Written by Jerry Newcombe

After President Donald Trump named Vice President Mike Pence last week to lead nation’s battle against the coronavirus, many in the media decried the choice because supposedly Mike Pence “doesn’t believe in science.” How could he? He’s a Christian. So the logic goes.

They mock along the lines of: Maybe he just wants to pray the virus away.

The late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped, “Why is Mike Pence in charge? What is his plan to stop the virus, abstinence?”

Writing for mediaite.com (2/26/20), Reed Richardson noted,

“President Donald Trump’s decision to task Mike Pence with heading up the federal government’s coronavirus response triggered an immediate backlash as critics noted the vice president’s record of doubting scientific evidence and his role in exacerbating an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor.”

Richardson argues that Pence allegedly did a poor job in quelling the HIV outbreak in Indiana because for two days, he cancelled a needle exchange program and supposedly during those two days, the HIV “infection rates exploded.” After praying about it, Pence relented. An explosion of new cases in just two days?

Meanwhile, Richardson has compiled many comments from those criticizing Trump’s choice of Pence for this fight. Included in the criticisms is that he doesn’t believe in “climate science.” Why should he? Man-made catastrophic climate change is a hoax.

Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted against the choice of Pence: “Trump’s plan for the coronavirus so far:…Have VP Pence, who wanted to ‘pray away’ HIV epidemic, oversee the response…Disgusting.”

Another socialist, Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented:

“Mike Pence literally does not believe in science. It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic.”

One critic tweeted:

“America is a driving force in fighting epidemics, and now the director of that fight is Mike Pence, a guy who’s [sic] scientific knowledge consists of how many times you have to pray before you’re cured of being gay.”

An M.D. remarked,

“Trump names Mike Pence as the Coronavirus Czar rather than CDC Director Robert Redfield or Surgeon General Jerome Adams. A physician should be in charge of the nation’s coronavirus response, not some dude who quarantines himself from other women when dining out.”

It seems like most of the criticisms are that Pence is unqualified to head up this task force because he is a devout Christian. Therefore, the same people who argue that a man can give birth  are pro-science, while because of his Christianity, Mike Pence is supposedly anti-science.

The canard that Christians are somehow anti-science is astounding. After all, Christian invented modern science. As the great astronomer Johannes Kepler put it, the scientist is a priest of the Most High God, “thinking His thoughts after Him.” A rational God had created a rational world, and it was the scientist’s job to try and discover God’s laws in nature.

The founder of every major branch of science was created by a Bible-believing Christian of one stripe or another. I highlighted this in a previous post. As the great evangelical thinker, Dr. Os Guinness, once told me, “Actually, many of the earliest, and some of the very greatest of scientists have been people of enormous faith.”

Daniel Lapin is an author and an orthodox Jewish rabbi. He once told me in an interview about the impact of Christianity on the world, “Sir Isaac Newton wrote far more on faith, theology and religion than he wrote on gravitation. And there is a reason for that. Once we are given a clue, wait a second, ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,’ then that tells me that one way I can get to know God better is by studying heaven and earth. And that’s why, until relatively recently, all the great scientists were also great Christians.”

Lapin also said, “If you look at the last thousand years…ninety-eight percent of all the major technological scientific medical advances took place again, let’s face it, under Christendom: they were in Christian countries.”

As D. James Kennedy and I noted in our book, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?: “Both Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) have stressed that modern science was born out of the Christian world view…..Whitehead [in his 1925 book, Science and the Modern World] said that Christianity is the mother of science because of ‘the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.’”

The arguments that Mike Pence is disqualified from serving as the top executive to fight the spread of this virus because of his Christian commitment makes no sense.

Pence has a good record of mobilizing people to work together for the common good—and to do so in a humble attitude of “servant leadership.”

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

More than 60 years ago, in “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis challenged his readers to enter the town square and the marketplace of ideas with boldness and confidence. He argued that in failing to do so, we would become “men without chests;” a culture of heartless people divorced from any agreement of what is right and wrong; a society of disconnected individuals who care little for what is enduring, accurate or true.

The Oxford don warned of a time when questions would lie fallow in a field of disingenuous inquiry with little interest in a harvest of answers.

With the political season upon us, we face a time of big questions.

Life: When does it begin, when does it end, and who has the right to define it and take it?

Climate: Is the theory of anthropomorphic warming scientific, principled or opportunistic?

Sexuality: What is healthy and best for body, soul, family and society?

Tolerance: Are all worldviews and religions epistemologically, ontologically and morally equal?

Women: Is a female a biological fact? Should she have the right to her own bathroom, facilities and sport?

Feminism: Can you be a feminist if you deny the reality of the feminine?

Socialism: With 100 million already dead at its hand, why are we intent on repeating history?

Immigration: Can a nation exist if it doesn’t have clearly defined and defended borders?

Justice: If society rather than God defines justice, then isn’t the concept of what is just and unjust somewhat arbitrary, meaningless and potentially deadly?

These are fundamental questions. But do we really want answers? In the present political climate, do we care more about silencing our opponents than correcting our opinions? Do we want to learn, or are we content to lecture? Does our query assume that one position is going to be closer to the truth than another? Are we honest enough to want an answer even at the expense of being wrong?

In “The Great Divorce,” Lewis challenges our intellectual laziness and political expediency.

“Our opinions were not honestly come by,” he said. “We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful … You know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause.”

He goes on:

“You and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn’t want the other to be true. We were afraid … of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule.”

“Having allowed [ourselves] to drift, unresisting …, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the [the truth]. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend.”

Lewis concludes:

“Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again … You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry [was made] for truth.”

The critical question for us today is obvious. Do we really want answers? Or are we more interested in seeking “good marks and saying the kind of things that win applause?” Do we embody childlike sincerity in wanting to know what is true, or do we look more like manipulative teenagers who are merely hungry for popularity? Do we want our arguments to be right, or would we rather be politically correct and “fashionable?”

Os Guinness, in his book “Time for Truth,” challenges our adolescent tendency to eschew the factual in favor of the faddish: “Truth does not yield to opinion or fashion,” he says. “It is simply true, and that is the end of it. It is one of the Permanent Things. Truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it.”

Thus, both Lewis and Guinness make it clear that confidence in popular trends (i.e., fallacies of argumentum ad populum) has very little, if anything, to do with ideological veracity. Truth is not determined by vim, vigor or a vote.

In this New Year, perhaps our resolution should be to humbly set aside our adolescent desire for “good marks” and, instead, seek what is true (even if it is dreadfully unpopular) and give up what is false (even if it is a dearly loved passion).

The integrity of real questions demands nothing less.

Dr. Everett Piper, former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017). This article was originally published at the WashingtonTimes.com.

No, the title of this article was not ripped from the virtual pages of the satirical website Babylon Bee.

A Time Magazine article on InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s (IV) 20-page internal policy position paper on human sexuality is generating a huge brouhaha.

IV, an evangelical parachurch organization that includes 667 college chapters as well as InterVarsity Press which publishes books by D.A. Carson, William Lane Craig, Os Guinness, J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul, and John Stott, distributed this position paper, which addresses sexual abuse, divorce, premarital sex/cohabitation, adultery, pornography, and same-sex “marriage,” to employees in March 2015. Beginning in November 2016, employees will be required to affirm these historical and biblically consonant positions.

It will come as no surprise that the IV position that is causing all the vexation,  huffing, and puffing is its position on marriage—a position that “progressive” disciples of diversity believe no individual and no organization should be permitted to affirm. And I guess that goes for Jesus who created marriage:

“He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

As theologian Denny Burk tweeted, “We live in a day when this is news: Intervarsity stands with scripture and the consensus of the entire 2,000-year history of the Christian church.”

Leftists are fake-enraged over this non-news, and others are wondering why the theologically orthodox IV is making clear its theologically orthodox views on marriage now.

There are two good reasons for IV to make clear its views on marriage now, neither of which should need to be identified but for the cave-dwellers among us, here they are:

1.)  If churches and parachurch organizations are not crystal clear in articulating their positions on matters related to sexuality and if they do not require affirmation of and behavioral adherence to these theological positions, the litigious Left will come after them.

2.) The anti-cultural mess we’re mired in has resulted in either the church’s cowardly silence on essential matters pertaining to homosexuality or its embrace of heretical views on these matters. Between the corrosive ideas on sexuality in general and marriage in particular that pervade American public life, Christians and especially young Christians are being deceived. Christians need clarity, correction, and unequivocal, unambiguous teaching.

A young IV worker cited in the Time Magazine  article provides troubling evidence of the heretical views being adopted by Christian youth:

Bianca Louie, 26, led the InterVarsity campus fellowship at Mills College, a women’s liberal-arts school in Oakland and her alma mater….Louie and about 10 other InterVarsity staff formed an anonymous queer collective earlier this year to organize on behalf of staff, students and alumni who felt unsafe under the new policy. They compiled dozens of stories of individuals in InterVarsity programs and presented them to national leadership. “I think one of the hardest parts has been feeling really dismissed by InterVarsity….The queer collective went through a very biblical, very spiritual process, with the Holy Spirit, to get to where we are. I think a lot of people think those who are affirming [same-sex marriage] reject the Bible, but we have landed where we have because of Scripture, which is what InterVarsity taught us to do.

I’m pretty sure it was neither Scripture nor the Holy Spirit that led the queer collective to affirm same-sex “marriage.”

Theologically orthodox pastor and well-known speaker Skye Jethani has written a very good blog post articulating the reasons IV’s policy directive is both a “big deal” and a good and even necessary document. That said, Jethani concludes his post with this head-scratching comment:

However, I do grieve that rather than allowing Christians, and particularly younger Christians, grow in their understanding of these matters in an environment of grace and inclusivity, wonderful ministries like InterVarsity are being forced to take premature and artificially divisive stands.

Would Jethani grieve if IV were to take an unequivocal and explicit position on consensual adult incest, bestiality, polyamory, or slavery? Would he grieve if IV required employees to affirm biblical positions on these issues rather than allowing them to “grow in their understanding of these matters in an environment of grace and inclusivity?” How is requiring employees to hold fast to biblical truth lacking in grace?

And although Christianity (like “progressivism”) is exclusive in that it holds some beliefs to be false, it is inclusive in that anyone who repents and follows Christ is included. In order to repent and receive God’s grace and mercy, people need to know what constitutes sin. And surely those, like IV employees, who already claim to be Christ-followers, should know and affirm truth.

Moreover, IV’s position is neither premature nor artificially divisive. If IV has employees who reject biblical truth on marriage, heresy has created the division—not IV. And if IV has employees that embrace heresy, IV is late to the party decorated with rainbow-appropriated streamers.

Marriage is a picture of Christ and his bride, the church. The belief that marriage can be the union of two men or two women necessarily entails the belief that there is no difference in role, function, or nature between Christ the bridegroom and his bride, the church. Further, affirming the false belief that marriage can be a same-sex union undermines respect for the authority of Scripture and not just on marriage.

Every church and parachurch organization and every Christian should explicitly affirm the biblical view of marriage as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has done.

Our get-out-the-vote campaign is up and running. We are distributing the IFI Voter Guide to hundreds of churches, civic groups and tea party organizations. Will you financially support our endeavor to educate Illinois voters and promote family values?  Donate today.

Written by Eric Metaxas

To those of you who don’t think religious freedom is that important, I’ve got a message for you: It isn’t. It isn’t, that is, if you don’t care about any of your freedoms. 

In early May, I had the honor of delivering the commencement address at Hillsdale College in Michigan. National Review has described Hillsdale as a “citadel of American conservatism,” though the college wasn’t founded by conservatives in the modern American sense, but by Christians.

So I used the opportunity afforded me to speak about the link between faith and freedom.

I noted the “unprecedented threat” to religious freedom we currently face. The threat isn’t only to religious believers and their institutions—it threatens all of our liberties.  You cannot redefine religious freedom and compromise this liberty without calling the entire idea of self-government into question.

To understand why, it helps to remember that when the Founders prohibited the establishment of religion by the national government, they were not being anti-religion.

On the contrary, they wished to protect religion from all state intervention. Government had no business picking winners in the sphere of religion. It must stand back and let the people decide—let the free market of ideas do its work.

But there was more to religious freedom than the Establishment Clause. The Founders also enshrined a right to the free exercise of religion. The free exercise of religion goes beyond what happens on Sundays. It means allowing your beliefs to shape the way you live your life every day of the week.

The Founders knew that a robust exercise of religion was necessary for America to survive, that people exercising their religious convictions was vital to the success of this fragile experiment in liberty called America.

In his book, “A Free People’s Suicide,” my dear friend Os Guinness has written about what the Founders called the “Golden Triangle of Freedom.” Simply put, Freedom requires Virtue. Virtue requires Faith. And Faith requires Freedom.  And Freedom requires virtue and round and round it goes.

But why does freedom require virtue? Well, because American freedom means self-government. And how are the people to govern themselves if they have no virtue? If we have no virtue, won’t we just vote to line our own pockets and elect people who will give us what we want? Isn’t it obvious that the more virtuous a people is, the fewer policemen we need? The fewer prisons we’ll need to build?

John Adams famously said our government was not armed “with power sufficient to contend with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . .  Our Constitution,” he said, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Okay, so Freedom requires Virtue. But does Virtue require Religion? Well, not always. There are many people who are religious and corrupt, and many people who have no religion and are virtuous. But generally speaking, those who acknowledge a higher power and the laws of that higher power tend to be more virtuous than those who do not, or those who believe they can make whatever laws they like and who are beholden to no one.

The third leg of the triangle, Religion requires Freedom, is the simplest to understand.  We need only consider the Middle East or—God help them—North Korea.

Attempts to curtail the religious freedom that makes our freedoms possible is what Os rightly called “suicide.” And just as any decent person would try to dissuade someone from killing himself, Christians must oppose the current attempts to kill the source of their freedom.

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.com website.

To get your copy of Os Guinness’s tremendous book “A Free People’s Suicide,” please visit the BreakPoint.org online store.  And if you’d like to see a video of my speech at Hillsdale College or read the text of it, just come to my website, ericmetaxas.com.