Culture Shift

CULTURE SHIFT
BY
R. Albert Mohler Jr

 
 
 
…Radcons,” a short compound for “radical conservatives.”
                                                            p. 9
 
This is the “justificatory principle” now discussed in law schools, which states that any restriction on human conduct must be socially mandated by the political process on purely secular grounds. (p. 19)
 

Christian Morality and Public Law – five theses

 
First, a liberal democracy must allow all participants in the debate to speak and argue from whatever  worldviews or convictions they possess. (p. 23)
Second, citizens participating in public debate over law and public policy should declare the convictional basis for their arguments. (p. 24)
Third, a liberal democracy must  accept limits on secular discourse even  as it recognizes on religious discourse. (p. 24)
Most importantly, secular discourse does not have the right to eliminate Christian discourse. (p.25)
Fourth, a liberal democracy must acknowledge the commingling of religious and secular arguments, religious and secular motivations, and religious and secular outcomes. (p. 25)
Fifth, a liberal democracy must acknowledge and respect the rights of all citizens, including its self-consciously religious citizens.
But as Robert Audi and Kathleen Sullivan understand it, that amendment only protects religious expression insofar as it does not interfere with a purely secular political state. In other words, religious people may talk among themselves about how they would structure society, but they are not free to air those ideas outside the walls of their churches. (p. 26)
 
Professor Helm is surely right when he argues that the “social value” of offendedness is now increasing. All that is necessary for a claim to be taken seriously is for the claim to be offered. (p. 32)
 
The truth claims of Christianity, by their very particularity and exclusivity, are inherently offensive to those who would demand some other gospel. (p. 35)
 
As Presser explains, the Court simply declared that the Fourteenth Amendment “somehow changed the meaning of the First Amendment so that ‘Congress’ ought to  be interpreted as meaning ‘Any state or local governmental official.”
At this point we come face to face with the infamous “incorporation” doctrine that has become the avenue for a vast expansion of federal power and influence. Presser explains that this doctrine was an act of “judicial legerdemain” through which the Court simply dictated that limitations placed on the federal government by the Bill of Rights should also be understood as applying to state and local governments as well. This, he declares, “is one of the great constitutional usurpations of the modern era, but [it] now goes virtually unchallenged.”  p.40-41
 

All that Terror Teaches – Have we learned anything?

 
First, the terror has taught us to accept reality
Second, the terror has taught us to distinguish between good and evil
These “accumulated habits of non-judgmentalism” are very much in evidence on America’s campuses today and in the academic world of publishing and public lectures. (p. 49)
Third, we learned once again that God is ultimately in control, or else we are lost in a cosmos of chaos.
Fourth, we were reminded that the gospel itself has enemies.
            Islam is at war with the Cross of Christ.
Claims that Jesus is the only Savior and that salvation is found in His name alone were dismissed as “theological terrorism” and religious extremism. But it was for this very claim that the early Christian martyrs gave their lives.
Fifth, we learned that spirituality is no substitute for Christian faith.
Spirituality is what is left when authentic Christianity is evacuated from the public square. It is the refuge of the faithless seeking the trappings of faith without the demands of revealed truth. Spirituality affirms us in our self-centeredness and soothingly tells us that all is well. Authentic faith in Christ calls us out of ourselves, points us to the Cross, and summons us to follow Christ. (p. 51)
 
Under certain circumstance, most morally sensitive persons would surely allow interrogators to yell at prisoners and to use psychological intimidation,  sleep deprivation, and  the removal of creature comforts for purposes of obtaining vital information. (p. 57)
 

Needed: An Exit Strategy from Public Schools – the Crisis Christian Parents Face

 
The children were taught that there are no normal families, and that all family structures are equally valid. (p. 66)
 
Massachusetts law requires that parents be advised in advance when issues of sexuality are to be discussed. They can then “opt-out” their children from these lessons. But school administrators insist that lessons about family structure – even those dealing with same-sex marriage- are exempt from this requirement. Thus far, they are standing on their policy. Parents who have children in this  school district will just have to accept the lessons or remove  their children from the public schools altogether. (p. 67)
 
Some now argue that Christian parents cannot send their children to public schools without committing the sin of handling their children over to a pagan and ungodly system. Fueled by a secularist agenda and influenced by an elite of radical educational bureaucrats and theorists, government schools now serve as engines for secularizing and radicalizing children. (p. 69)
 
Educational leaders like John Dewey saw the public schools, often called the “common” schools, as the mechanism for indoctrinating children into anew democratic faith. The worldviews and eccentricities of the various ethnic and national backgrounds would be erased and a new melting pot of Americans would emerge.
In his book A Common Faith, Dewey advocated a radically secular vision for the public schools and the larger public culture. His concept of a humanistic faith, stripped of all supernatural claims, doctrines, and theological authorities would replace Christianity as the dominant, culture-shaping worldview. (p. 70)
 
With control over the public-school system increasingly in the hands of the courts, educational bureaucrats, the university-based education schools, and the powerful teachers’ unions, little hope for correction appears. (p.71)
 

The God Gene – Bad Science meets Bad Theology

 
Humans are collections of atoms and molecules, and all consciousness, belief, emotion, and moral judgment must be explained by nothing more than biochemical processes within the brain. In other words, the evolutionary mind-set must reject the notion of a soul and must insist that all dimensions of consciousness are definable in purely physical terms. (p. 74)
 

Are we Raising a Nation of Wimps?   – A coddled generation cannot cope

 
To the contrary, today’s parents are now spending a great deal of their time doing little more than protecting their children from life. Marano describes this as “the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or an occasional C in history. Our kids are growing up to be pampered wimps who are incapable of assuming adult responsibility and have no idea how to handle the routine challenges of life. (p. 82)
 
John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, suggests that American parents ‘expect their children to be perfect – the smartest fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can’t get their children to prove it on their own, they’ll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are.”  Inevitably, what the parents are actually doing, Portmann stresses, is “showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit.” (p. 84)
 
Christian parents can fall into this same game, pushing our children as if worldly markers of  success are to be our greatest goals and hallmarks of achievement. (p. 87)
 
While we are charged to protect our children from evil and to guard them from harm, we are not to shield them from reality.  (p. 87)
 

Hard America, Soft America – the battle for America’s Future

 
As he [Michael Barone] continued, “For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.”
How does this happen? Barone explains that American youngsters “live mostly in what I call Soft America – the parts of our country where there is little competition and accountability.” But once these adolescents emerge into adulthood and have to work for a living in a competitive economy, they find themselves in “Hard America” where competition and accountability are the rules of the day. (p. 91)
 
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs represented a softening of life for many Americans, shifting much of the economic responsibility of the nation from individuals to the state. (p. 92)
 
As educational historian Dian Ravitch explains, the school curricula of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s reflected a loosening of standards, the marginalization of classical disciplines, and the substitution of grade inflation and social promotion for achievement.
(p. 93)
 
As Barone sees it, the big question for America’s future is whether the nation will move in a harder or a softer direction. This means a choice between competition and coddling, between therapy and truth, between concern for self-esteem and pride in genuine achievement. (p. 94)
 

The Post – Truth Era – Welcome to the Age of Dishonesty

 
Keyes acknowledges that human beings have lied in the past, but he suggests that the current generation of liars has developed a skillfulness and nuance in lying that is virtually unprecedented in the human experience.
Since we do not want to think of ourselves as unethical, we simply “devise alternative approaches to morality.” (p. 96)
 
In time, however, the device of mental reservation allowed an individual to rationalize dishonesty, to hold or “reserve” the truth to himself even as he misled an interrogator. Before long, others used this excuse in order to give apparent assent to creedal statements while privately rejecting the very truths articulated in the statement of faith. (p. 98)
 
Keyes reports that some half million Americans hold jobs they attained with spurious qualifications, adding that an investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office once revealed twenty-eight senior federal officials who did not actually hold the college degrees they claimed. (p.100)
 

God and the Tsunami-  A Christian Response

 
First, a faithful Christian response must  affirm the true character of  God.
Second, we must avoid attempting to explain what God has not explained.
Unless God reveals the purpose of His acts and the working of His will among us, we would do well to affirm His sovereignty and goodness, while holding back from placing blame on human agents for disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. (p. 133)
Third, Christians must respond with the love of Christ and the power of the gospel.
Our answer to the reality of unspeakable tragedy must be to witness to the gospel of unfathomable power – the power to bring life out of death.
Furthermore, we must indeed point to natural disasters as only a hint of the cataclysm that is yet to come – the holy judgment of God. (p.135)