who can know it?” Jesus declared, that people “love darkness rather than light.” And Paul observed that we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” in order to continue in our sins.

But the Bible doesn’t just accurately state the problem; it also reveals the only possible solution. Because of our moral failings, God’s infinite love compelled Him to add humanity over his Deity and come to earth in the person of Jesus that first Christmas. The incarnation was necessary because an infinitely just Being cannot allow sin to go unpunished. Instead of punishing us, God found in Jesus an innocent human substitute to voluntarily take the punishment for us.

Our pride tells us that we can rescue ourselves, but we can’t. No matter how much we try to justify ourselves or pledge to do better in the future, we can’t escape the fact that we’re guilty for what we’ve already done.

So it’s important to ask this Christmas season, “Have you accepted the pardon Jesus came to offer you? And have you asked Him into your life to help heal your self-centered heart?” If not, why not? He’s the only true solution to the world’s evils and the heart problem that afflicts each one of us.

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The Pope: Income Inequality or Poverty?

What’s really the problem with which the Pope should be concerned: is it income inequality or poverty? Philosopher Ed Feser, who happens to be Catholic himself, brilliantly points out that inequality is not only a reality, but a necessary one.  Society would be impossible without certain inequalities in talents and income.

Quoting scholars and previous Popes, Feser makes the case that it’s poverty not income inequality that is the problem. Here’s an excerpt from Feser’s post:

The basic idea is very simple and not really original (I’ve made it before myself, e.g. here) but cannot be restated too often given that so many people appear to lack a grasp of the obvious. It is that equality as such is not a good thing and inequality as such is not a bad thing. Suppose everyone was so poor that it was difficult for anyone even to secure basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing, but no one had any more than anyone else. It would be ridiculous to say “Well, at least there’s a silver lining here for which we can be grateful: Everyone’s equal.” Or suppose everyone had a standard of living at least as good as that of the average millionaire, but some were multi-billionaires. It would be ridiculous to say “It is unjust that so many have to make do with mere millions while a few get to enjoy billions.”

When people complain about economic inequality, this can make sense from a moral point of view only if talk of inequality is really a proxy for something else. Most obviously, it certainly makes sense to lament that some people live in poverty, and it makes sense to call on those who have wealth (and indeed in some cases and to some extent to require those who have wealth) to help those who live in poverty. But the problem here is not that the poor have less than others. The problem is that they have less than they need. The problem, that is to say, is poverty, not inequality.

It’s well worth reading his entire post here.  Also, download the CrossExamined App to listen to my interview with Dr. Feser on the “Unmoved Mover.”

For the best book I’ve seen on the intersection between economics and Christianity, pick up a copy of Money Greed and God by Jay Richards.  You can also hear my interviews with Jay on the app.

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Should You Do Your Job or Obey Your Conscience?

Should Christians ever disobey their government? Some say no. But Kim Davis sides with Martin Luther King and thinks civil disobedience is justified. Ms. Davis is the Rowan County Kentucky clerk who spent five days in jail for refusing to put her name on same sex marriage licenses. Claiming to be a new Christian, Ms. Davis is also a long-time Democrat.

In court last week, Judge David Bunning told Davis: “The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order.” He said that “if you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”

Judge Bunning is absolutely right. This is the kind of chaos that results when people do not respect the law. But I’m not referring to Kim Davis—I’m referring to the United States Supreme Court. As I’ve written before, and the multiple dissents state more eloquently, there is no justification in the Constitution for judicially imposing genderless marriage on every state in the union. Five unelected justices simply imposed their own law on 330 million people.

But does that justify civil disobedience? Where do you draw the line?

Certainly, there is a line somewhere. After all, we laud those behind the Underground Railroad who freed slaves and those who protected Jews in Nazi Germany. While bad marriage laws are obviously not as serious, consider a more equivalent scenario: Suppose the Supreme Court decided to drop the age of consent in every state to twelve years old (a position Ruth Bader Ginsberg supported before she became a Supreme Court Justice). Would you think that Kim Davis should be forced to endorse the marriage of a 75 year-old man who brought a twelve year-old girl into her office? I hope you can see that there is a line and it’s not far from Kim Davis.

Liberals believe in civil disobedience—when it suits their causes. Despite chanting, “Do your job!” outside Kim Davis’s office, liberals were rejoicing when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered clerks to violate California law and issue marriage licenses to same sex couples in 2004. They certainly were not chanting “Do your job” outside of Attorney General Eric Holder’s office when he told the states last year to ignore their own laws that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman. And liberals were not asking a federal judge to throw President Obama in jail when he refused to do his job by defending the Defense of Marriage Act in Court.

So just ten minutes ago liberals believed that defying marriage laws was heroic! Now their blatant double standard is all too obvious—they laud civil disobedience when it’s used to advance the religion of sex and denounce it when it’s used to protect Christian or natural law beliefs.

But on what authority does one defy the government? One man who wanted a same-sex marriage license asked Kim Davis on “what authority” was she not issuing licenses. She cited God.

Yet, the question needs to be asked of both sides. By what authority did Newsom, Holder, Obama and other liberal politicians defy the law? They certainly weren’t citing God or the Creator cited in our Declaration of Independence who gives us unalienable rights. But without an authority beyond man’s law, there is no authority for their actions nor is there any objective standard to ground unalienable rights. Without God, every right claim is merely a human opinion. At least Kim Davis, agree with her or not, is citing an authority beyond herself.

Civil disobedience has rich precedent in the United States. In fact, our country was founded on it largely to secure religious freedom. Civil disobedience also has precedent in the Bible. When Pharaoh ordered Hebrew midwives to murder all Hebrew boys, they disobeyed and even lied to the authorities (Exodus 1). And Daniel and his friends peacefully defied laws that contracted God’s commands. Likewise, when the Jewish authorities told John and Peter to stop telling people the good news that Jesus paid for your sins and rose from the dead, they disobeyed saying that they would obey God rather than men (Acts 4).

Therefore, the principle for Christians is this: civil disobedience is necessary when a government compels you to sin or prevents you from doing something God commands you to do. You don’t disobey the government merely because it permits others to sin—only when it compels you to do so. Kim Davis thinks that line has been crossed.

It’s actually not hard to avoid crossing the line. Both parties can be accommodated as Judge Bunning finally figured out when he released Davis yesterday. In North Carolina, we passed a law to allow people like Kim Davis to opt out of endorsing relationships that violated their religious or moral beliefs. Since other government employees are more than happy to issue licenses, no one is inconvenienced or forced to violate conscience. We do this for far more serious issues than weddings. For example, even during a time of war when we draft people to defend the country, we allow for conscientious objectors to opt out. If we can allow exemptions for government employees involved in protecting the very existence of our nation, we can certainly allow exemptions for government employees involved in weddings!

Will the Kentucky legislature act when it returns in January to pass such a law? Unfortunately, I doubt the activists who are always demanding tolerance will tolerate such reasonableness. It seems that some people just can’t live and let live. They will not rest until all opposition is crushed and everyone is forced to celebrate what they are doing.

If that’s your position, I have a question for you: Why would you want anyone who disagrees with your wedding to have anything to do with it? Go to another clerk, another florist, another photographer. Why force people to violate their conscience when there are so many other people willing to help you and celebrate with you?  After all, isn’t this supposed to be a time when “love wins?”

Apparently not. For some liberals “love wins” as long as everyone agrees with them. Those that disagree will not like the kind of “love” some liberals dish out. Are the same people who are chanting “love wins” some of the same people who issued death threats to Kim Davis? It’s certainly wasn’t the Christians.

The truth is Kim Davis and other victims of “tolerance” don’t want a holy war. Davis just doesn’t want her signature on the license. She suggested other government officials sign, and Judge Bunning finally agreed. But a law needs to be passed to prevent future problems.

North Carolina has led the way. It remains to be seen if liberals in Kentucky will accept that way. If their recent history is a guide, I’m afraid they will demand that every knee bow and every tongue confess the dogma of their secular religion.

(This column also appears at Townhall.com) and Stream.org 

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Barbarians at the State

In this latest undercover video, an abortion “doctor” picks up a severed human leg with forceps.  She toys with other organs, and earlier in the video offered to “change her procedure” to deliver dead babies fully intact.  Who can defend this?   Why did 46 Senators vote to keep sending our money to these barbarians? (The video below starts at about the 10 minute mark of the original video produced by the Center for Medical Progress.)
U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 114th Congress – 1st Session
                          Planned Parenthood and their advocates in the Senate refuse to watch the videos, seek court orders to stop them, or try to divert the issue.  This exactly the kind of behavior the Apostle Paul warned us about in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans— suppressing the truth so we can do our favorite evil.
We used to sacrifice ourselves for our children; now we sacrifice our children for ourselves. God help us.
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