Dangerous Absolutes by Craig L. Parshall

Although they knew God, they did not glorify [honor] Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools (Rom. 1:21-22).

Place: Aspen Institute conference, Colorado

Date: August 4, 2011

Former U.S. vice president and environmental-disaster activist, Al Gore, stepped onto the stage and began a veritable tirade against all who doubt what he sees as the absolute truth about global warming and the catastrophe he claims man-made carbon emissions are creating.

Gore’s “rant” (as it was described by the Los Angeles Times) was so filled with profanities that most newspapers couldn’t print extensive excerpts. He proclaimed that, because of global warming, “the very existence of our civilization is threatened.” His real complaint, though, seemed more fundamental: “There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate.”

By “shared reality,” I take Mr. Gore to have meant that he is crestfallen over the American public’s refusal to close the debate on climate change. In other words, he vehemently believes his worldview on environmental issues should be the “shared reality” for everyone. And if you disagree, you are now a target of his four-letter epithets. A clearer picture of political correctness gone wild is harder to imagine.

The issue here is not the validity of the global-warming theory. It is the transformation of trendy ideas about “greenhouse gases” into a belief system that resembles a secular religion. Those who doubt are infidels.

Case in point: When Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry of Texas dared to question that man-made carbon emissions cause catastrophic global warming, he was skewered by the press. Columnist Scott Stroud of the San Antonio (TX) Express-News said Gov. Perry “breezily dismissed the science behind global warming,” something Stroud equated with opening a “can of crazy.”

This type of totalitarian approach makes politically incorrect dissent a crime against humanity. Even cultural heroes become enemies when they question the sacred cows. Before his death, Michael Crichton, a medical scientist and novelist who wrote blockbuster science-fiction novels like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, had the courage to question radical global-warming theories in his novel State of Fear. In response, climate alarmists lashed back, calling him a “global warming denier”—a label that implies something morally and intellectually terrible, as “Holocaust denier” does, for example. Such are the slings and arrows from those who have turned a scientific speculation into a form of nature worship.

I recall a point once made by Dr. Donald MacKay, a late, brilliant brain physiologist in England—and a Christian—who wrote a book refuting the behavioral theories of the atheist B. F. Skinner. He noted that what often passes for rational dispute over truth is, in reality, merely a preference for what is ^“palatable,” dressed up in rational garb.

Because of our fallen natures, people are prone to gravitate to conclusions that are palatable. We like what is convenient or what appeals to our pride and our desire to “be like God” (Gen. 3:5). Which is why futile thoughts (to quote Paul in Romans), or ^“speculations,” as the New American Standard Bible puts it, can be so dangerous; human reason must be reined in by clear, irrefutable facts, not merely inferences.

Furthermore, our reasoning has to begin with the pre-supposition that, if we observe orderliness in nature, it is because such order was created by the Creator. The more we push aside the Creator and deify the creation, the more futile and dangerous our thoughts become.

None of these points are meant to diminish the role of true science. Rather, they are a reminder of what many good Bible teachers tell us: The only things we can afford to be totally absolutist about are those things that God has absolutely decided to reveal in His Word.

Craig L. Parshall is senior vice president and general counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters.

What has America become?

Editor,

Has America become the land of special interest and home of the double standard?

Let's see: if we lie to the Congress, it's a felony and if the Congress lies to us it's just politics; if we dislike a black person, we're racist and if a black person dislikes whites, it's their 1st Amendment right; the government spends millions to rehabilitate criminals and they do almost nothing for the victims; in public schools you can teach that homosexuality is OK, but you better not use the word God in the process; you can kill an unborn child, but it is wrong to execute a mass murderer; we don't burn books in America, we now rewrite them; we got rid of communist and socialist threats by renaming them progressive; we are unable to close our border with Mexico, but have no problem protecting the 38th parallel in Korea; if you protest against President Obama's policies you're a terrorist, but if you burned an American flag or George Bush in effigy it was your 1st Amendment right.

You can have pornography on TV or the internet, but you better not put a nativity scene in a public park during Christmas; we have eliminated all criminals in America, they are now called sick people; we can use a human fetus for medical research, but it is wrong to use an animal.

We take money from those who work hard for it and give it to those who don't want to work; we all support the Constitution, but only when it supports our political ideology; we still have freedom of speech, but only if we are being politically correct; parenting has been replaced with Ritalin and video games; the land of opportunity is now the land of handouts; the similarity between Hurricane Katrina and the gulf oil spill is that neither president did anything to help.

And how do we handle a major crisis today? The government appoints a committee to determine who's at fault, then threatens them, passes a law, raises our taxes; tells us the problem is solved so they can get back to their reelection campaign.

What has happened to the land of the free and home of the brave?

- Ken Huber

Tawas City

Note: "What Has America Become" was the title of a letter to the editor written by Ken Huber of Tawas City, Michigan. It was originally printed in the Iosco County News Herald on June 9, 2010, published in the Opinion column.

Fortress of Faith, Castles of Sand

 

By Craig Parshall

When someone is said to be harboring a "fortress mentality," it is not intended as a compliment. In Washington, DC, it usually implies one has pulled up the mental drawbridge and is overly defensive.

But fortresses have a function. My wife, Janet, and I have seen a number of them in our travels. I particularly remember the castle fortress in Saint Andrews, Scotland, that housed a dark, foreboding jail known in the 16th century as the "bottle dungeon" because of its shape. It lay beneath the castle floor and was accessible only through a small hatch.

Christian evangelist and reformer George Wishart was imprisoned there before he was finally dragged out, lashed to a stake, and burned alive for his bold proclamation of salvation by grace through faith.

When the fires of the Protestant Reformation swept through Scotland, the fortress switched hands. John Knox and his Bible students found solace there until a fierce military bombardment by anti-Reformation forces occurred. When the smoke cleared, Knox was captured and chained as a rowing slave in the hold of a French galley ship.

Fortresses were built because war and conflict, tribulation and social tempest were inevitable; and high, thick walls and guarded gates made good military defenses. In America the church of Jesus Christ is under attack. Though the force is not military, it is formidable nevertheless.

The Masters of Media and Entertainment

One of the surest signs of rising anti-Christian bigotry in America is the mainstream press's boldness in slandering believers. In October 2009, when MSNBC's Chris Matthews said on national television that the "group in this country that most resembles the Taliban, ironically, is the religious right," it was hard to believe the news media's treatment of conservative Christians could get any worse. But it has.

Enter liberal TV commentator Lawrence O'Donnell. In March 2011, while scoffing at end-times discussions on Glenn Beck's television program on FOX News, O'Donnell used his own television show to proclaim, "The book of Revelation is a work of fiction describing how a truly vicious God would bring about the end of the world. Now, no half-smart religious person believes the book of Revelation anymore." O'Donnell finished his diatribe by describing God as "a malicious torturer and mass murderer beyond Hitler's wildest dreams."

In his column in the Chicago Tribune this year, Clarence Page complained that too much is being made of the link between Islam and terrorism. Then he posited that such a link is equal to the connection "between the evangelical Christian community and the bombers of abortion clinics." And when National Public Radio's (NPR's) fund-raising executive, Ron Schiller, was caught on videotape in a Washington, DC, restaurant castigating (among other things) evangelical Christians, it confirmed a bias many of us had suspected within NPR.

This bias is not limited to the liberal mainstream press. Large communications titans that own new media platforms are exercising a powerful and disturbing form of anti-Christian censorship. In November 2010, for example, Apple banished from its iTunes store an application (app) from the Manhattan Declaration, blocking it from its hugely successful iPhone. The reason? The Declaration contained a statement of Christian orthodoxy on sexuality and opposed gay marriage.

A few months later, in March, Apple banned a second Christian iPhone app. This one, from the ex-gay organization Exodus International, Apple considered "offensive" because the ministry sought to introduce homosexuals to Jesus Christ, a source of liberation from that lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Facebook officials have promised to block "hate-speech" critical of gay rights but will make no promise to protect Christians' rights to post Bible-based statements about homosexuality.

In the entertainment world, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival shows how easy a target conservative Christians have become. Red State, a horror film about a Christian fundamentalist family that tortures and kills some teenagers, was promoted at the festival to throngs of enthusiastic supporters.

Another film, Higher Ground, is about a woman who leaves the "Jesus movement" because, as the director told The Huffington Post, it was "an impoverished expression of the Christian religion." Another featured film was a documentary about a former Liberian soldier's conversion to Christ. According to reviewer Dick Staub, it shows "the messiness of his redemption."

In the world of television, former Saturday Night Live regular Victoria Jackson, outspoken about her Christian faith, has been excoriated by the entertainment industry because she dared to criticize a scene in the sitcom Glee where two gay characters kiss. When interviewed on Headline News's Showbiz Tonight, she was asked the now standard, politically correct, politburo-type question of whether she was "homophobic."

Judicial Blindside

While large segments of the popular culture seem to be aiming their arrows at Bible-believing Christians, we are still apt to ask, "Our basic religious freedoms under the Constitution are still intact, right?" Well, yes and no.

The full effect of the Supreme Court's devastating decision last year in Christian Legal Society
v. Martinez has yet to be felt. In a closely divided ruling, the court held that a Christian ministry may be banned from a public university if it sticks to its statement of faith and refuses to open its leadership to atheists, agnostics, and members of other religions. We do not yet know how this ruling might be used to bar biblically sound Christian organizations from receiving public services, benefits, and ministry opportunities.

On the positive side, the high court rightly decided Snyder v. Phelps this year. Despite the sympathetic losing party and the repugnant winning party, the ruling was sound. The court struck down, on free-speech grounds, a large monetary damages award against Fred Phelps.

Phelps, the leader of a small, angry group that misapplies Bible verses, had picketed the funeral of a young man killed during military duty in Iraq. The grieving father brought the suit. The court noted that Phelps's group had obeyed police and stayed peacefully on a public sidewalk, 1,000 feet away from the funeral. Had the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, responsible, legitimate, Bible-preaching Christians would become the next defendants in such lawsuits.

But there is a catch: In his concurring opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer, leader of the court's liberal faction, warned that the ruling did not extend First Amendment protection to religious speech over the airways (i.e. television) or Internet. The implication is that "hate speech" laws could well be used to stifle the gospel over those venues.

Most cases, of course, never reach the marble steps of the Supreme Court. Their ultimate fate rests with the army of lower court federal judges. So it is important to see what types of judges America has in its future. Will they respect the fundamental, constitutional liberties of Christians, or will they bow to prevailing opinion?

In 2010 influential U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) recommended Daniel Alter for the U.S. District Court in New York, saying he hoped to make him "the first openly gay male judge" in America. Since then Schumer has supported President Barack Obama's nominee to the New York federal bench, Paul Oetken, a homosexual-rights activist who argued an amicus curiae brief in favor of homosexual rights in the notorious Lawrence v. Texas case, the decision that reversed Supreme Court recognition of the Judeo-Christian roots of America's social disapproval of homosexuality.

These are the future judges who will weigh the rights of Christians against the radical "anti-discrimination" laws that demand that Christians ignore their consciences. One example looming is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that would make it illegal for employers to consider the homosexuality, bisexuality, or "gender identity" of a job applicant.

I testified before both the House of Representatives and Senate on behalf of the National Religious Broadcasters, indicating that the bill's so-called exemption for religious groups is more mirage than reality. ENDA would apply to every for-profit Christian ministry and many non-profit Christian organizations as well. The bill has been reintroduced in the House again this year.

Troubling Our Own House

Not all threats to the gospel occur from outside Christianity. Some come from within. These present a particular challenge. We continue to see debates in some denominations over the plenary inerrancy and inspiration of the Bible. That is a most troubling problem because God's propositional truth about Himself and about us is in His Word. When we ignore the principle of sola Scriptura, we set ourselves adrift.

Earlier this year the battle for the Bible took a new turn. When prepublication marketing began for Pastor Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, a firestorm erupted within the evangelical community. An editorial vice president of a Christian publishing house criticized the book's liberal treatment of hell and salvation on a blog and, within a few days, sparked some 1,000 comments and some 24,000 Facebook shares. The subject has since gone "viral" on the Internet and Twitter.

I have reviewed Rob Bell's book, and it is highly problematic. To characterize it generally, I quote emerging church leader Brian McLaren who said both Bell's views and his depart from the traditional biblical view of hell because they "can't in good conscience defend that view any longer."

The existence of hell is clearly taught in Scripture by our Lord (Mt.5:22; 10:28; Mk. 9:47), the apostle Peter (2 Pet. 2:4), and the apostle Paul (2 Th. 1:8-9). Furthermore, it was adopted by the church Fathers and every major Christian thinker from Augustine to Martin Luther to John Calvin to America's great colonial preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, as well as by other preachers of the Great Awakening and all of the great Christian missionaries and evangelists throughout history.

Bell's book goes even further. It challenges God's revealed truth about salvation itself:

Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices? Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don't need to resolve them or answer then because we can't, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.

If there was ever a time for evangelical Christians to know exactly what we believe and why and then to live it out lovingly, humbly, and courageously before a confused and hostile world, it is now. We dare not decide these matters by majority vote or popular opinion. We must not first see who agrees with us before we decide what the truth is. We must see what God says on the subject.

Our Fortress

All that we truly know about God's greatness, goodness, and grace toward sinners is contained in His Word, As Jonathan Edwards observed, "The reality of Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world and the great things that He has revealed concerning Himself and His Father are no longer matters of speculation."

Our fortress, our ultimate defense, will never lie in our own strategies or cleverness or even in learning the true doctrines of the faith. Rather, our ultimate defense will always reside with Him, the living God. As King David wrote under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, even though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though its waters roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with its swelling" (Ps. 46:1-3).

God is telling us that, in our present troubles, He is a comforting presence. Our destiny is not merely a better life or a peaceful present; it is a bountiful and blessed future: "There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High" (v. 4).

Those who have trusted in Christ are inheritors of eternal life—a continuum that covers our past sin, empowers our present walk, and guarantees our future blessing in His presence. Whatever rises up against God's truth will inevitably prove to be not an impregnable castle, but merely shifting sand. Jesus declared it plainly: "In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (Jn. 16:33).

 

Beware the New Barbarians

A More Perfect Union — Beware the New Barbarians

by Craig L.Parshall

An ultra-liberal movement is ripping its way through American culture. I call its purveyors the “new barbarians.” When we think of barbarian, we often picture Neolithic-looking creatures in animal skins, wielding giant clubs.

But these “new barbarians” do not use force. They use rhetoric, the blunt edge of politics, and the giant club of political correctness to storm the gates of spiritual orthodoxy, the rule of law, and the intellectual and moral traditions of America’s Founding Fathers.

It was G. K. Chesterton who astutely observed that the real mark of a barbarian is not that he uses violence but that he wages war against values. Such barbarism, he said, is characterized by “the destruction of all that men have ever understood, by men who do not understand it.”

Within hours of the tragic shooting in January 2011 in Tucson, Arizona—before any evidence had surfaced about the motives of the clearly disturbed individual who killed several people and seriously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the verbal pillorying of conservatives commenced. So did cries that seemed to call for the suppression of free speech.

Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos declared, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.” Liberals on Capitol Hill blamed conservative talk radio, demanded reinstatement of the nefarious “fairness doctrine,” and recommended legislation making it a crime to use certain figures of speech.

A liberal civil-liberties law group, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), speculated the assailant had right-wing political ties, which he does not. But it was red meat for the liberal New York Times and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann who picked it up and ran with it.

The SPLC should have known better. It earned its reputation by admirably going after violent neo-Nazi groups and brutally racist skinheads. But lately the SPLC has become part of the new barbarians. Late last year it put conservative Christian organizations like American Family Association and the Family Research Council on its list of official “hate” groups because they promote traditional ideas on issues of sexual morality.

The new barbarians, including the left-leaning Common Cause, have also tried to storm the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently they disliked the high court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which protected the free speech rights of advocacy organizations both large and small, including conservative ones. The court shot down portions of a crippling federal regulation that threatened to censor the broadcast of an unflattering documentary on now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her run for president in 2008. The new barbarians have mounted a vicious attack against conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, alleging a wide range of supposed ethics and conflicts-of-interest charges. Some pundits have suggested this may be an attempt to get some or all of these justices disqualified from certain controversial, high-profile cases.

Not all liberals belong to the barbarians. To their credit, progressive law commentators like CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin and Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman have soundly criticized the attacks on the justices.

Nevertheless, the club of political dirty tricks is disrupting the constitutional separation of powers. It is being wielded in a mean-spirited way that made its modern appearance during the Senate confirmation hearing of Robert Bork when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987. The Senate refused to confirm him during an embarrassingly partisan battle that focused not on his brilliant record as a federal judge or his stellar qualifications but, rather, on the traditional constitutional values he believed in. The new barbarians are warring against fundamental values. Some within the group may even be well-intentioned; but they are warring nonetheless.

Years later, in his book Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, Bork quoted James Madison on his greatest fear for the new republic he had helped to establish. It is worth repeating: “I believe,” Madison said, “there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

The strategy of the new barbarians is not a massive invasion but a persistent erosion; they manipulate by politicizing words, using loaded meanings rather than bullets. Their ultimate target will not be a fortress or walls but, rather, those who speak out boldly and clearly on social, moral, and spiritual issues with a worldview forged in God’s eternal Word.

After all, those foundations are the most formidable walls against radical, secular liberalism. The last and only real hope for civilization is always truth, and truth springs from the transcendent values of a God who has communicated His demands for righteousness, the sinful frailty of man, and His compassionate plan of redemption.

Those were the moral presuppositions that informed our Founding Fathers. Those were the timbers from which they hewed our constitutional form of government.

Beware the new barbarians who would tear down the bulwarks of freedom and set fire to the foundations of our republic.

Craig L. Parshall is a leading trial attorney who argues cases involving civil liberties, constitutional rights, and religious freedoms. He is also senior vice president and general counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters and a critically acclaimed novelist.