IFI was honored to have theologian, pastor, and courageous truth-teller Doug Wilson speak at our September banquet, after which he continued his critique of culture in an interview with Pastor Derek Buikema of the Orland Park Christian Reformed Church. Pastor Wilson addressed the cultural issues to which Christians must respond: abortion and “same-sex mirage.” Take a break from the holiday hubbub to savor and be both educated and challenged by words that more pastors and priests should be speaking.

We have two video versions for your consideration.  Our short “highlights” video is six minutes long and can be viewed HERE.

The full video interview can be viewed HERE.  So sit back and enjoy twenty-two minutes of instructive and uplifting conversation with Pastor Wilson. And if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with your friends.

Illinois Family Institute’s

FAITH, FAMILY & FREEDOM BANQUET
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

For the first time ever, IFI will be hosting two esteemed speakers, both of whom are prolific authors.

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine and a contributor to both LifeSiteNews and Crisis Magazine.

Douglas Wilson is the senior minister at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho; faculty member of New Saint Andrews College; one of the editors of the homeschooling Omnibus series; and apologist extraordinaire whose debates with famed atheist Christopher Hitchens were documented in the film Collision.

There are no better speakers than Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson to help shed light on the path forward for Christians in the aftermath of the arrogant and foolish Supreme Court same-sex faux-marriage decision. They demonstrate the kind of courage, wisdom, vision, and boldness desperately needed in such a time as this.

How should Christians think about and respond to the many challenges that face us as parents raising children, neighbors extending hospitality, citizens engaged in self-government, and employers and employees in a culture increasingly hostile to truth? What is morally permissible for Christian citizens and what is impermissible? What are our obligations to God and society?

Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson will offer answers to these vexing questions, and they will answer questions clearly. No ambiguous, strategic equivocating.

Here is a sampling of the kinds of things we may hear from Professor Esolen and Pastor Wilson.

Professor Esolen:

Kennedy has gotten everything wrong, as ambitious sentimentalists are wont to do. Man is worthy of our reverence as man. But his thoughts are worthy of our reverence only insofar as they are true. His deeds are worthy of our reverence only insofar as they are virtuous; and virtue is grounded in truth. I must revere the thief as man; I must not revere him as a thief, because he would be a better man, and more the man he was made to be, were he not a thief. I must revere the sodomite as man, not as sodomite, because he would be a better man if he could integrate his desires and his deeds with the reality of his body. The truth of the sexes, male and female, is stamped upon their bodies, so clearly that even children understand it. To treat a man with reverence is to honor that manhood, what is given to him in the structure of his mind and body; it is not something he has chosen. To treat a man as if he were a woman is to do violence to that manhood and that body. Need we spell this out?

Here finally I hear a soft and simpering voice, the last gasp of the lie. “But what harm will it do to pretend that the two men are married, even if, strictly speaking, they aren’t? Can’t we simply shrug and go about our business?” No, we can’t. Justice Kennedy is a kindly sentimentalist, but kindliness divorced from truth is no real virtue….Ignoring reality, ignoring the law of our being, ignoring the peculiar goodness of the sexes, is always foolish, even when it is not downright evil. You may pretend that such truths do not exist, just as you may pretend that you can suspend the law of gravity as you step off the edge of a cliff. Nature, and Nature’s God, are not required to oblige your fantasy.

And Christians of all people should remember the one whom Jesus called the father of lies.

Pastor Wilson:

In the aftermath of the Obergefell decision by the Supreme Court, a lot of Christian parents are reeling. They know they must do something, but what can they do? The decision was so high-handed, so arbitrary, so insolently rendered, that it would be easy to assume that there is nothing we can do about it down here at street level.

But this is false. There are many steps we can take, and some of the first ones are steps we must take. Here is one that millions of parents could take in just a small number of weeks—they could pull their kids out of the government school system.

The necessity of doing this has been growing increasingly obvious every year, and now the need for it is open, manifest, and pretty much on fire. What can Christian parents do? If their kids are already receiving a Christian education, they can be encouraged and stand fast — and they can use the opportunity to openly appeal to Christian friends who still have their kids in the government school system. And if they themselves still have kids where their kids ought not to be… well, this is the perfect opportunity to bolt. If anybody asks why, a reasonable answer would be anything in the neighborhood of “fire on the mountain, run, boys, run!”

…If your children remain in the government schools, there is now no legal way for them to be taught any normal view of human sexuality. And, depend upon it, they will be taught the other kinds.

We at IFI look forward to seeing you on September 18! Bring your older children, parents, friends, neighbors, and church leaders. This will be a very special night.

Order your tickets now!

Event Details:

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center
2401 W. Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois  60169

Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Secure your tickets now – click here or call (708) 781-9328.

Program advertisements & banquet sponsorships are available. 

Professor Anthony Esolen is one of America’s cultural treasures. He writes about moral decline in America with insight, boldness, and eloquence—no timid, hesitant, evasive speech from Professor Esolen. Many people—though not nearly enough—know Professor Esolen through his writing for LifeSiteNews, and Touchstone and Crisis Magazines.

IFI has the distinct honor and privilege of hosting Professor Esolen along with Pastor Douglas Wilson at our upcoming very special banquet, which takes place in just 4 1/2 short months on September 18, 2015.

Those like me who read everything they can by Professor Esolen will welcome this opportunity hear him in person, and those who are unfamiliar with his work must come to be introduced to this remarkable cultural warrior.

To whet your appetite for bold, impassioned truth-telling, here is a recent piece Professor Esolen wrote on the pernicious lies with which leftist sexual revolutionaries have poisoned America:

Fools or Liars?

The latest apologists for the Sexual Revolution – that great swamp of sewage backup, human misery, family breakdown, squalid entertainment, and lawyers – have been saying that the most radical anthropological breach ever known to man, the detachment of marriage from childbirth and the plain facts of nature, will have no effect (none at all, not to worry) on marriage and childbirth and family and community life.

To which I reply, “Haven’t you said that before?” About what exactly have the sexual revolutionaries been right? Which of their non-predictions has been confirmed?

They told us that liberalization of the divorce laws – the no-fault divorce that libertarians so heedlessly pushed – would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the frequency of divorce. The new laws would only make divorce less painful to the couple, and consequently less painful to the children. For there are such things as “good” divorces.

By a miracle of sympathy and maturity beyond their years, children would be happy to find their parents happy. In fact, they could never be happy otherwise. No one troubled to ask how their parents could possibly be happy in the teeth of their children’s sorrow. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that. Or they were lying; one or the other.

They told us that “everybody was doing it,” with “it” growing gradually more immoral and unnatural, basing their assertions upon research conducted by that pedophile and fraud, Alfred Kinsey. Therefore, they said, to smile upon fornication was not to change anything, except to relieve everybody from reproach, and allow them to do open and honestly what they had been doing dishonestly and in secret.

In one generation the relations between the sexes were utterly transformed, so that girls (and boys too) who wanted to practice the ordinary virtue of prudence, and even the more difficult virtue of chastity, were “immiserated,” left out, lonely. In the old days, a boy’s heart might leap if the girl gave him a kiss. Now he can hardly feign a bit of affection unless she brings him to climax. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that too. Or they were lying.

They told us that pornography was an innocent pastime for a minority of people interested in it. It had nothing to do with violence. It would not coarsen the culture. You would be able to keep children away from it. No effect, none at all, not to worry. Need I comment on this one? They were wrong, or they were lying.

They told us that the Pill would result in fewer children being conceived out of wedlock, and that liberalizing the abortion laws would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the number of women seeking them. Pope Paul in Humanae vitae predicted otherwise. Now forty percent of children in America are born out of wedlock, most of them to grow up without a stable home. And by the testimony of the Supreme Court itself, abortion has become so intimate a part of a woman’s life, as the failsafe against the misfortune of making a child when you do the child-making thing, that it cannot possibly be scaled back now. Again, the revolutionaries were wrong, or they were lying.

I should say they were lying again, because the evidence they brought before the courts had always been a mass of fabrications.

They told us that little children introduced to sex by sweet and gentle older people would suffer no great harm by it, unless parents overreacted. They had for a while to forget that they ever said it, but now that the Catholic Church has cleaned house, they are forgetting that they forgot it, and are starting to sing the same old tune: no harm, none at all, not to worry. They were and are wrong, or they were and are lying.

They told us that the ERA, which was never ratified but which has been litigated into law anyway, would not result in such absurdities as women being sent into combat, the end of single-sex public colleges, unisex bathrooms, and the normalization of homosexuality. No effect, none at all, not to worry. They were wrong about that, or they were lying.

What have they gotten right? Have the relations between men and women ever been more suspicious, more fraught with anger and shame? according to their own testimony, our colleges are swarming jungles of assault and rape. That was not so before the revolutionaries did their work.

They said that abortion would not lead to euthanasia. Now they are glad that it has led to euthanasia, and they say that euthanasia, doctor-assisted snuffing, will not lead to killing elderly people without their consent. Actually, it has led to killing elderly people without their consent. Elderly people are subjected to slow and purportedly painless suffocation every day, in every hospital in the country. No effect, none at all, not to worry.

We were told that extending the notion (not the reality, which is impossible, but the pretense) of marriage to same-sex couples will have no effect, none at all, on anything else in the land. It will have no effect on what children are taught in school. It will have no effect on the number of young people experimenting in the unnatural. It will have no effect on religious liberty. It will have no effect on freedom of speech.

It could not possibly have any effect on such things, because, we were told, the behavior in question was perfectly natural, engaged in by perfectly healthy people. It was not an unnatural moral and psychological disorder, impossible to render natural, which could only be shored up by coercion. No effect, none at all, not to worry. And by the way, agree or be destroyed.

When have they ever been right in their predictions? Why should we trust them now?

The IFI Banquet is a rare opportunity to hear Professor Esolen, who is coming from Providence, Rhode Island and Pastor Wilson, who is coming from Moscow, Idaho. Please come and bring your family, friends, church leaders, and neighbors to hear these two brave, brilliant, inspiring men of God who through their uncompromising commitment to transcendent, eternal, unchanging truths will inspire us all to do more and better.

Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Event Details:

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center
2401 W. Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois  60169