While McCain meets with evangelical venerables like Billy and Franklin Graham in an attempt to smooth his awkward relationship with evangelicals, Obama seeks a demographic that CNN is now calling “an important swing voting bloc” —- young evangelicals. 

They’re more pro-life than their parents, but they’re breaking with the religious right and the GOP.  Some of them are more interested in the environment, the war, and health care than they are in gay marriage or stem cell research.  Even decided voters can be difficult to categorize.    

Diana Smith, 27, is a New York resident who is actively involved in her Presbyterian church.  She supported Clinton but now she’s “slowly going for Obama.”    

Her registration: Democrat, because she read they send out less junk mail.  “I’m not like a clear-cut Democrat or a clear-cut Republican.  But in this world they make you pick a party, so if push comes to shove I feel more close to Democrat I guess … but fiscally I’m very Republican.” 

Her top three issues: The environment, poverty and health care, the issues she says affect her most and the issues she thinks Jesus would care about, too.  “I know that Jesus said visit the sick, feed the hungry. … I feel like I’m not going against my faith by putting those issues at the forefront.”

Abortion: “I think that comes down to a woman and her doctor. … I’m very pro-life.  I believe abortion’s killing and it’s wrong but I don’t think it’s the government’s place to step in and say you can’t do this,” until the baby can live on its own without its mother. 

Gay marriage: She doesn’t think opposing it would be at the top of Jesus’ priority list: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuals at all.”

McCain: “More of the same.”  She respects his competency and his military record, but “He’s older.  He’s in his seventies.  And at this point we need drastic change.”

Ben Stafford, 23, lives in Parma, MI, and even identifies himself as a Presbyterian, too.  But he describes his politics as libertarian and he’s definitely not voting Obama. 

His registration:  Independent, although he once started a Teenage Republicans group and volunteered as a page at the 2004 GOP National Convention.  Now he thinks the GOP has lost its commitment to Constitutional principles: “I’d rather work to advance ideas and principles of liberty than work to advance candidates who will become corrupted by the game of politics.”

His top three voting issues: Free market economics, abortion, and limited government spending.

His faith and politics: “I don’t like to use politics to advance my faith,” but he says his political beliefs come from reason and a Christian worldview.  If we’re all God’s image bearers and are unique, “How can the government go around making decisions for us and trying to decide things for our lives?” he asks.  “The depravity of man tells us that government can’t solve things for society no matter how hard it tries.”    

His candidate: McCain.  “I’m just not a big fan of him but I think he’s much better than the alternative.  He knows nothing about economics.  He’s limited free speech with the McCain-Feingold bill.  He’s wishy washy on the Bush tax cuts.”

The religious right: “It appears they’re trying to accomplish their agenda through politics, not the church of Christ, which surprises and disturbs me.  … They do seem really single issue and I think that turns a lot of people off.  They want to pop the baby out of the womb and then they seem to stop caring about it.  They forget about the next 70, 80 years of the baby’s life. .. There’s more to good government than abortion.”

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 32 Comments »

Barack Obama’s mantra of change has inspired young and old, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. While calls for change have become recycled rhetoric, Obama has convinced many that his promises won’t be relegated to the closet if elected. Some, however, aren’t buying it, including one staunchly liberal demographic—homosexuals.

In a recent ABC News interview, Obama infuriated gay rights advocates when he declared allegiance to the traditional view of marriage. “You know, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” he told Jake Tapper. Like John McCain, he feels states should decide the gay marriage question.

Not surprisingly, the homosexual community responded harshly. The American Spectator’s David N. Bass reports that one lesbian blogger said: “If I hear ‘Marriage is between one man and one woman’ one more time from Obama’s mouth—or any Democrats mouth—I’m going to scream. How is this change? Leadership? Hope? Or do only straight people get to hope?” On the Reuters blog, Peter Henderson quotes one gay rights advocate as saying, “He was a civil rights lawyer. It just seems weird to me that he doesn’t think we should have full civil rights.”

Such a controversy, however, is unlikely to make huge difference come November. Unlike the riff in the Anglican Church over homosexuality, this disagreement among Liberals and Democrats will not bring schism. But it does show us something important: Mr. Obama is not as committed to radical change (at least regarding same-sex marriage) as some believe, or want him to be. As Bass puts it:

This underlines the tension that, for years, has seethed between the Democratic Party bosses and homosexual-rights activists on the issue of marriage. The far left wants strong rhetoric and actions to back it up. Politicians have elections to think about. . . . Obama is hardly the Democrats’ perfect savior. And at least on this one issue, he’s anything but the candidate of change.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 29 Comments »

“Hi there, my name is Ron Steen. I am selling 2% of my future earnings for a chance to go to college.” That’s how an e-bay auction began in August 2006, in which one high school graduate offered to send the highest investor a check every year for 40 years in return for tuition money. E-bay eventually discontinued the auction, but Steen’s desperation does highlight a problem: college tuition prices growing like weeds.

In a recent article, American reporters Kevin Carey and Frederick M. Hess write, “between 1989 and 2005, college costs had increased at double the rate of inflation.” The College Board, administer of the SAT, says “there’s no escaping the fact that college costs are rising.” For the 2007-2008 year, it reported that, on average, families paid up to “$1,404 more than last year for this year’s tuition and fees.” Suddenly, Steen’s idea of a tuition market may not be so asinine.

The question, then, remains: What if students could convince investors to pay their college tuition in exchange for a fixed percentage of their future income? Such a tuition market could benefit all those involved. More students could afford college without incurring suffocating debt; banks would see fewer defaults; and we’d see increased standards of higher education. But it’s the latter that may be the greatest benefit.

As investors regularly look for “good deals,” colleges across the nation would be forced to lower prices and increase quality. Why invest in a $180,000 Harvard student, Carey and Hess ask, when one could invest $48,000 for a Pennsyltuckey U. student that produces similar, if not better, results (while collecting the same rate of return)?

The concept is tempting because it utilizes one of economics basic, most trusted principles: competition. And in an era where many top universities have sold their souls for cultural relevance, competition might be able to exercise the demons. Ivy League institutions such as Harvard (which has abandoned a common core curriculum) would be forced to once again offer an education instead of just a name. As Carey and Hess put it:

“Investors would steer away from overvalued institutions, making them more expensive, raising red flags, prompting hard questions from investors, and lending real urgency to institutional efforts to cut costs and boost student success.”

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 9 Comments »

I recently read a review of several children’s books and videos about the story of Jonah. The reviewer was incensed that children were not learning about a wrathful God. Storybooks that don’t portray the whale as “a terrifying sea monster” are “a lie we should quit telling our children,” he wrote. “We do not bring them to God by pretending that he is cuddly and not terrible.”

One can forgive him for losing sight of the reality that everything is learned this way, in stages. Does any rightminded person start his children on calculus before they can count? Do we demand they recite the doctrinal points regarding propitiation before allowing them to sing “Jesus Loves Me?” But by this reviewer’s logic, the proper thing to do when one’s children sing “Jesus Loves Me”, is to stand over them and recite after every verse something to this effect: He loves some of you, but others are children of the devil, as He Himself said, and will be cast down with the Evil One into a dark pit at some predetermined but unknown point between the resurrection of the dead and establishment of the New Jerusalem.

It’s a legitimate question nonetheless, this matter of what we teach our children about God, and when we teach it. The Bible is entirely true, and we know further that all of it is “profitable for reproof and instruction.” At the same time, it is filled with terrible things. When do we teach them, in detail, to our children? Mark Twain once quipped, after all, that whenever he heard about a library banning one of his books for its potential deleterious effects on the minds of children, he would chuckle at the thought that they were still free to check out the Bible.

I suppose the reviewer’s concern was that children who read these stories about Jonah will only ever get the edited versions. Perhaps his insistence on shocking them with the wrath of God is like one of those mega-doses of antibiotics, administered out of the doctor’s fear that their parents can’t be trusted to give them the full regimen. Or perhaps he’s someone who believes every mention of God’s love and mercy must be given equal time with his wrath. We can’t have people going about believing in a cuddly God, after all. They might start smiling.

I think it’s incontrovertible that God hates sin, and I think it’s important for teachers of the Word to teach the whole Word. But I reject this notion that people must be cowed into faith. It was on display in this particular essay, but we can find it throughout the Christian community. Consider those ubiquitous church marquees with slogans like: Jesus: Accept him now or regret it forever.

And I especially reject this tack when applied to children. They respond to love with love, and to fear with retreat. I certainly avoided God for twenty years in no small part from a conceptualization of him as angry and waiting to punish me unless I behaved better. And I know plenty of other adults with similar training. As an empirical matter, it doesn’t seem to work.

But more than that, it seems a gross mischaracterization of God. “Let the little children come to Me,” Christ said. He didn’t say: “Scare them my way. Dwell on how My Father punished wrongdoers, until they’re shivering in their little boots.” He drew them to Himself with love. Speaking as someone who experienced the reverse, I think hell and judgment ought to come later in a child’s education, not first.

To read Tony’s “Angry God,” part I, click here.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 175 Comments »

When I was a new and callow Christian, someone told me never to sing “I have decided to follow Jesus” because it is Arminian. I had been tipped off about Arminians (though I had never encountered one in the wild) — persons who thought too highly of man’s capability, and who believed that man is able to thwart God’s will.

That one took a long time to get over. But now I sing “I have decided to follow Jesus,” and “Today (As for me and my House)” and “Just as I am I come,” and any number of other dicey hymns. I do it because I see that the Bible uses that kind of language in places, language that calls me to make a decision for Christ, language that warns of dire consequences of not doing so. So if it’s good enough for the Bible it’s good enough for me. (I also sing plenty of songs about grace and how God delivered me, which is also in the Bible.)

Nowadays I think of the teachings of Scripture as similar to the pixels of a picture. The contents of God’s mind would burst the seams of my wineskins. But he “translates” his mysteries into tiny components of the image, arranged side by side for me to read and meditate on each one. The more I read of his Word, the more pixels I gather, and the higher the “resolution” and sharper and more accurate the perception of Truth.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 66 Comments »

In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood excoriates the arrogant fumblings of popular theodicy, which quickly brands every calamity-averted as “Gods’ protection,” while discreetly invoking “the mystery of providence” when true catastrophe rears forth. Wood outlines an “anti-theodicy” stemming from an outrage that, according to theologian David Bentley Hart, should be profoundly Christian.

Wood, whose agonies over the problem of evil gradually eroded his childhood faith into apostasy, scorns popular treatments of evil, from the weeping university students who praised God for preserving them from tornadoes (apparently doing so by sending the tempest to kill other area residents), to the Archbishop who, in article after the 2004 Asian tsunami, cautioned his Communion against expecting God “constantly to step in if things are getting dangerous.”

Wood lampoons the appeal either to selective intervention, or to mysterious providence–the former, because it seems to have God perenially “on holiday,” idly diverting a car wreck while the masses writhe and weep; and the latter, because it implicates God in “the Holocaust, the killing fields, the five people who die of malaria every minute.” Even if such suffering were justified, even if “the sound of weeping and of crying were heard no more,” Wood would have no part of such redemption.

This view, of course, is profoundly paradoxical, in that such outrage against the silent God is coherent only if there is in fact a God who is silent. Wood, still shivering in the tattered rags of his faith’s former finery, recognizes this contradiction, and, with heart-rending sincerity, calls his belief “permanent rebellion,” a state of “wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God is is not supposed to believe in.” Wood links arms with Ivan Karamazov, whose “Rebellion” speech in The Brothers Karamazov made famous this sort of anti-theodicy, in declaring war on any redemption that would seek to justify the senseless suffering of children.

In a recent interview, Dr. Hart, author of The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, remarked, “The pathos of [Ivan’s] protest is…exquisitely Christian.” For Ivan, and–Hart contends–for every Christian, “the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.”

Rather, Hart insists, “The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those powers — death chief among them — that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity.”

The truly Christian view, according to Hart, which requires “the eye of charity and a faith in Easter,” is to insist upon the beauty and wonder of creation, to shout obstinately in the face of suffering and death: “Where is your victory? Where is your sting?” If Hart is correct, then perhaps many Christians ought to fortify their theology with heavy doses of Wood’s outrage, that they might learn to speak, not of God’s justifying evil, but of His conquering it.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 75 Comments »

I was reading a book review by Christopher Hitchens some time ago when I started at something he wrote, something which seemed too outrageous even for a man who would go on to write God Is Not Great. He referred to what he understood to be a widely accepted Christian vision of heaven, namely, that it consists of all those who are “saved” standing and praising God in an eternal church service. That, Hitchens declared, sounds like what most people would consider hell.

My first thought, upon reading his audacious claim, was: Can he say that? There was more to the review, so unless he wrote the entire piece and then added that sentence as an afterthought, it seemed that God had not struck him dead. My second thought, the sort that slips out before our better training and self-righteousness kick in, was: I think he’s right.

I felt really guilty for thinking it. Thankfully there was no lightning. I suppose we all have blasphemous thoughts from time to time, or maybe it’s just the sinners among us. Only lately I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s not blasphemy. There is that bit about saints casting their crowns at the feet of the Lamb, but it’s not entirely clear, after all, that there won’t be food and naps and touch football, too. Further, there’s the original Garden, and Adam’s first, delightful work, before he got tongue-tied and failed to stand up for his woman in the moment of truth. Surely that’s evidence, isn’t it, that heaven will be more than one eternal church service?

But it’s interesting that this is what Hitchens absorbed as the Christian theory of heaven. I wonder if he absorbed, likewise, the doctrine that seems prevalent in some Christian circles, that of a perpetually furious God. It’s not an official doctrine, but a theme that emerges gradually from the lips of some Christians. Yes, Jesus loves us, yes, God is merciful, but oh boy are those homosexuals and Babylonians and a good many of our so-called brethren going to get it, and good.

I had a friend, a new Christian back when I wasn’t a Christian, who told me how he went to the front of his church and announced that a lot of people in the sanctuary were going to hell, where they were going to burn and burn and burn. Apparently someone got him started reading the Bible, and he was zealously working his way through the Old Testament. I’d already formed that impression, of God being really angry, from being dragged to my grandmother’s Baptist church as a child, as well as — oddly, given how little else we read in my high school — from studying “Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God.”

It’s at once unfair and telling to examine what someone picks up about a subject by random osmosis. Unfair, in this case, because an ignorant new Christian, an unrepresentative sample from a particular sect, and a hell-obsessed essay hardly constitute a definitive treatment of Christian doctrine. Yet this is how people formulate opinions about Christianity, isn’t it, through the random assemblage of what they read or what they hear a televangelist say or what someone who professes the faith tells them?

(At this point my Calvinist friends are gritting their teeth over my use of the word “random,” while my Limbaugh/Hannity/O’Reilly-following friends are shaking their heads that I didn’t list the biased media in my explanation for mistaken impressions of Christian doctrine.)

I suppose it’s like anything else, we gravitate to certain attributes of God, or certain elements of doctrine, and amplify them. Presbyterians talk about predestination, Catholics about the grace of Mary, and so on. So some of us focus on God’s mercy, and others on his anger, and I suspect that somewhere behind our fumbling recitations of doctrine is the true God, at once more majestic and awful than we can imagine. I’m sure I don’t understand him so well myself, even after these eleven years of wrestling. I’m just thankful none of us gets to define him.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 99 Comments »

Last month, Indian affairs officials from the Brazilian government photographed from the air an Amazonian tribe that seems to have had little or no contact with the modern world. Pictures show men, women and children staring up from thatched huts and men painted with yellow and red attempting to scare off the airplane flying above them.

The flyover is the latest development in a controversy over “uncontacted” indigenous tribes and whether governments should prohibit outsiders from crossing paths with them. Groups like Survival International say about 100 tribes around the world have avoided or cut off any contact with outsiders, and half of them live in Brazil or Peru. The government of Peru has pledged to investigate the existence of uncontacted tribes on its side of the border, and to find out if illegal logging is driving them from their native lands as some allege. Disputes over land encroachment are central to indigenous issues: The French oil company Perenco is involved in a lawsuit in Peru that will determine whether it can drill in a remote jungle area inhabited by natives.

Actress Julie Christie is helping Survival International promote an isolation policy toward tribal groups. Survival claims tribal lands should be protected from logging and from outsiders who could introduce foreign sicknesses to the natives. (An unfamiliar virus such as a flu bug can overpower and kill a significant portion of a tribe’s population.)

Last March, representatives of the British television company Cicada Films were accused of unwittingly introducing an epidemic that left four Matsigenka Indians dead while the filmmakers scouted locations for the Discovery Channel’s “World’s Lost Tribes” reality show. Cicada Films denies causing any such outbreak. Brazilian activist Sydney Possuelo, featured in a 2003 National Geographic story, once favored modern contact with tribes but changed his mind after seeing the sicknesses and cultural challenges indigenous people face as a result.

Survival International doesn’t exactly express a positive attitude toward America, which it lists among its 2007 “terrible ten” list of abusers of tribal peoples’ rights for being one of four nations that voted against the UN’s “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The UN Declaration, adopted in September of 2007, grants broad national rights to natives and contains language that could cause problems for yet another group Survival isn’t positive about: missionaries.

New Tribes Mission seeks to establish indigenous churches around the globe, but Venezuela stopped the group’s work among indigenous groups in 2005, when, as WORLD reported, President Hugo Chavez denounced the agency in a speech and accused it of spying for the U.S. and exploiting indigenous people. (Hundreds of indigenous Venezuelans later marched in protest of Chavez’s speech.)

It’s hard to understand how providing medical care and literacy is exploitation, especially among indigenous groups where the life expectancy of men and women is lower than average and suicide rates among youth are alarmingly high, but New Tribes and other mission organizations may face increasing opposition as governments like Venezuela’s and Brazil’s restrict outside access to tribes. In the process, those governments seem to be promoting the ideology of the “noble savage” and assuming it’s in the best interests of indigenous people to have no access to the modern world, or to the gospel.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 35 Comments »

If I were at a swinging party in the suburbs, I don’t know which statement I would be more afraid to blurt out: “I am a Christian,” or, “I don’t believe in college.”

A college education is considered de rigueur for everyone. One day we may all awaken from this mass hysteria and realize what lemmings we have been, tripping over ourselves to pay $80,000 to have our kids pass tests about Poetics, spend every waking minute with other kids bent on getting drunk, and imbibe the Weltanschauung of professors who think Christianity is for idiots.

You can dismiss my own college experience as merely anecdotal, if you will, but it’s like cockroaches: where you see one like me, there are a thousand others hiding. I wish I could have 1969 - 1973 back again, to learn a skill (by which I could reimburse my parents).

College is a business. They get their money whether your kid gets a good education or not. And as a matter of fact, “among college freshmen who graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class, 76 of 100 won’t earn a diploma, even if given 8 ½ years” (Marty Nemko, “America’s Most Overrated Product: Higher Education”).

The hardest pro-college argument to argue against is that many employers require that piece of paper from an institution with a fancy name. (like a very expensive hall pass) All I can say to that is that it stinks and we ought to fix it.

“Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts — and with no more brains than you have. But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma!” (“The Wizard of Oz”)

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 44 Comments »

Earlier this week, a Marine stationed in Fallujah gave Iraqis silver coins, printed in Arabic with John 3:16. Coming so recently after the Koran shooting incident, the military—and the media—are not taking this lightly.

The soldier’s action violated Army rules regarding the conduct of American soldiers, but it highlights an important issue for American Christians. Christians face a unique challenge sharing their faith in the Muslim world, because they represent more than just Christianity. They represent the history of the Crusades.

As an American who has gone to the Middle East and shared his faith, I have seen that the people of the Levant do not let history slip easily from their worldview. Though the Crusades were hundreds of years ago, Muslim children hear stories of the Crusades in the same tone that American children learn about Vietnam and the Berlin Wall.

Religion-filled political rhetoric doesn’t help the confusion. During the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush’s frequently ended his speeches about “liberating” Kuwait with, “may God bless America”, giving the war religious undertones and conjuring, in the Muslim mind, images of stories of the Crusades.

Today’s American troops in Iraq represent a similarly troublesome force. While modernity says the US-backed coalition soldiers are non-religious, and only fighting for political ideals, there remains the doubt in some Muslims’ minds that religion is somehow in play.

Iraqi politicians understand—mostly—that the US Army is not a religious tool. But to the average Iraqi, a man with a gun and an American flag on his shoulder passing out unsolicited Christian material sends a different message.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 20 Comments »