The gospel and the coalition of silence

The silence from Evangelical 'leaders' regarding the issue of child sexual abuse within the Church was deafening and spoke volumes. Why no statements about the horrors of child sexual abuse and the apparent horrors of the abuse that occurred in these two churches? Why no statements from Evangelical leaders that express grave concern that there is even a possibility that these church leaders instructed victims and their families to embrace the horrors of silence? We are now told by some that the silence was because of pending litigation. Really? Since when have Christians allowed pending civil litigation to silence them over sin?     

[....] the Gospel is about a God who didn’t remain silent in the face of sin, but took self-sacrificial action in order to openly confront sin and redeem those He loves for His ultimate glory. A Gospel-centered response to child sexual abuse begins with our understanding that silence is not an option.

-- Boz Tchividjian, "Where are the voices?" 

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Biography for a Calvinist

A biography ... invites the reader (as it demands of the author) to come to terms with the person at the center of the story. Readers are free to draw their own conclusions about [Abraham] Kuyper as they move along through this volume; I only hope to have supplied ample, nuanced evidence to make theirs a balanced judgement. Here is mine: Abraham Kuyper was a great man but not a nice one. He was immensely talented, energetic, and driven to great exploits. He appeared always confident, partly to quiet his own insecurities. He was an ambitious person who sought power, and often felt uneasy over that quest. He could be congenial and polemical, sometimes to the same person in fairly quick succession. He loved radical options and was typically more generous to opponents than to spiritual kin who differed with him on details. He loved having collaborators and disciples but drove them away when they stepped up as equals. In public he often showed a better understanding of God than himself. He majored in ideas -- Big Ideas above all -- with some impatience over the intricacies of mid-range policy or scholarly discourse as it evolved in its own deliberate way [....] 

I will thus pain Kuyper warts and all -- both the real ones and the ones that might seem like blemishes only to us. As a real Calvinist he would understand such a portrait, even though he might not like it. My critical observations are not meant to disparage his motives, his goals, or his achievements; indeed, these are remarkable enough to survive any record of his personal foibles. Just as Kuyper would own that he was in part a child of his times, so he would, ultimately, appreciate the citation I make, as a fellow Calvinist, from the apostle Paul, that the treasure of the gospel comes to us in earthen vessels to show that its transcendent power belongs to God (2 Cor. 4:7).

-- James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat

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John Piper retires

John Piper -- the preacher who formulated "Christian hedonism," and done as much as anyone to promote Calvinism to evangelicals and stoke the revival of interest in Jonathan Edwards in the late 20th, early 21st century -- retires his pastorate tonight.

Justin Taylor describes the scene:

Tucked into the coat pocket of his charcoal suit jacket will be his compact ESV Bible, and in his worn leather briefcase will be a cheap folder, and in the folder will be a 11-page double-spaced typewritten sermon manuscript, with an array of handwritten circles and connecting lines and underlines and exclamation points and notes.  

Within a couple of hours the singing will cease, and he will rise from the front-row pew, place his sermon manuscript on the wooden pulpit, offer an introduction, and then read from Hebrews 13:20-21, the text for his Easter sermon that will double as his farewell sermon.

The farewell sermon will be live-streamed at Desiring God, this evening.

Piper has been the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist since 1980.

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'Free exercise' of religion & the covering up of child sexual abuse

The "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment has been used for lots of things. In a lot of different ways.

It's been understood by the Supreme Court to mean that those fired for their religion still have a right to unemployment benefits, and to mean that religious institutions have the right to define "minister" any way they want, and to fire those so designated for any reason. It has been applied to protect the rights of those who sacrifice animals, and those who are required by their faith to distribute literature. The idea that government can't rightly pass a law prohibiting the free exercise of religion has been successfully used to defend those who won't salute the American flag, those who won't send their children to public schools, those who use controlled substances in their worship, etc., etc., etc.

Now Sovereign Grace Ministries, an association of New Calvinist churches led by C.J. Mahaney, are arguing that "free exercise" also means churches can't be taken to court on charges of covering up sexual abuse.

The churches, in an official press release, argue:

SGM leaders provided biblical and spiritual direction to those who requested this guidance. This care was sought confidentially, as is a right under the First Amendment. We are saddened that lawyers are now, in essence, seeking to violate those rights by asking judges and juries, years after such pastoral assistance was sought, to dictate what sort of biblical counsel they think should have been provided. SGM believes that allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance would represent a blow to the First Amendment, that would hinder, not help, families seeking spiritual direction among other resources in dealing with the trauma related to any sin including child sexual abuse.

On these grounds, the church is seeking to have lawsuits alleging leaders protected child predators and covered-up child sexual abuse dismissed, the Associated Press reports.

According to the lawsuit, the "biblical and spiritual direction" that was offered to help families "dealing with the trauma related to ... child sexual abuse" involved a lot of covering up evidence that crimes occurred.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is accused of forcing abused children to forgive their abusers.

They are accused of disciplining those who wanted to tell legal authorities about the abuse.

And more.

According to the suit, which was filed on behalf of eight who were once children in the church:

The Church directed members to unquestioningly 'obey' the Church in all matters, including methods of parenting, place of residence and employment .... Between 1987 and the present, the Church repeatedly confronted occasions of sexual predation of children was occurring under the Church's auspices. The Church failed to alert law enforcement authorities, and failed to take any steps whatsoever to protect the children from sexual predation. Instead, the Church taught members to fear and distrust all secular authorities, and expressly directed members not to contact law enforcement to report sexual assaults. This practice has not stopped, as is evidenced by teachings as communications as recent as August 2011. On those occasions when the Church was not successful in persuading the parents of the victim to refrain from contacting law enforcement, the Church interfered with the administration of justice by tipping off the sexual predators that they had been reported to law enforcement. The Church provided sexual predators with free legal advice and counsel on how to evade accountability, and repeatedly worked with sexual predators to mislead law enforcement. The Church was willing to, and did, make false statements to law enforcement officials and in courts of law in its efforts to protect sexual predators.

The lawyers representing the people claiming they were abused and that church leaders knew about it and didn't report it are making a fairly straightforward case that being a minister does not relieve one of all legal responsibilities. On-going crimes have to be reported. People being harmed have to be protected. Dissembling on behalf of a pedophile isn't protected by the First Amendment or any amendment, and isn't a right recognized by the United States Constitution.

As the co-council explained in an interview:

You cannot participate in wrong doing regardless of your status as a pastor. They don't have the right to put people into harm's way. And they don't have the right to step in the middle and obstruct justice. So there are duties imposed by law that when you know that you have somebody who is harming people, you are not allowed to let that person keep harming people.

Sovereign Grace Ministries' lawyers, on the other hand, is making the case that "Maryland courts can’t get involved in the internal affairs of church business." They filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds on Monday. They are of course also making the argument that they are not guilty of the cover-ups of which they've been accused, and have made multiple statements about the high priority they place on the protection of children against sexual assaults. The first legal line of defense they church is using though, is the argument that even if they did cover up sexual abuse of children, the courts do not have the right to "second guess" that pastoral care.

The argument is that religious institutions are -- or ought to be -- autonomous and self-governing, and courts have no right to interfere with religious groups' internal affairs. (Arguments against "second guessing" have also been used in extra-legal contexts to quell or at least quiet critiques. See Rachel Heald Evans' piece, "How [Not] to Respond to Abuse Allegations"). According to the Associated Press, this legal argument has been defended by some legal scholars and a number of judges. Courts in the states Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri have said the First Amendment does protect religious institutions from intruding courts.

Other experts disagree with that position. One law professor, for example, told Christianity Today that "the First Amendment is not—and shouldn't be—a defense against child abuse." Even in the cases of clergy-penitent privilege, where the law doesn't require that crimes be reported, that legal protection does not normally extend to cases of child sexual abuse.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is not the first to make this case. They're following the legal strategy laid out by the Catholic Church. In Rhode Island, a decade ago, the Diocese of Providence argued that it had a First Amendment right not to turn over documents allegedly pertaining to its own cover-up of child sexual abuse. The argument worked for more than nine years, but was then rejected by the court.

The judge in that case ruled:

By no elastic stretch of the most fertile imagination can one rationally conclude that such information or any such communication deserves or merits confidentiality as expressions of religious freedom.

The church subsequently settled the suit for $13.5 million.

The next hearing in the case against Sovereign Grace Ministries is scheduled for March 8.

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Francis Schaeffer and the death of Baby Doe

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.

The speech was part of Schaeffer's book tour for A Christian Manifesto, which had been published the year before. That book and tour, along with 1976's book and film series How Shall We Then Live? and 1979's book and film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, all made a sustained argument about the need for Christian activism. The pro-life movement, as such, can be traced to these arguments; the religious right as a "bloc" and a single, mobilized, political entity, was formed in part by these efforts. Schaeffer made the historical and philosophical case that undergirded the emerging movement.

The argument was about attitudes towards life and death.

Attitudes exemplified by the issue of infanticide.

The case Schaeffer made to the Presbyterians hinged on claims about infanticide, its prevalence and its popular acceptability. His philosophical critique of modern America and his proscriptive solution of Christian action both depended on the accuracy of his cultural analysis. Both were dependent on the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about the way the world was at that moment. For that reason alone, it's worth inquiring into the question of infants killed by doctors in 1982.

The answer to the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about infanticide in 1982 will go some ways towards answering the questions of whether or not he was right about the modern world, and right or not about humanism.

Schaeffer's abstract, philosophical critique was a critique of humanism. This is constant throughout his work, and was essential to the point he was making in February 1982.

Schaeffer told the people at Coral Ridge:

What we are facing is Humanism: Man, the measure of all things -- viewing final reality being only material or energy shaped by chance -- therefore, human life having no intrinsic value -- therefore, the keeping of any individual life or any groups of human life, being purely an arbitrary choice by society at the given moment.

This is not an obvious argument. Humanism, as articulated in the two Humanist Manifestoes, explicitly and adamantly affirms the value of human life. The first Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, concludes with the claim that humanism will "affirm life rather than deny it." The second Humanist Manifesto, written in '73, states that "the preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value." Schaeffer is claiming that the humanists are wrong about what humanists believe. Or, more precisely, that they misunderstand the logical consequences of consistently holding to their humanist epistemology and ontology. They don't see the contradiction between denying God and excluding revelation and the supernatural from conversations about public policies, on the one hand, and upholding the value of human life on the other. For Schaeffer, the humanists may say that human life has value but they can't say it is intrinsically valuable, and that makes all the difference.

This is not just an abstract claim, though. Schaeffer was making an argument about what was actually happening in American at that moment. He claimed that this social development was visible: Humanism has taken over and has wrought death.

As evidence of this, he offered the current practice of doctors and nurses committing infanticide. Those who looked, he said, would see how humanism, in practice, meant the devaluation of human life:

Believe me, it's everywhere. It isn't just abortion. It's infanticide. It's allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor's concept of a quality of life worth living. I'll just say in passing -- and never forget it -- it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death....

So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed -- not all doctors. I'm sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn't take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child -- the child with Down's Syndrome -- to starve to death if it's born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views. The view now is, "Is this life worth saving?"

This is not a philosophical claim. It's a claim, rather, about what was actually happening in 1982, and should be a matter of record, a claim that could be verified. Where arguments about what humanists "really" believe are not likely to go anywhere, it should be a simple enough matter to establish whether or not Schaeffer was right about what was happening in American hospitals in 1982. Note that he was not here making a slippery slope argument, saying that the legalization of abortion will at some future date end up meaning that infanticide is an accepted practice. That's common in pro-life rhetoric, and Schaeffer made that argument too, but that's not what Schaeffer was saying here. He was making the claim that there was a general practice in the medical profession -- i.e., an implementation of humanism -- such that certain sorts of infants were being starved to death.

Is this true?

Were newborns being regularly killed in American hospitals -- easily, wantonly, and so on?

No.

There's one particularly famous case from that same year that would seem, on one level, to confirm what Schaeffer argued. An infant born with Down's syndrome was allowed to starve to death in a hospital in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1982, two months after Schaeffer's Florida speech. Some of the basic facts might seem to confirm his claims, but the details of that case show that Schaeffer was wrong -- importantly -- about the majority attitudes towards life and death in American hospitals. The full story of the Baby Doe case, as it's called, seriously undermine Schaeffer's argument.

Here's what happened: a child was born on Good Friday, April 1982. He was born with Down's syndrome and a disorder of the digestive system, esophageal atresia. This meant he could not eat.

There were three doctors in the case. Two recommended transporting the infant immediately to another hospital where emergency surgery could be preformed. The surgery had a 90 percent chance of success. The third -- the doctor who actually delivered the child -- said that there was another option that the parents had to consider.

They could let their child die.

The third doctor, Walter Owens, said the surgery would be painful, and possibly only the first of many, and the child would still have Down's. He suspected there were also other issues, such as brain damage. He said the child would be a "mere blob." They had a choice and they needed to know they had a choice that they had to make.

The family, which had had experiences with children with Down's, decided to let their child die. Owens told them they were being courageous, and said, "Here's how I look at it. If you let the baby die, you're going to grieve a little while. But if you go ahead with this surgery, you're going to grieve for the rest of your lives."

To this point, the story seems to align exactly with what Schaeffer predicted. Owens was a Unitarian-Universalist, incidentally, which would also fit Schaeffer's cultural analysis of the betrayal of Reformed Christian worldview and its consequences.

The story goes on, however. One of the doctors recommending the emergency surgery -- who happened to be named Schaffer -- fought for the infant's life. He appealed to the hospital authorities, and they brought in a judge on Saturday night to make a decision about this case. According to Jeff Lyons, who wrote the history of the Baby Doe case (1, 2, 3, 4), the judge was at home coloring Easter eggs with his children when the call came, and there was an emergency hearing at the hospital.

Lyons writes:

At issue was nothing less than whether parents ever have the right to refuse live-saving treatment for their children and whether a life of handicap is so abysmal as to warrant its termination at birth. 

Only rarely in American jurisprudence had such questions been raised. On the few occasions on which they had, the courts had almost invariably ruled against the parents and in favor of life. But in those instances the doctors had always been lined up against the parents. 

In Bloomington, however, it was a different matter. There existed a strong--one might say vehement--difference of clinical opinion as to what the best course of treatment was.

After hearing the evidence and the testimony of the conflicting doctors, as well as the arguments of the hospital's lawyers and a cleric, the judge took 30 minutes to deliberate. Then he ruled that it was not the court's place to make this decision: when a family is presented with two options by medical professionals, it is their right to make the choice about which course of action to take concerning a newborn infant. The family in this case had made their decision, and the child would die.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

The nurses revolted. A sign was taped to Baby Doe's crib saying "Do Not Feed." Possibly this was because of the problem with the infant's esophagus, but it was taken as a symbol of the parent's decision to starve their child. The head nurse saw the sign and responded: "Over my dead body." En masse, the nurses threatened to strike.

Francis Schaeffer, from a certain perspective, seems prescient here. At Coral Ridge, two months before, he had said that nurses would be asked to participate in the death of infants. He predicted there would be signs on cribs that said "Do Not Feed," and that nurses would be fired if they refused to follow those orders. The nurses in Bloomington did refuse, though, and they weren't fired. The hospital took their side. Instead of firing the nurses, the child was moved out of the nursery, taken to another floor, and the family was required to hire private nurses.

There was also immediate, fierce criticism of the judge, and so the decision was referred to the state's Child Protection Committee, with a guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child in that hearing. After 45 minutes of deliberation, Lyons reports, the committee returned with the same decision, affirming the rights of the parent's to make this medical decision.

Neither the court nor the committee, it's worth noting, never made any sort of decision about the value of the infant's life, or about the ways in which, perhaps, quality of life could be measured against life itself. Rather, they considered and made a ruling about who has the right to the final decision about how to respond to an infant's serious medical condition when doctors disagree. They decided, very conservatively, that the state does not have the power, nor does the hospital. The rights are the parents', in consultation with their physicians.

There was another legal challenge the next day, when the county prosecutor tried to have the child declared neglected, giving the state the authority to overrule the parent's decision. That failed, and there were then a series of other efforts: a local attorney acting on behalf of the county prosecutor applied for a temporary restraining order agains the parents; a lawyer for the National Right to Life Association filed a petition on behalf of a couple that wanted to adopt Baby Doe; an appeal was made to the Indiana Supreme Court; plans were made to appeal to the Supreme Court.

All of these failed. Mostly for legal and technical reasons.

The parents, meanwhile, named the child Walter after Owens, the doctor who'd recommended they let him die. They had the infant baptized into the Catholic Church by their parish priest. They asked their nurses when the ordeal would be over.

Others continued to fight for the infant's life, nevertheless. Protestors gathered outside the hospital with signs. The doctor who strongly recommended the emergency surgery, Schaffer, tried to break into Baby Doe's room to administer an IV, to feed the dying child. Lyon's calls it "one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American medicine, an episode that saw one doctor guard a dying baby from another doctor who was threatening to try and save its life." The rescue mission only stopped because it was too late. The doctor said he knew that feeding the dying infant intravenously could cost him his medical license or even result in criminal charges of kidnapping. But he didn't care. It was too late, though.

At six days old, denied medical treatment and denied food, Baby Doe died.

There don't seem to be any reliable figures to indicate how many similar cases occurred in the United States in 1982. It's just not known if, as Schaeffer said, such practices were "everywhere." The fact that this case received such attention, though, and evoked such a strong response, suggests that letting Down's children or otherwise handicapped children die was not common or commonly accepted. A similar case in 1983 received similar attention, and similarly garnered outrage from the public, the medical community and legal community, indicating that while there were some doctors doing this sort of thing, they faced overwhelming resistance.

Schaeffer's description of the culture, where "the medical profession has largely changed," is simply factually wrong.

But what should be made of this? It seems significant that he was wrong. Schaeffer's cultural analysis and his philosophical analysis in this 1982 speech depended very much on the truth of the claim that infanticide was happening, and happening without any resistance. The entire argument that he made in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., can be summed up with these two arguments that both rest on this purported fact of infanticide: modern society is humanist, humanism results in the devaluation of life, and thus the modern world is now a place where infants with Down's are being nonchalantly killed.

But they weren't, though. Not nonchalantly.

According to reports, even in such liberal quarters as the Washington Post, Baby Doe's death was considered a tragedy. The American Academy of Pediatrics expressed "open concern that Baby Does' obstetric physician had made a mistake, that poor advice was given to the family and that such an event should be avoided." An article published in the Western Journal of Medicine said the doctor made a "serious judgement error," because of his own prejudice and bias. The next year, in response to the public outcry, every hospital that received federal funding was required to prominently post signs announcing "discriminatory failure to feed and care for handicapped infants ... is prohibited by federal law." Several laws were passed, following the case. Reflecting on the case 20 years later, the judge who'd been called to the Bloomington hospital on Easter eve noted that "if this situation had happened in present-day courts, there would be no doubt all action would have been taken to save the baby's life because of new state and federal laws that prohibit such acts."

If Walter Owens received any support in this case, for his opinion that the child should be allowed to die, it wasn't very vocal. Even those who opposed the Baby Doe regulations went out of their way to make it clear that they thought the doctor made a horrible decision.

All of this points to the fact that Schaeffer was wrong. The reaction to the Baby Doe case shows that the America of 1982 was not the kind of place that Francis Schaeffer thought it was. While there may have been a few who, in specific cases, asked the question, "Is this life worth saving?," that was clearly not happening "on every side." When you look at what actually was the case, what you find is the opposite of what Schaeffer said would be found. People overwhelmingly wanted to keep this infant alive, and valued his life enough to try to get the government to take away the parents' legal rights.

Schaeffer's message, to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and in those tours in 1976, '79 and '82, was about the dangers of humanism, and how Christians should wake up because humanism had taken over their world, reshaped their country, and put the lives of America's most vulnerable in jeopardy. In this specific instance, he made very concrete claims about how that was happening, but it's clear he was wrong.

Schaeffer's cultural analysis was mistaken.

The only possible conclusions, it seems, is that either he was wrong about humanism having taken over America, or, alternatively, it's just not the case that humanism devalues human life in the way Schaeffer said it did.

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'I’m gonna baptize you in fire'

Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last 

Papa gone mad, mamma, she’s feeling sad
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war
Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be

-- Bob Dylan, in "Bye and Bye," on Love and Theft, narrating from the point of view of a God outside of time, with promises of providential purposes and a holiness-style sanctification for the chosen.

Alternatively, this could be Dylan riffing on a Faulkner novel, maybe Absalom, Absalom! Not that would be entirely different.

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J. Gresham Machen's signs of the times

What will be the end of that European civilization, of which I had a survey from my mountain vantage ground—of that European civilization and its daughter in America? What does the future hold in store? Will Luther prove to have lived in vain? Will all the dreams of liberty issue into some vast industrial machine? Will even nature be reduced to standard, as in our country the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed, as I have seen them destroyed in Maine, by the uniformities and artificialities and officialdom of our national parks? Will the so-called 'Child Labor Amendment' and other similar measures be adopted, to the destruction of all the decencies and privacies of the home? Will some dreadful second law of thermodynamics apply in the spiritual as in the material realm? Will all things in church and state be reduced to one dead level, coming at last to an equilibrium in which all liberty and all high aspirations will be gone? Will that be the end of all humanity's hopes? I can see no escape from that conclusion in the signs of the times; too inexorable seems to me to be the march of events. No, I can see only one alternative. The alternative is that there is a God -- a God who in His own good time will bring forward great men again to do His will, great men to resist the tyranny of experts and lead humanity out again into the realms of light and freedom, great men, above all, who will be messengers of His grace. There is, far above any earthly mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.

-- J. Gresham Machen, Mountains and Why We Love Them, 1933.

The "signs of the times" really do dramatically change. Even though what the signs say is always the same, regardless of whether the specific sign is a new national park or gays openly serving in the military, regulation of child labor or employee health care.

Machen -- a Reformed theologian at the forefront of opposition to Modernism and Christian liberalism -- climbed the Swiss Alps in 1913 and 1932, in both cases ascending a peak on the eve of a world war. He believed Modernism, especially in the form of the "higher criticism" taught by German theologians, had significantly weakened Christianity, undermined it, and was threatening the faith and also civilization, leading directly to the destruction and devestation of World War I and World War II.

He was a significant influence on Francis Schaeffer, and can be thought of as the grandfather of today's religious right, though many reformed Christians, such as Machen biographer and religious-right-critic D.G. Hart, would argue that politically-oriented American Christians have strayed too far from Machen's ideals. I.e., that they are not conservative enough to be Machen's true heirs.

Those who are direct spiritual and intellectual descendants of this leader of Christian fundamentalism have famously been called "Machen's warrior children," emphasizing a Machenian attitude that's praised by some as a willingness -- a boldness in being willing -- to defend truth.

Machen, it's important to say, accepted the name "fundamentalist." He thought there was a better word for it, though: orthodox.

What's perhaps most notable about this quote, if one is looking for historical precedent for contemporary conservative Christians, is the sense that it's "experts" who are the problem. "Experts" who, through an exercise in "tyranny," have lead humanity away from both light and freedom. There's a deep strain of anti-intellectualism in American history, of course, and that's been of significant aspect of religious experience throughout the history. Machen states it so succinctly, here, and puts experts up as the most basic problem.

Notable, also, are the two politically issues Machen highlights. These are the "signs" he sees in America in the 1930s. In the piece, he mentions the international situation, decrying Mussolini by name and Hitler by reference. Domestically, however, Machen sees the end of civilization and betrayal of Reformed Christian truths in a) national parks, and b) federal child labor laws.

Two peculiar issues, if ever there were.


This was, after all, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, the depth of the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal.


Overall, Machen wasn't particularly interested in politics. Certain less than his "warrior children." Here, though, in 1933, he does for a moment speak politically, and chooses out of all the issues of the day to take a stand against national parks and child labor laws. There's probably an explanation for why these could have seemed so pressing from a particular cultural position. To first sight, though, the choice of issues highlights certain characteristics of this worldview, and goes to show how strange many political fights seem from a distance.

The only National Park in Maine in 1933, as far as I can tell, was Arcadia National Park, the first National Park east of the Mississippi. A system of carriage trails through the park were then being built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and that seems to have particularly offended Machen. In one of his books he wrote,

When I first went there it was about the sweetest and most beautiful lake and mountain region that could possibly be imagined. It really seemed as though no human being would have the heart to destroy the delicate charm of those woods. But then came Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Lafayette (later Acadia) National Park, and all was changed. Huge roads now scar practically every mountainside and skirt the shores of practically every lake. The woods near the roads have been ruthlessly ‘cleaned up.’ The natural beauty of the region has been systematically destroyed. When I go into that National Park, with its dreary regularity and its officialdom, I almost feel as though I were in some kind of penal institution .... Certain it is at any rate that the best way to destroy true recreation is for government to go into the business of promoting it.

I don't know how it looked in '33, but today, to be sure, Machen's assessment that "the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed" seems strange.

I can imagine other reasons he might have had for opposing the park -- libertarian principle, perhaps, or just privileged annoyance that what one enjoys is now widely available -- but the argument he makes is somewhat bizarre.

The constitutional amendment that Machen references as the other "sign of the times" was ratified by 13 states in 1933, but never acheived the necessary 2/3 majority. The Child Labor Amendment is technically still pending approval. The amendment reads: "The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age." The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 -- a key piece of New Deal lesgislation -- succeeded where the ammendment failed.

Machen seems to have opposed the amendment specifically for being too general, and not specifying what sort of child labor congress might be interested in prohibiting or limiting. He said, in another piece on the topic, that the amendment was "the most sinister attack upon American institutions and the sanctity of the American home that has been made for half a century."

Further, he made the sort of limited government, anti-government argument that's standard on the right:

[The amendement] would take by far the most important part of human life out of the hands of state legislatures in touch with local conditions, and put it into the hands of the army of government agents, which any exercise of the powers to be conferred by the amendment would require. There could scarcely be a more disastrous blow at the very foundations of American freedom.

Though few conservative Christians in America would, today, make an argument against child labor laws, the logic Machen employs about the privacy and the sanctity of families, that "the family" constitutes a seperate sphere that ought to be autonomous, the federal government represents a kind of hideous, alien aberration of the normal order of things, is quite common.

That's the way it seems to work: the signs of the times change; the interpretations of said signs are consistent, though, across time.

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Mark Driscoll on pot: sloppy, lazy, deeply unserious

Full disclosure: I am a public transportation user.

This makes it difficult to achieve or maintain the necessary distance to dispassionately review Mark Driscoll's new e-book, Puff or Pass? Should Christians Smoke Pot or Not. Because, it turns out, Driscoll's big argument opposing the recreational use of marijuana is the same as his argument against taking the train. Bus riders and pot smokers turn out, in Driscoll's understanding, to have the same problem. His message to both sets of "users" is identical: grow up.

I am not making this up, and I'm not stretching to make this argument.

Driscoll, "one of the world's most downloaded and quoted pastors," according to his church's website, explicitly makes this comparison.

He writes that the question of marijuana use comes up in his ministry because he works with "a high (pun intended) percentage of single young guys living typical, irresponsible urban lives." The real problem, the root problem of the issue of marijuana use, is that irresponsibility and immaturity: marijuana is just another example of the spiritual epidemic of boys who won't grow up, according to Driscoll. So even though smoking a joint isn't illegal anymore in Washington State, where Driscoll ministers, and even if marijuana isn't specifically prohibited by his church and maybe won't bring down church discipline, it's wrong because it's another way people avoid maturity.

Driscoll writes:

[...] as a pastor I have noticed that people tend to stop maturing when they start self medicating. Everyone has very tough seasons in life, but by persevering through them we have an opportunity to mature and grow as people. Those who self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol (as well as other things) often thwart maturity as they escape the tough seasons of life rather than face them. 

[...] when a man acts like a boy, that’s a real problem. A recent article even noted that young men are now less likely than ever to own a car, as taking public transportation allows them to use their smartphone more hours every day playing video games and downloading porn. The last thing these guys need is to get high, be less motivated, and less productive; instead, they need to "act like men, [and] be strong" (1 Cor. 16:13).

The article that Driscoll cites about public transportation users doesn't say anything like he says it says. He links an Atlantic Monthly piece entitled "Why are Young People Ditching Cars for iPhones?" The author writes that economic changes and changes in consumer culture explain the 11 point drop in young people's car purchases between 1985 and 2012. There's nothing in there -- at all -- about a somehow new age of irresponsibility, and not even a single mention of publicaly viewed porn or lives devoted to video games.

I don't know if Driscoll's just making stuff up or what.

I can tell you what people do on buses and trains, though. I commute to work on a train and spend, some semesters, up to eight hours a week on public transportations. I made the decision to take public transportation rather than buy a car for financial reasons, and also to make better use of my time. I read, grade papers and prep classes on the train. I have also slept on the train, had breakfast on the train, and occasionally played computer games on the train. The other commuters I've seen are like me: they read, write e-mails, listen to music, do homework, talk to people, watch TV, and sometimes just stare off into space. Apparently, to Driscoll, this looks like a public health crisis of immaturity. To me it looks like people doing stuff. Maybe Driscoll looks at commuter traffic and sees manliness: I see waste and frustrating boredom.

If car culture encourages adult behavior and car ownership correlates to personal responsibility, I'm sure I don't know how. 

But this is the thing about this little digital booklet. Supposedly the value upheld and advocated is maturity. On a certain level, that's what's happening. However, this work is also itself enormously lazy, and, I think it can be argued, encourages and fosters immaturity.

This is a slight book, free to download from The Resurgence, which offers resources to train and equip people in Driscoll and Mars Hill's brand of evangelical Reformed theology. It's only 36 pages, but with lots of white space, oversized fonts, and half an excess of front matter, it's more like 15.

And some of that is filler.

Part one of Puff or Pass? is labeled "Statistics." Driscoll -- with the help of a research group -- uses this section to recap two Pew Research Center studies about marijuana, both of which are freely available online (here and here). The reports have to do with public support for legalization, and also mention the percentage of people who say they've tried marijuana. Driscoll simply quotes the studies. There's no interpretation, no explanation, no arguments, and no effort -- not even a minimal one -- to try to connect those sociological facts to the question the book is supposed to answer. The relevance of this information is completely mysterious. If the statistics are supposed to be "evidence," what are they evidence of?  Driscoll just packs it in, and then moves on.

Part two of the book is dedicated to setting out a variety of opinions on the legality of marijuana and the morality of using marijuana. Driscoll calls these "Evangelical Views," but cites and quotes many who aren't evangelical leaders or even speaking specifically for or to Christians, such as an editorial by Kevin A. Sabet, who's worked on drug policy for the last three presidential administrations, and Marc Emery, an imprisoned advocate for the legalization of marijuana, who has written about Rastafarians in the magazine Cannabis Culture. The Christians cited range from Pat Robertson to Douglas Wilson, several Christianity Today writers, and official statements from a variety of churches, including the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("whose members," Driscoll mentions parenthetically, "consider themselves Christian").

Driscoll doesn't actually review these various opinions, or do much in the way of evaluative work, thinking through the available arguments or ideas. He just says what they are. He classifies the opinions into options, so one can see several choice quotes for "OPTION A: Any Illegal Use of Marijuana is Immoral," "OPTION B: Recreational Use of Marijuana is Immoral; Medical Use of Marijuana is Immoral Until Science is More Conclusive," and so on.

After a certain point, with various positions being re-capped, it becomes difficult to discern what the point is. Surely American adults who are even half-way paying attention -- maybe they've been to high school, worked in a restaurant or spent time in a suburban parking lot -- can give a more or less decent account of why some people have a problem with marijuana and others don't.

But that's exactly the point.

This whole booklet seems to presuppose the reader is not a half-way intelligent, reasonably capable adult human being in 21st century America. The assumption on every page is that the reader needs the most basic information explained. Driscoll may say he wants Christians and his congregants specifically to think these issues through like adults, but he doesn't act like he's writing for adults. This booklet makes no sense unless you think the intended audience is people who are incapable of considering an issue like the morality of marijuana without a lot of handholding and rudimentary help.

Driscoll protests that this is not supposed to be a "comprehensive" or "definitive" treatment of the question, but is meant to help "Christians think through the matter in an informed way," but what he offers is more or less a cut-and-paste job, as if the intended readers couldn't Google this stuff for themselves.

This is not to say that there are no arguments made here, but they are precious few.

In at least one case, his argument is nothing more than a statement that he believes something "as a Christian." How the one thing connects to the other he doesn't bother to say.

Driscoll concludes that recreational use is always wrong but that medical use is OK "in some cases, under a doctor's supervision." The argument for medical use is just that he's not skeptical of the science that shows it's helpful in some cases. The argument against recreational use is that getting high is wrong, or anyway wanting to get high is wrong, and also there's the above-mentioned comparison to public transportation users and the injunction to "grow up!"

Driscoll notes here that he aligns with the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians on this issue. That conclusion isn't beyond the pale or in anyway crazy, but it's also not really supported as much as just stated. There's a patina of research, a gloss of "careful consideration," but in the end Driscoll isn't doing anything more than making a declaration. A press release in response to Washington State recent legalization of marijuana would have been just as informative.

The real question of this booklet is why it exists.

At several points, Driscoll notes that he used to deal with the question of marijuana by just saying that Christians shouldn't break any law they're not morally required to break by God, but that now that objection to smoking a joint is gone. The change in the state law meant the issue came up again in this new context, and this is Driscoll dealing with it.

Mostly by not dealing with it.

As best I can determine from the textual evidence, this book exists so that Driscoll and his followers won't have to think about the question of marijuana usage. This is something Driscoll can reference and people in his church can reference and be done with, without really doing any serious work. This work exists so that when someone asks if it's OK for a Christian to smoke weed sometimes, an elder won't have to answer the question, but can instead just recommend the church's website. This isn't the kind of work one produces when a topic is important or something one cares about -- it's a sloppy and lazy and deeply unserious.

The only reason it might be taken as anything else is because it has Driscoll's name on it. If that happens, it'll be a prime example of exactly the sort of facile immaturity that Driscoll is supposed to opposed to but, nevertheless, seems to be encouraging.

If this is what it means to "act like men," I'd recommend taking the train.

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Defending damnation

Justin Taylor, an editor at Crossway and blogger at The Gospel Coalition, defending the doctrine of eternal damnation:


Taylor notes:

"If I had a 'do over' I might have challenged the premise of the analogy: if a father can rescue his children from destruction but only saves some we consider him morally culpable, but in the Christian worldview we are rebelling against the Judge and receive a free offer of mercy which we reject. Instead, I focused on the underlying issue I see at play not only in this debate but in so many aspects of progressive revisionism: namely the desire to create God in our own image."

This is an insanely difficult argument to make, that an all-power, all-loving God wills (or even just allows) everlasting punishment. There are ways to make the argument easier -- e.g. freewill, even if that just pushes the problem back, rather than resolving it.

Taylor, to his credit, doesn't try to shirk the task.

His ultimate argument is against the arguments, it seems to me. He doesn't want to "justify the ways of God to man," ala Milton, but to defend God against the claim justifications are needed. Taylor's point is traditional Christian theology rejects antropocentric standards.

I'm not convinced Taylor actually rejects all anthropocentrism, including the anthropocentric standards of justice, the standards of a judge, king, etc. But this is the argument he's advancing.

He's advancing his anti-anthropocentrism, even, it seems, to the point of discounting the anthropocentrism of the incarnation. Where some take up this issue of hell by attempting to explicate judgement/grace from the ethics of Jesus, as Jesus is understood as the ultimate revelation of God, Taylor states, "I think that is inverting the proper Creator-creature relationship."

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The religious history of the cubicle

Kathryn Lofton, American religion professor at Yale, author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, and curator/executive editor of Freq.uenci.es, "a collaborative genealogy of spirituality," talks about the religious history of the "spiritless space" of the office cubicle.

"The cubicle," Lofton said, at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies last night, "is a shuttered spiritless trap. The cubicle is a spirited invitation to rise."

Lofton argues that the history of work and work spaces is also a history of the struggle of questions of body and mind. Thinking about cubicles is invitation to consider this. The cubicle is a decision that has been made about what would be a "best life." Which means, in market terms, the most productive, but also something having more to do with an individual's asserted individuality and self, and thus, a matter of spirituality.

And in both those cases, the religious and the economic, it has to do with how consciousness is formed. For Lofton, this is a key connection of the relationship between religion and the marketplace today.

Behind Lofton is Herman Miller, of the Zeeland, Mich. company he named after himself. His company was the one to develop the cubicle, as well as to pioneer in the mass production of modernist furniture. He was a committed Dutch Reformed Neo-Calvinist, Lofton said, and his company's philosophy was deeply Neo-Calvinist.

As was the cubicle.

The modern version we know, according to Lofton and according to those involved in developing the idea, is a horrible betrayal of the original concept. At the first, it wasn't supposed to be a "spiritless trap" or contain and oppress people into efficiency, but to be a creative space within the workspace where the "human performer" and human creativity was central. Efficiency and business success were still paramount, but the idea was that the market gods didn't reward worker alienation and oppression.

The goal was to recognize and make a first priority out of the variability of people and the variability of work. To end fatigue. Enhance creativity.

There's at least one Neo-Calvinist today who would argue that that religious potential is still present in the cubicle.

Thinking about cubicles as religious, as spiritual, as spaces where the human spirit is nurtured and enabled and enhanced can strain credulity.

As Lofton said, though, even that skepticism is an opportunity to engage the question, again, of religion and work: "What would it mean to see products' production without cynicism and as a matter of human fullness?"

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The Mather tomb

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Chuck Colson on Abraham Kuyper

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