Lord Acton, the iconic historian, famously said, “No historian thinks well of human nature.”  That is another way of saying that we should never be surprised at seeing humans sink to new levels of moral decadence.

At times, a keen satirist—a Dickens or Swift or Plutarch (and too many modern counterparts to catalogue)—might suggest we have reached the bottom, but then we are vouchsafed a deeper view into the abyss of human depravity.

If we are not at the bottom, we must be nearing it when we discover that a medical doctor, trained to sustain life (did she not raise her hand and recite the Hippocratic Oath?) is one of a pack of Serengeti wild dogs performing late-term abortions, being careful not to injure fetal organs and muscle, in order that she might sell them intact.  Yes, sell them.  Butchers selling their prime cuts at premium prices on the open market.  One assumes that modern medical science makes possible, for the first time in history, this level of unconscionable immorality.  This might be a true “first.”

I suspect your mental computer is scanning your ideational cosmos in an attempt to get the picture in focus.  Take your time.  Like German citizens being forced to visit their liberated prison camps, we all need to have our faces rubbed in this.  We need a good whiff of this sewer.

Wordsworth spoke of men whose souls were so dead they would “peep and botanize on their mother’s grave.”  These dead souls, with skillful hands and razor-sharp scalpels, slice and dice up living humans in their graves—their mothers’ bodies.

What, precisely, shocks us?  Not the fetal carnage—God knows we’ve seen enough of that to be immune to it.  What is stunning is the nonchalance, the insouciance, the offhandedness of the doctor exuding a serene sense of accomplishment, while she, sipping wine and eating a salad, declaims her forte.  “I had a seventeen-weeker today,” she brightly says.

America opened hell and broke its doors off the hinges with Roe, and many predicted the inevitable moral chaos that has followed.  If a woman can kill a growing human being in her own body, at will, sell its body parts to the highest bidder, and be labeled an enlightened heroine in the process, what act, however despicable, can we say “no” to now?  Mother Teresa had it right: “If a woman can kill a baby growing in her own body, what is left in Western civilization to save?”

Jonathan Swift wrote a fanciful story entitled “A Modest Proposal,” in which the satirist proposed that Irish politicians create a law which allowed babies of a year old to be sold as food.  Human food.  He catalogued, in brilliant satire, the many commercial advantages of such a practice.

The hope of our very civilization depends on the existence of a moral remnant which will continue to possess the ability to appreciate his satire, and be horrified as unthinkable satire comes closer to existential reality.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

No, the same-sex “marriage” ruling by the American Supreme Court is not the end of the world.  It is, however, the end of the world as you and I have known it.

For starters, no one should be surprised.  The death-beetles (which infest all human attempts at governance) in the great American oak have been intensely active since the ‘60s, with notable outbreaks in Supreme Court decisions Roe, and two recent decisions on “Obama-care,” but this case is in a class by itself because it poisons the roots of the essential institution of civilization.  Five centuries of recorded history have taught us the significance of the institution of covenant marriage between one man and one woman, permanent monogamy.  Confessedly, that institution has always been an elusive ideal, but it has served as a bulwark against personal and societal anarchies of all sorts. 

The central certainty of the decision promises unintended (or intended?) consequences which truly boggle the mind.  One could write a tome on serious implications for public and private schools, for ministers and ministries of every sort which must now (impossibly) attempt to function without offending the current “law of the land,” forever broadening definitions of “marriage,” etc. endlessly.  Writ large, for a further destabilization of a crumbling culture.  One is reminded of that horrible attribution of Jeremiah to Israel, “…you have a whore’s forehead, you refuse to be ashamed.” (Jeremiah 3:3)

How should people of faith, specifically evangelicals, respond, not to the tectonic shift itself (which was going on underground anyway), but to the act of codifying it into law?  (Although not technically a “law;” it will function as one.)

(1)  The real surprise is that any knowledgeable Christian is surprised!  Read, very carefully I Timothy 4 and II Timothy 3 for starters.  And then perhaps Revelation 13 for the end of the story.  (Psalm 82 is especially appropriate here in re perverse judges.)  God has told us from the beginning that human society will degenerate until the cataclysm at the end.  One of our essential problems is that, while millions of Christians around the world have been called to die for their faith, we have lived in a safe bubble in the west.  The bubble is leaking!

(2)  We should expect America, increasingly, to be ruled by “judicial activism,” that is, for the court to continue to pursue, with avidity, a leftist agenda.  It is difficult to imagine that the court will reverse itself, although it has reversed or revised its actions more than a hundred times.  The slide will continue, producing many new interpretations of the law “at the edges,” meaning “where you and I live every day” and which will be, often, grindingly onerous.  “Marriage” will, in fact, lose it meaning; a word that means everything will now mean nothing. 

(3)  We shall increasingly, in personal and corporate contexts, be the butt of  jokes, the jest of the cultural elites, “the hopeless defender of lost causes.”  Get this: much of what our ministers now say is already criminalized; the laws simply are not being executed against us. 

(4)  Let all churches prepare to lose, in time, tax-exempt status.  We should not worry about that or base ministry on it.  We must give, in every sense of the word, while we can and more generously than ever before.  The day of our current measure of opportunity may well be closing.

(5)  We must remember that God has not abdicated His throne!  Our watch-word is Revelation 19:6, “Alleluia! For the Lord God omnipotent reigns.”  He has, does, and will finally and eternally reign, subduing everything and everybody to His perfect rule.  (Heb,12:25-29)  The American Supreme Court is not THE Supreme Court at all; it is manifestly (hang on for that revelation!) a very low court.

(6)  We will be called on to what the Babylonian captives did, i.e., to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” (Ps. 137:2)  In fact, we must sing it more passionately, more persistently, more persuasively, more believingly, than ever! 

(7)  All of this will place immense pressure on churches to come into congregational conflict; the enemy will fracture every church-family he can.  The answer?  Simply this: stay in the book and let its message prevail.

(8)  To my own clan (four children, fifteen grandchildren, and five great-grand-children (with two more on the way): God must love you in a special way to allow you to live in such a critical cultural context!  It’s tough, but you’re tougher.  You’re champions and I love you and am proud of every one of you!  A man once prayed for “London Grace.”  A friend asked him later what that meant.  “The grace necessary,” he said, “to live effectively for God in London!”  Your Mom and I have, and will, pray for “America grace” on all of us!  And God will give it!

Bill Anderson

(see my article on Tony Campolo, on this subject, at billandersonministries.com)

Tony Campolo, one of the best-known speakers on the modern American university-seminary circuit, has come out of the closet: he has called for a tectonic shift in American church life: “Christian gay couples” he says, should now enjoy “full acceptance into the Church.” One may be certain he means the entire LGBTQ “community.”  Who believes his concern for sexual “openness” extends only to gay couples.

Actually, it’s not quite “tectonic.“ For decades Campolo has walked at the edges of theological and ecclesiastical orthodoxy. We may expect a raised eye-brow here and there, but little shock. This is his MO, his penchant, his schtick.

Campolo knows “gays” have the megaphone of western civilization, and he, with a keen sense of cultural shift and historical context, shouts a loud “Amen” to their small but vocal band.

Questions bristle:

1. What took him so long to come out? Hypocrisy? Fear? Political incorrectness? Homophobia? The one excuse he can never offer, given his educational background, is ignorance. He could not possibly not have known what the Bible teaches on the subject which, previously, he often admitted and accepted. The screaming fact is that the new Campolo makes absolutely no reference to scripture in defense of his sexual about-face.

2. Why at this specific moment does he choose to come out? Does it have anything to do with the upcoming vote of the Supreme Court which may clarify marriage to include same sex unions? Did he want to get on the right side of history before the court does? (The odds are, we are told, that even if the court leaves the matter to the states, in the long run, it will all come to the same thing.)

3. What new revelation(s) might we expect from Campolo? That marriage may include any number of people? If two members of the same gender, why not six? Bestiality? Remember the PETA spokesperson saying recently, “Animals are people too!”? Will abortion be the next morally permissible act? Everybody being saved in the end? Those anti-biblical positions already have their defenders in the name of tolerance and are becoming increasingly popular. To put the question another way: does God have the right to say no? And does He ever need to? Many forces produced Jesus’ death, one of which was His capacity to say no. Would the Romans ever have murdered him if He agreed often enough with them?

4. Is the church ready for the fall-out? That assumes Campolo is in the flow of what is, or will one day become, the cultural norm. It is easy to imagine local churches saying, ”Pastor, we love and admire you, but look, the feds say we lose our tax exemption or you have to go. No hard feelings, but happy trails!” Sound wild? Hang on! (Such possibilities must never dictate our theology or ecclesiology; it is but to toss out a warning.)

5. What do we do if we find one day that God really did mean what He said, and explicitly said, about homosexuality, as Campolo admitted for decades? Does one imagine Him saying, “Tony, I am so happy that you revised what I said and made it more palatable in your historical context. Your new message is so much more humane than what I said. Thanks a million for making Me more believable!”

6. What if, the Bible aside, we find that aberrant forms of sexuality (i.e., non-biblical sexuality) do in fact—as we have believed for centuries—produce lethal results to humans—mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, societally, etc.,? Shall we then stand against such practices, not because we are biblically informed, but, are simply being pragmatic? Put otherwise, will functionality trump God?

7. Do you remember Jesus’ word, spoken on the way to the cross, “If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” If this in good times, what in evil times? Surely, modern American church morality is at least a part of what He had in mind. How do we say no to anything or anyone now?

We all remember a horrifically demonized man in Gadara who, touched by Jesus, was found “sitting (not running about in a graveyard frenzy), clothed (true redemption inevitably produces modesty, a sexual matter) and in his right mind (not a psychopathic demoniac).” That event is a mother lode of spiritual (and societal!) gold for a lifetime of study.

First-century Christianity, as every serious student knows, was an island of sexual sanity in an ocean of sexual insanity. The waves are getting higher.

Alas: so much for the church being the conscience of the culture. It appears at times that the last footholds of moral order are being dislodged in our culture; we have a right to expect the darkness.

A recent Pew research project indicates that the religious “landscape” in America shows a rather substantive decline in Christian affiliation, and that other faiths (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu) are gaining, though not as much as the atheists, agnostics, and “nones,” (i.e. those who claim no religious preference).

We evangelicals have not done as poorly as some other “traditional” American denominations, the study finds.  “The number of evangelical Protestants dipped only slightly as a share of the population, by 1 percentage point, and actually increased in raw numbers.”  (I hasten to say that it is unwise to take much comfort in merely treading water.)

My take on the entire matter:

(1)  While Pew research enjoys a good reputation, only God knows who are His and who are not; we should all be braced for shocks at the final separation of wheat and tares, sheep and goats, which may demonstrate strikingly little correlation with “religious observance” in America or anywhere else.

(2)  One of the most common prophecies in the New Testament is that Christians will be persecuted.  “You shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake,” Jesus warned. (Matthew 10:22)  “(A)ll that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” is the way St. Paul puts it (II Timothy 3:12), and then predicts a widespread “falling away” (II Thessalonians  2:3), i.e., an apostasy from the true faith, in the final days of human history.  Fifty other such passages could be cited.  To be surprised at the decline of true Christianity is itself the real surprise, especially since the persecution of Christians is growing markedly worldwide.

(3)  One of the most serious difficulties the American church has been forced to live with is that, from the first days of the republic, we have been called on so seldom to suffer for our faith.  We have lived (with rare exceptions) in a societal hot-house.  That explains some of our spiritual funk, and the fervor of fellow Christians around the globe, especially those who are called on to suffer for their faith.  We are asked to give up our parking space on Sundays while they must be prepared to give up their lives.  No honest American will deny that it is easier to join most churches than the local Rotary Club.  (A must read here is Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christendom,” Oxford University Press, 2002. Jenkins predicts “The Coming of Global Christianity” in the future, with the center of the faith being, not in America or the United Kingdom, but in the third world.  He also reports on growing persecution of Christians around the globe.)

Several other facts explain much of the decline of the true Christian faith in America:

(4)  Often, little of it is preached from the pulpit.  Apostate pastors do not usually elicit a serious response to the “costly grace” of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all their spiritual kin.  If Americans look to the pulpit for spiritual guidance—pray tell, where else would they go?—who can be surprised that they meander about in a spiritual fog?

(5)  Our cultural context causes many church-goers equal shock at the faith being denied or seriously practiced.  (Read that sentence again!)  We want to touch the wire— but only if it is not” hot”!  An English woman once said, “Yes, I am a Christian, but not offensively so!”  A man said to me:  “I have been visiting your church for a while and I want a little bit of what y’all have—but not as much as you have.”  I explained to him that there is only one dose.  That is decidedly not, however, to assert that any of us had reached the level of beatification.

(6)  Many studies indicate the stunning fact that over 95% of Christians have never once shared their faith with another person—a fatal failure of the modern church.  It is difficult to conjure much excitement for the battle when one is not on the battlefront, indeed, might not even know there is a battle going on.  To be an evangelical is to know where the well is; to be evangelistic is to carry water to thirsty people.

(7)  To be guilty of monstrous understatement, the modern media (include here Hollywood and the universities) does not energize modern Christians to stand up for their faith (or anything else but “tolerance,” which is the core value of America’s current zeitgeist.)  No serious Christian believes such institutions should affirm our faith-walk, of course, but their anti-Christian rant weakens many who are already spiritually anorexic.  Consider the coming television series, “Impastor,” in which a gay con man stumbles into the pastorate. Many will fail to get the humor.

(8)  The real problem with people leaving Christianity is not that it has been tried and found to fail; it is that it has been tried, found to be difficult, and abandoned.

Since we’re on the subject: why did you leave?

“Ever play “Twenty Questions?” Maybe the torture kerfuffle in America—and therefore western civilization—presents an interesting subject.

Serious ethical matters are often gnarly, but honest and thoughtful people should (sometimes must) come to conclusions about them even if admittedly tentative. Chesterton said that the reason for opening the mind is approximately the same as opening one’s mouth—to close it on something solid once in a while. (He also said it was good to have an open mind, but one should be careful not to open it too wide or too long lest the brain fall out.)

The questions that come to mind are for all of us, but particularly for the sudden swarm of neo-moralists opining about torture.

The tortuous human-torture questions:

1. Is shooting an enemy combatant’s brains out in battle sufficiently morally “clean” to escape the label of “torture?”

2. Who is it, what committee is it, and how chosen, who can draw the precise line between a proper and improper punishment response to one’s truly morally demented—and very capable—would-be murderer? In real life, not in the safe confines of a sophomore ethics class or a recording studio!

3. Can droning enemy targets—which in every single case has killed civilians and sometimes only civilians—be properly cited as torture events?

4. Totally apart from ethics (for the moment), which is it that the death-dealing jihadist fears most, an IED killing him instantaneously or serious and lengthy torture? The ethical question is: If wounding him (as happened recently) and he dies weeks later from the wounds, would that amount to torturing him?  Right becoming wrong because of poor aim. (The question of those wounded in drone strikes—both combatants and civilians—fits here.)

5. Again, apart from ethical considerations in any specific situation, it is at least a pertinent tangential question: which nation in the entire history of mankind has not used methods which some percentage of the population would say (maybe properly so) were excessive? Meaning we might do well to moralize a little less arrogantly and with a tad less of a chest-thumping tone of moral superiority. 

6. In light of the new-found easy moral outrage on the part of some about military torture situations, should one expect the new moralists to broaden their perspective on the subject of torture?  What about politicians blatantly lying, as a matter of course, so persistently that thoughtful people wouldn’t believe them if they reported the time of day or their middle name? The question then becomes: does such insistent and deliberate “terminological inexactitude” (Churchill) ever rise to the level of torture? 

7. What about dropping two atom bombs, killing in the range of two hundred thousand mostly innocent Japanese civilians? And producing other hundreds of thousands of deformed Japanese infants for several generations. And hastening the day (causing the day?) when at least nine other nations—that we are sure about!— to possess nuclear weapons. Estimates are that an invasion of Japan would have cost a million lives and immeasurable other losses. Should the neo-moralists argue that sustaining such losses would have been a less tortuous way to end the war, allowing America to maintain its putative “high moral ground?” (See footnote “a”)

8. Do IRS, NSA, VFW (!),“Fast and Furious” connote any sort of torture? (If one is looking for torture material, that question is a serious mother lode.) 

9. Is saddling future generations of Americans with an eighteen trillion dollar debt, and a reported 50 trillion (yes, that’s the figure) of “unfunded liabilities” torture? 

10. Is abortion torture?  

11. Does a public education system which abysmally fails a nation’s children, both mentally, morally, and psychologically comprise nationalized torture?

12. Do unprotected national borders, without which no nation can continue to survive in any real sense, torture that nation? (Ditto about the provable lies that the borders are secure.)

13.  The proud boast of the American press is that its duty is “TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER!” Well, yes, of course, but which power? Is it in any sense torture when the citizenry hears from the major press an eerie and sustained silence about all sorts of collective power? One thinks immediately of the very lucrative and rapidly growing abortion industry, of Islamic jihadism, and of blatant race-baiting. 

14. You are a father of four. Islamic jihadists have broken into your home. You are forced to watch as your children and their mother are beheaded.  Suddenly you have complete power over the jihadists. You have five minutes to deal with them before they leave to kill your neighbors. Can you be certain your response to them would not rise to the level of torture? (Fanciful? Doesn’t that scene look a lot like current western civilization writ small?)

16. Is long-term solitary confinement, say twenty years, torture?

17. Where is the outrage against the Taliban killing 145 civilians, 132 of them school children, in Pakistan? Why not an out-cry from the UN and all nations—beginning with the American neo-moralists— calling for war-crimes trials? We in the west tend to yawn at such events, having come to expect it. The question then becomes: is it torture not to hold bestial torturers accountable? Or not even to passionately call for it!

18. Would a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program either by Israel or America (certain to kill many civilians) be an act of torture remembering Iran’s long-standing promise to wipe Israel off the face of the map once they are able to do so? 

19. Is it national torture to turn Americans against its entire law-enforcement establishment because of the sins of perhaps 1.657% of officers who are “bad cops?”

20. Are you certain about your answer about abortion? 

The teapot’s boiling.  American legal justice, always difficult (like all judicial systems on the planet) has become the focal point, well, of just about everybody, including foreign oglers, with the outbreak of a triumvirate of ebola-like cases—Travon Martin, James Brown, and Eric Garner.   (One could cite a hundred other cases which don’t, for some reason, ascend to the attention level of the aforementioned trinity.)

Legal justice is not difficult to adjudicate.  Ideal legal justice is impossible to adjudicate.  In point of fact, it has never, once, in all of human history, ever occurred!  How could it be otherwise?  Is the guilt-non-guilt ratio in a trial 46% to 54%, 16% to 84%, 1% to 99%, etc., ad infinitum?  And if guilt is assumed, what defines equitable punishment among judges and juries with infinite variations of perceptions of what is best, even acceptable?  (A proven child rapist got off recently without, literally, a slap on the hand, and another man—surely there is one—who is innocent awaits his final injection.)

Our system, at its best, is the best in the world.  That doesn’t prevent it from being horrific at times.  After all, in a trial, you have sinners judging another sinner, a sinner defending a sinner and a sinner (or sinners) condemning him, with yet another sinner in a black robe who can express immense power over all the other sinners.  Plus a courtroom full of sinners protected by sinners with guns.  And still other sinners reporting on the event.   And finally, there are all those other sinners—by the hundreds of millions in the three aforementioned cases—hearing about the trial and pontificating about what “true justice” would look like.

What to do?  Surely, we must not give up seeking justice!  Any other response is imbecilic, anarchy (produced by either apathy or activism) being the most lethal disease in the governance pharmacopeia.  We have to keep on doggedly trying even when “heart and nerve and sinew” (Kipling) are exhausted from the struggle.

It is little comfort to realize that none of this is new.  Three thousand years ago the reputed wisest man who ever lived, Solomon, said “…I saw under the sun (meaning everywhere) in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and in the place of righteousness iniquity was there.” (Ecclesiastes 3:16)  Do all we can to ameliorate that fact, the fact is as inviolable—-and as universal—as the law of gravity.

Two other facts (real ones with sharp edges!) will sober us if not fully satisfy us in this boiling-kettle moment:  (a) Each and every one of us, for our good and for the good of all others, must not let the kettle fire-stokers overwhelm us; we must keep everlastingly at the pursuit of the dream of our forefathers to seek, as a people, justice for all.  That pregnant phrase must persistently animate and energize us.   Such a pursuit demands unflinching and unwavering and unrelieved tenacity.  We really have no other choices, do we?  (b) Second, we must live out the significance, in the narrow confines of our own individual hearts, the most consequential judicial reality for each of us, that judgment which our forefathers called “The Final Assize.”  It is the one in which each of us will sit in heaven’s dock in judgment before God who “will render to every man according to his deeds.”(Romans 2:6)  It will be a day when “God will judge the secrets of men” as well! (Romans 2:16)  Our focus then will not be on our frustrating and often fraudulent justice systems, but on that setting in which, for eternal weal or woe, (as Lincoln famously reminded us), “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” (Psalm 19:9).  No side-bars, no copping pleas, no bought juries or judges, no manufactured evidence, no appeals (to whom!), no forensics (the Judge knows it all!).  And miscarriages of justice, being, by definition, impossible.  Until then Travon Martin and James Brown and Eric Garner and their judicial progeny must absorb our minds and hearts and wills, but on that inevitable occasion our concern, one may be assured, will not be about them, but ourselves.  Existentiality will overwhelm metaphysics!

We must not be less vigilant about earth’s justice for others now, but are well advised to be more vigilant about heaven’s judgment on ourselves on a day to come.  One of the many salutary effects of so doing would be a greater motivation to seek, now, justice for others.  Why?  Because those two trial settings—theirs now and ours later—are substantively connected morally; I do myself a favor then to be more consistently energized about justice for others now.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

Actually, we all knew it would happen, we just didn’t know when or where. Well, we’re at the where and the when now. The city of Houston, Texas, led by their lesbian mayoress Annise Parker, is not going to take it anymore. Take what anymore, you ask? American citizens freely expressing themselves openly about, well, we’re not sure just what yet. At the top of the list, for Houston City Hall, are references to homosexuality and “gender identity.” That kind of speech, we are told, violates “non-discrimination laws,” and so some preachers, suspected of having verbally crossing the line, have had their sermons summoned by City Hall for perusal by self-appointed language police. Yes, you heard it right. No, we are not in Tehran. 

The logical progression of such ordinances would include a lengthy laundry-list of forbidden subjects: not only anti-city-administration talk, but anti-county-state-nation-world talk. Maybe no more free speech on any subject between Islamic-Jihadism and, say, gender-colored soccer balls. And maybe everything in between. After all, sufficiently sensitive people can spot gender connections in the strangest places. In the end, every piece of clothing will be categorized as Discriminatory or Non-discriminatory (hereafter D and ND), every gesture, every look, every word, every product, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Left-handers seriously offended by the right-handed majority, with ambidextrous folk screeching for laws against both. And demanding tomes of laws defending their “rights”. Maybe red-haired Irishmen venting their ire for being D’d against, like a billion other categories of minorities. Little-tree defenders against large-tree defenders.

For obvious reasons, sign-language is no solution to it all.  Alas for that which alone distinguishes humans from the jungle: human speech.  But, on the positive side, think of the windfall for the N and ND label-makers!

Consider one (there may be 578) simple unintended (?) consequence: this ordinance legally opens every woman’s restroom, every women’s dressing room, every YWCA swimming-pool shower-room to every cunning cross-dressed male pervert (or murderer) in America. That is true because the law is reported to “allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.”

“You can’t yell ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire,” broadly applied, once covered the waterfront of free and unfree speech in America. Takes two law libraries now.

My counsel? (a) Realize that it is a complex situation. (b) Understand that It’s made vastly more complex by the proliferation, myriads now, of mental midgets being outraged by every opening of a new Wal Mart because blue, to them, represents a male baby, and offensively so. (c) Know that it would be good if all humans would kindly consider the feelings of all other humans. (d) Let every American fall in love again with the entire Constitution, especially the first amendment. (Check it out.) (e) Let nobody expect to speak (or act!) like a moral imbecile in public and think he/she (can’t use the generic anymore!) is going to get away with it. Get thee to thy closet! (f) Know that none of this is new and its result is predictable. Over 2000 years ago a keen observer of humankind said, speaking of people-types like those who now yelp for affirmation of their outre lifestyles:  “For many walk (in such a way that) their “end is destruction, whose god is their belly (sensual lusts), and whose glory is in their shame.” There have always been those who glory not in their virtue, valor, or victory, but in their vice. Bad as that is, it would be tolerable if they did not try to force me to revel with them in their shame. That, however, would have the salutary effect, they tell me, of my staying out of jail!

In the late1860s, there was much talk about the US congress (Stephen Douglas was a leading figure) about passing legislation prohibiting the mention of slavery from pulpits in America. Preachers, on both sides of the issue, went right on their vociferous way, defending both sides, paying no attention to politician’s threats. As preachers will do, infallibly, on the current subject of debate.  They are writing sermons on the subject as we speak.  Sermons based, hopefully, on the First Book and the First Amendment.

The celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee said it plainly: civilizations come and go. From his life-long study of the subject, he concluded that (conceding the difficulty of drawing neat lines around, or even defining, such entities) over twenty civilizations have existed, and all are now in history’s cemeteries except four—the Oriental, the Hindu, the Muslim, and “western Christendom.”  He also observed that, in principle, that which determines why some live and some die is what he calls “challenge and response,” that is, the continued existence of  a given civilization depends on how it responds to the challenges to its life and health in its own particular historical context.

What about us, “western Christendom?” Is what we in the west are experiencing today vis-à-vis Islam epic or episodic, all-encompassing or anecdotal, a burial ground or a bump in the road?  To put it another way: at what point in the trajectory from birth to death do we stand today, specifically, in the light of our confrontation with Islam.

Many voices (Oswald Spengler, Jacques Barzun, Arthur Koesteler, the authors of The Columbia History of the World, Toynbee are notables, along with dozens of lesser lights) say western civilization is obviously and measurably in a decline mode. We see such things clearly only in retrospect, when both the apogee and the nadir of a civilization have passed which, among other factors, makes our question difficult to answer.

But it remains: of what significance is our confrontation with Islam? It all began early in the seventh century when the Muslims arose from the Arabian Peninsula, over-ran the entire Mediterranean world and a sizable slice of Europe, being stopped in their northward march in France in 732. Its ultimate aim, from its beginning, has been to establish a world-wide caliphate under Sharia law. Allah must reign. (Remember: of all the world’s religions, only Christianity and Islam seek world-wide acceptance.) We are told that no one can correctly call himself a Muslim who does not want, by one means or another, that end-game. That fact, if Islam is not altered fundamentally by Muslim “moderates,” promises that the confrontation can be expected to last for perhaps the next half-century. Or even longer. And if it does moderate, immoderate Jihadists will assuredly continue, endlessly, to arise from its midst.

Islam may well possess a long-term life-or-death commitment to establish a global caliphate, but it is not certain that the west (like our forebears, the Greeks and Romans) has sufficient will-power to save itself. Some (not all) of our leaders talk as if they do, but then, they must. In any case, leaders alone can never compel a civilization to care enough to preserve itself. The western “coalition of the willing” is, at this writing, vacillating and equivocal. Time, maybe a little, maybe a lot, will finally tell. Toynbee again: “Every dead civilization died by suicide.” And Churchill is apt here: “An appeaser diligently feeds the alligator hoping he’ll be the last one eaten.”

Your personal response? (a) Do all you can to positively affect the larger culture, remembering Thomas Carlyle’s word, when asked who caused the French Revolution. It was every Frenchman, he said, who didn’t do his duty to his country. Individuals can make a difference. (b) Invest in the civilization of your church. After all that is what it is. Or ought to be! (c) By all means, work for the health of that yet smaller but more important civilization, your family. (Civilizations have language, rules, morals, beliefs, celebrations, symbols, etc., and thus your family constitutes a civilization writ small. But very large in significance!)  (d) Of greatest import is the civilization of you, your own self. If you and I cannot civilize anybody else, we can choose to become civilized ourselves. And only civilized people can become civilizers of others!

Bill Anderson

Grapevine, Texas

PS: Every student of civilization will enjoy two recent books by Rodney Stark, recently recognized as one of the “25 most influential Evangelicals in America,” by Time. They are “For The Glory of God” and “The Victory of Reason.”  Both are serious, and seriously interesting, and demonstrate conclusively that—although he doesn’t use the precise words—the Judeo-Christian God is the only God in history who ever did, or can, civilize human beings.

PPS: For all pessimists regarding our civilization, get Peter Kreeft’s “DARKNESS AT NOON”: THE ECLIPSE OF “THE PERMANENT THINGS” from the web.  It is a treasure, a gold-mine of ink on paper. God, he said, may not be through with us in the west just yet, and suggests several surprising possibilities in that regard.

Recently, the National Football League has proven to be a bottomless gold mine for all moral (and pseudo-moral) gold-diggers in this part of the planet.  And the treasure is so close to the top of the ground, so accessible!  What produced it all?  The recent discovery that some NFL players, all ripped masculine types, are batting women around.  Men batting women around! To quote an anonymous fifth-grade philosopher, “Well, DUH!”  No honest person would be surprised, alas, to hear that Adam might have been a little too rough with Eve in some excitable moment.  Speaking generally, the physically stronger sex has been doing that to the physically weaker sex literally since time immemorial.

For starters, no male should ever strike a female.  Period. End of story.  Punta finale.  Obviously, it is conceivable that there are legitimate exceptions, but, as they say, “the exceptions prove the rule.”  (I personally thought it was ludicrous, parenthetically, for a “million” men to gather some time ago at the DC Mall, raise their hands to heaven and swear, vociferously, that they would “never raise their hand(s) against a woman.”  A trip to DC to deepen one’s moral sensitivities?  What a waste of airfare!)

I gently suggest, here, that the avid nugget-gatherers in the NFL gold-mine consider, if only for a moment, their utter and arrant hypocrisy.  Yes, the NFL, but why only the NFL?  What about Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the PGA, professional (or non-professional!) boxers, the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment!), etc., ad infinitum.  No mistreated females in those realms?  At the moment, the NFL gold-mine alone is being worked.  But, hey, the larger question is not why just the NFL, but why just sports?

Here’s a map to a monstrous labyrinth of man-hits-woman gold-mines: What about truck-drivers?  As a class, I mean, as are NFL players.  What about mailmen?  What about, uh, authors or painters or sculptors or musicians?  How about philosophy professors?  Or doctors or lawyers?  (Include judges in that grouping!)?  Or corporate CEOs?  And what about clergy types: pastors, rabbis, priests, imams?  For God’s sake, what about politicians!  (Mother-lode?)  Dare I mention Hollywood and all media types?  Who remembers a Hollywood celeb being outed as an abuser (except in a gossip rag which normal humans don’t read, and only dupes believe) with screams to pull his Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership and fire him and his associates immediately with public ceremony and without pay?  When was the last time we heard of a reporter of any sort labeled, publicly, as an abuser, and suffering nation-wide opprobrium as have the NFLers?

Look, the NFL screwed up royally, from top to bottom, on this deal.  Preposterously!  That is as obvious as the noon-day summer sun in a cloudless sky.  Neither the king nor his acolytes have any clothes on! A nd may never be able to purchase enough to cover their nakedness!  I am not asking for a free ride for them, but for a fair ride for everybody.  Right across the board.  As Mark Twain’s Mulberry Sellers said, “there’s gold in them thar (other) hills!” No charge for the heads up on their location. Just sayin’!

Bill Anderson

Grapevine, Texas

Great experience today:  I now know what to do about the church-music wars!  Either a revelation from God or dyspepsia from too much Tabasco Sauce!

But here goes: Consider how much carnage litters the ecclesiastical landscape of western civilization from the interminable wars over what music we should use during our worship services. Here’s the road to armistice. Try to follow my logic,

(1)  Every literate American, of course, has an iPhone with an iTunes app which is capable of making available, at the touch of a button, several thousand songs.  And that is not to mention radios, TVs, short-wave sets, the web, etc. etc., literally ad infinitum, ad nauseum. No cubic foot of space in the cosmic blogosphere is devoid of “church” music.

(2)  Now, there being 168 hours in every week, let every Christian listen to his religious music of choice (anthems, hymns, choruses, solos, instrumentals, a capella or accompanied, etc., everything from Beethoven to bangy-clangy, from Bach chorales to kum-baya) for 167 hours and forty minutes.  Night and day, waking and sleeping, dining and dieting, dusting or dreaming, whatever.  Not just any music, but the very best of every genre.  Got it?  Contemplate the vision of hundreds of millions of church-types literally gorging, all week long, on the worship music of their choice.

(3)  Then, the churchman can attend church on Sunday morning, determined to face musical torture of twenty minutes without murmuring about whatever sort of music or non-music he is subjected to.  I realize that’s asking for a terrific work of supererogation, a counsel of perfection, but don’t leave yet, because…

(4)  All that will come easier if, to begin with, our “worshipper” realizes that to mumble and maunder about how horrible worship music is declares to the entire universe (including angels) his spiritual lunacy!  And his utter surrender to the level of a consumer and not a worshipper.  (“Mr. Music Man, I am not here to worship anybody; I am here as a consummate American Consumer and you had better give me what I want to consume or you’ll be the consummee!  You will remember, of course, that I, and I alone, among all humans, know what is acceptable to God and what is not acceptable to God in this matter!”)  Still difficult?

(5)  This process will be immeasurably easier if our “worshipper” would imagine, beforehand, the Judgment Seat of Christ where, inevitably (see I Corinthians 3: 9-15, etc.) the words, deeds, thoughts, motives, etc., of all Christians will be judged (yes, that’s the word).  Now, imagine listening to the testimonies of hundreds of thousands of modern Christians—men, women, and children—suffering martyrdom (I trust it won’t give pain to your tender sensibilities, but that word means to be murdered, often raped, tortured to death, decapitated, sometimes hacked to pieces, sometimes burned to death, often with family members being forced to watch). Missiologists report that on average, over 300,000 Christians every year are slaughtered like cattle (sorry!) for simply being Christians.  Don’t  move on until you get that report session well-fixed in your consciousness.

(6)  And, now, it is time for the modern Christian (perhaps YOU!) to report. “Ah, yes,” he retorts, “but think about me! I had to sit, every single Sunday morning (voice strident!) for a full hour, in a commodious and climate-controlled and secure and ornate edifice (our new auditorium was recognized as the most impressive new building in the city last year!) sitting on the softest seats in my city, with twenty-five churches to choose from, in a peaceful land, and hear horrid music which prompts one man to lift his hands and another to sit on them, with some swaying to the music and others standing like statues, some clapping hands and others clasping them, some patting one foot, another patting two, and a third refusing to deny Jesus by patting anything, and all that amid some songs ten verses long and others four verses short, some written ninety years ago and some nine minutes ago and some obviously never written at all!  The entire scene is utterly nauseous.  My friends and I, as a regular religious ritual, would drive in our luxury sedans out to the country club for Sunday lunch and we would all commiserate together over a sumptuous meal that we had to endure such torture, a torture comparable to having your toenails pulled out without anesthesia—and that for a full twenty minutes!  EVERY Sunday!  Think of ME!  Have you no PITY?”

That simple and inexpensive exercise would, infallibly, produce an immediate and permanent armistice in the celebrated church-music wars.  Punta finale!  Just saying.

An aside to all our third-world brothers and sisters:  it occurs to me that you know very little about that word anesthesia.  We, on the other hand, have produced an entire pharmacopeia on the subject.  And are constantly adding to that knowledge, discovering new and exotic ways to stop hurting.  We have learned how to assuage pain of every conceivable sort, including the pain demanded by “the cost of discipleship” as one of our true western martyrs recently phrased it.

I notice that you are quiet.  Good.  Maybe you will hear the angels weeping.

Bill Anderson