The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.

This article was originally posted on the Wall Street Journal blog.

There are a number of Americans of which every young boy and girl should learn. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Sam Houston, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, and Louis Zamperini. Zamperini (or “Zamp” to his friends) first achieved celebrity as track athlete in the 1932 Berlin Olympics. A head-strong young boy from Torrance, California, Zamp came out of nowhere to place 8th overall in the 5,000m event.

In 1943, as 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, his bombardier was shot down over the Pacific, more than 800 miles away from Hawaii. The survivors of the crash drifted in their survival raft for 47 days, battling hungry sharks and starvation to eventually land on the Marshall Islands. The Japanese captured them and imprisoned Zamp in a series of increasingly oppressive P.O.W. camps until the camps were eventually liberated and Zamperini returned home as a hero.

Do we belong to the same country which spawned Louie Zamperini? Some days it is hard to tell. By that I mean, think about some of the Americans who have accomplished the most memorable feats over the past 20 years. Lance Armstrong, won seven Tour de France titles and beat testicular cancer—admitted to a doping scheme, stripped of his titles. Barry Bonds, hit 762 home-runs in his career—allegedly used a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs during his career. Michael Phelps, won 18 Olympic gold medals during his career—has been caught hitting a bong and driving-drunk, suspended from all swimming competitions.

These three men have scaled the zenith of American achievement over the past 20 years. Yes, to some degree they are cherry-picked, since there have been other Americans who accomplished great things (Cal Ripken Jr, Nik Wallenda, etc.), but the fact that three of the most accomplished Americans in recent memory are a) athletes and b) of dubious character proves that our concept of remarkable has changed dramatically.

Do we still have true American heroes?

Or are we left with talented athletes as our best and brightest?

We absolutely do have true American heroes. They are all around us. Sadly we usually don’t know their names, or the particularities of the Hell they went through on our behalf, because they are often reticent to speak about their service. The Armed Forces of the United States of America are hero factories. They prepare the best of us to protect the rest of us. Even today, while these institutions are under attack by an effeminate administration which finds itself threatened by their selfless heroics and ruthless efficiency in the face of evil, even today there are still young men and women lining up to serve their country.

So why doesn’t valor engender celebrity in 21st-century America? For a number of reasons, the first being that we have become a cynical people who are motivated primarily by self-gratification and sensual pleasures. Much like a citizen in the late Roman Empire, honor has ceased to be the goal. We would prefer to experience the latest salacious indulgence than think about self-sacrifice.

Another reason is that the prevalence of moral relativism has watered down the potency of concepts like valor and honor in this country. As more people come to believe that there are no moral absolutes, they put little stock in those who live their lives as paragons of those absolutes. The average college student, who thinks that we each create our own morality, cannot accept the integrity of a man who believes so strongly in living honorably that he would give up his life to prevent Evil from achieving success. The terms Good and Evil are meaningless to this poor, befuddled student and so he is left unable to understand or appreciate the heroic individuals in our midst.

The exciting thing is that this Christmas Season, not one, but two films which depict true stories of valor, honor, and indomitable will, open nationwide. Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie, and American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, tell the true stories of Louis Zamperini and Chris Kyle, respectively. While I have no clue yet how faithful these films will be to their source material, and the real lives on which that material was based, we have a rare opportunity to enjoy tales of American valor and skill on a scale not seen more than once or twice in a generation. The lessons these men can teach through the example of the lives they led are desperately needed today in America.

Unless we desire the fate of the late Roman Empire, we must recalibrate our concept of remarkable and once again seek the noble and honorable as our celebrities. Not for their athletic prowess, but for their intestinal fortitude and unbreakable will.

The first great challenge of my life was when, as a kid, I made the transition from a dissipated teenager to a dedicated athlete. Another was staying alive for forty-seven days after my plane crashed, then surviving prison camp. The best way to meet any challenge is to be prepared for it. All athletes want to win, but in a raft, in a war, you must win. Luckily, and wisely, I was prepared—and I did win.  ~Louis Zamperini

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matthew 5:13)

At the recent fund raising banquet for Abstinence & Education Partnership, Dr. Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church spoke with IFI’s Monte Larrick about recent developments in the state of religious liberty and the Church’s presence in the public square. Watch the interview below:

Help us reach our goal of raising a total of $80,000 during the month of December.

You can also send a gift by mail to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
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100 Truths About Jesus:

1) Jesus claimed to be God – John 8:24 8:56-59 10:30-33

2) Jesus created all things – John 1:3; Col 1:15-17

3) Jesus is before all things – Col 1:17

4) Jesus is eternal – John 1:1, 14 8:58

5) Jesus is honored the same as the Father – John 5:23

6) Jesus is prayed to – Acts 7:55-60

7) Jesus is worshipped – Matt 2:2, 11; 14:33; John 9:35-38; Heb 1:6

8) Jesus is called God – John 1:1, 14; 20:28; Col 2:9; Titus 2:13

9) Jesus is omnipresent – Matt 28:20

10 Jesus is with us always – Matt 28:20

11) Jesus is our only mediator between God and man – 1 Tim 2:5

12) Jesus is the guarantee of a better covenant – Heb 7:22 8:6

13) Jesus said, “I AM the Bread of Life” – John 6:35, 41, 48, 51

14) Jesus said, “I AM the Door” – John 10:7, 9

15) Jesus said, “I AM the Good Shepherd” – John 10:11, 14

16) Jesus said, “I AM the Way the Truth and The Life” – John 14:6

17) Jesus said, “I AM the Light of the world” – John 8:12; 9:5; 12:46; Luke 2:32

18) Jesus said, “I AM the True Vine” – John 15:1, 5

19) Jesus said, “I AM the Resurrection and the Life” – John 11:25

20) Jesus said, “I AM the First and the Last” – Rev 1:17; 2:8 22:13

21) Jesus always lives to make intercession for us – Heb 7:25

22) Jesus cleanses from sin – 1 John 1:9

23) Jesus discloses Himself to us – John 14:21

24) Jesus draws all men to Himself – John 12:32

25) Jesus forgives sins – Matt 9:1-7; Luke 5:20 7:48

26) Jesus gives eternal life – John 10:28 5:40

27) Jesus gives joy – John 15:11

28) Jesus gives peace – John 14:27

29) Jesus has authority – Matt 28:18; John 5:26-27; 17:2 3:35

30) Jesus judges – John 5:22, 27

31) Jesus knows all men – John 16:30

32) Jesus opens the mind to understand scripture – Luke 24:45

33) Jesus received honor and glory from the Father – 2 Pet 1:17

34) Jesus resurrects – John 5:39; 6:40, 44, 54 11:25-26

35) Jesus reveals grace and truth – John 1:17 see John 6:45

36) Jesus reveals the Father – Matt 11:27; Luke 10:22

37) Jesus saves forever – Matt 18:11; John 10:28; Heb 7:25

38) Jesus bears witness of Himself – John 8:18 14:6

39) Jesus’ works bear witness of Himself – John 5:36 10:25

40) The Father bears witness of Jesus – John 5:37; 8:18; 1 John 5:9

41) The Holy Spirit bears witness of Jesus – John 15:26

42) The multitudes bear witness of Jesus – John 12:17

43) The Prophets bear witness of Jesus – Acts 10:43

44) The Scriptures bear witness of Jesus – John 5:39

45) The Father will honor us if we serve Jesus – John 12:26 see Col 3:24

46) The Father wants us to fellowship with Jesus – 1 Cor 1:9

47) The Father tells us to listen to Jesus – Luke 9:35; Matt 17:5

48) The Father tells us to come to Jesus – John 6:45

49) The Father draws us to Jesus – John 6:44

50) Everyone who’s heard & learned from the Father comes to Jesus – John 6:45

51) The Law leads us to Christ – Gal 3:24

52) Jesus is the Rock – 1 Cor 10:4

53) Jesus is the Savior – John 4:42; 1 John 4:14

54) Jesus is King – Matt 2:1-6; Luke 23:3

55) In Jesus are the treasures of wisdom and knowledge – Col 2:2-3

56) In Jesus we have been made complete Col 2:10

57) Jesus indwells us – Col 1:27

58) Jesus sanctifies – Heb 2:11

59) Jesus loves – Eph 5:25

60) We come to Jesus – John 5:50; 6:35, 37, 45, 65; 7:37;

61) We sin against Jesus – 1 Cor 8:12

62) We receive Jesus – John 1:12; Col 2:6

63) Jesus makes many righteous – Rom 5:19

64) Jesus is the image of the invisible God – Heb 1:3

65) Jesus sends the Holy Spirit – John 15:26

66) Jesus abides forever – Heb 7:24

67) Jesus offered up Himself – Heb 7:27 9:14

68) Jesus offered one sacrifice for sins for all time – Heb 10:12

69) The Son of God has given us understanding – 1 John 5:20

70) Jesus is the author and perfecter of our faith – Heb 12:2

71) Jesus is the Apostle and High Priest of our confession – Heb 1:3

72) Jesus is preparing a place for us in heaven – John 14:1-4

73) Jesus cleanses us from our sins by His blood – Rev 1:5; Rom 5:9

74) Jesus is the Light of the world – Rom 9:5

75) Jesus has explained the Father – John 1:18

76) Jesus was crucified because of weakness – 2 Cor 13:4

77) Jesus has overcome the world – John 16:33

78) Truth is in Jesus – Eph 4:21

79) The fruit of righteousness comes through Jesus Christ – Phil 1:11

80) Jesus delivers us from the wrath to come – 1 Thess 1:10

81) Disciples bear witness of Jesus Christ – John 15:27

82) Jesus died and rose again – 1 Thess 4:14

83) The Christian dead have fallen asleep in Jesus – 1 Thess 4:15

84) Jesus died for us – 1 Thess 5:10

85) Jesus tasted death for everyone – Heb 2:9

86) Jesus rendered the devil powerless – Heb 2:14

87) Jesus is able to save completely – Heb 7:25

88) Jesus was a ransom for many and to serve – Matt 20:28

89) Jesus came to be a high priest – Heb 2:17

90) Jesus came to save – John 3:17; Luke 19:10

91) Jesus came to preach the kingdom of God – Luke 4:43

92) Jesus came to bring division – Luke 12:51

93) Jesus came to do the will of the Father – John 6:38

94) Jesus came to give the Father’s words – John 17:8

95) Jesus came to testify to the truth – John 18:37

96) Jesus came to die and destroy Satan’s power – Heb 2:14

97) Jesus came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets – Matt 5:17

98) Jesus came to give life – John 10:10, 28

99) Jesus came to taste death for everyone – Heb 2:9

100) Jesus came to proclaim freedom for believers – Luke 4:18

~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

• “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
• “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
• “I believe in reason and logic!”
• “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
• “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
• “I put my faith in science.”
• And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

Help us reach our goal of raising a total of $80,000 by the end of the month – Donate today!

To make a credit card donation over the phone, call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.

You can also send a gift by mail to:

Illinois Family Institute
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Carol Stream, IL  60188

For the last several years, Christian leaders have been asking, “What’s wrong with us and our message today? Why do so many people have such a negative view of the Church?”

But are those the right questions to ask? Should we expect the gospel to be popular with the world?

On the one hand, it’s always good for us to examine ourselves and to ask the hard questions.

Are we rightly representing our Savior? Do our lives reflect who He is?

Does the society associate us with purity or corruption, with integrity or scandal, with compassion or selfishness?

Sadly, all too often, we have fallen short in our conduct and example to the point that, in 1989, I wrote, “Look at our American scene today. The reproach we suffer is not for the Messiah’s sake; we are not scorned because of our militant stand. No. We are mocked because of our leaders’ sins, because of our failure to be holy and clean. Gospel and greed seem to go hand in hand, and our society equates evangelist with exploiter. Yet Jesus is the Head of the Body! How can this be?”

And if we’re really candid, we will have to admit that we have often put our trust in the arm of the flesh, leaning on parties to carry out our agenda rather than trusting in the power of the gospel and the life of the Spirit (with the help of the government rather than dependence on it).

For all these failures (among many others), we need to humble ourselves and repent, having dishonored the Lord and driven sinners away from Him. May God help us to take responsibility for our sins!

But there’s another side to the story that is often overlooked today.

Who said the gospel is supposed to be popular with the lost and rebellious? Why do we measure our effectiveness for the Lord and our loyalty to Him based on what the world thinks about us?

We are certainly called to let the light of our good deeds shine brightly (Matthew 5:14-16), to live honorable lives before non-believers (1 Peter 2:12), and to have a good reputation with outsiders, especially if we are leaders (1 Timothy 3:7).

But let us not deceive ourselves. We will never be more Christlike than Christ, and just as the world hated Him, it will hate us too, no matter how exemplary our lives might be (John 15:18-20).

You say, “But isn’t the gospel good news?”

Yes, of course it is good news – unspeakably good news.

It is the message of salvation as a free gift through the shed blood of Jesus.

It is the message of unmerited forgiveness, the almost inexpressible display of divine mercy, the astounding declaration of the love of God.

But it is a message that calls on sinners to repent and acknowledge their guilt and to confess Jesus as Lord (Acts 2:38; Romans 10:9-10).

And it is a message that is often criticized, maligned, and mocked, a message that is very costly to preach.

That’s why the apostles were persecuted and killed, why servant-messengers like Stephen were stoned to death, and why Paul reminded Timothy that everyone who lived a godly life would be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12).

The truth is that godliness is not always popular, and when everyone speaks well of us, we know that something is wrong. That’s how past generations spoke about the false prophets (Luke 6:26).

People who live in darkness, by their very nature, hate the light.

People who are proud and rebellious do not take well to the call to submit to the lordship of Jesus.

People who are self-righteous are not quick to admit their guilt.

That’s why the rulers of the nations “take counsel together, against the LORD and against his anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.'” (Psalm 2:2-3)

As Paul wrote, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Or, in the words of John, “We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

Yet today, as if Satan had not blinded the hearts and minds of the lost, we are told that if the world is to accept us, we must avoid controversial social issues (like abortion and same-sex “marriage”) and preach a non-confrontational, positive-only message.

But to do so is to conform to the world rather than transform the world, to bow down to the spirit of the age rather than liberate the lost from the dominion of darkness.

How can we be so shortsighted and naïve?

Long ago the people of Israel said to the prophets, “‘Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.'” (Isaiah 30:10-11)

In response to this challenge, the prophet Isaiah replied, “Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel . . .” (Isaiah 30:12).

That is exactly what we must do today, seeking to please the Lord rather than people, exercising wisdom and compassion in the midst of our obedience yet being determined to speak and do what is right regardless of cost or consequence. That is the ultimate manifestation of love for a dying world.

Otherwise, in our zeal to avoid offending the world, we end up offending the Lord.

For the first seventy or so years of Christianity’s existence, the Greco-Roman world paid it relatively little attention. There were persecutions here and there (like the one that claimed the lives of Peter and Paul). But, for the most part, it wasn’t until the second century that their pagan neighbors began to focus their attention on just how different Christians were.

As Michael J. Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary wrote at The Gospel Coalition, one major difference was that “Christians would not pay homage to the other ‘gods’ ” of the Roman world. Since paying homage to these “gods” was a civic as well as a religious duty, this refusal caused Christians to be viewed with suspicion. Incredibly, some pagans even accused Christians of atheism!

As Kruger notes, there was another area in which Christians stood out like the proverbial sore thumb: and that was sex. As Kruger writes, “While it was not unusual for Roman citizens to have multiple sexual partners, homosexual encounters, and engagement with temple prostitutes, Christians stood out precisely because they refused to engage in these practices.”

Thus Tertullian, the second-century apologist who has been called the “Father of Western Theology,” wrote that Christians “do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us except our wives.”

The author of the second century “Epistle to Diognetus” wrote that Christians speak and dress like their neighbors and added “[Christians] share their meals, but not their sexual partners.”

Obviously, Christians regarded sexual ethics as a mark of what it meant to be what Peter called “a peculiar people.”

But that still leaves us with the question “why?” Were they and the God they worshipped “killjoys” who were opposed to pleasure? That’s how they and we have often been depicted, that is, when they (and we) weren’t being accused of trying to subjugate and oppress women.

To understand why all of this is, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts,” you need to understand the world into which Christianity was born and how revolutionary the Christian message concerning sex really was.

That’s one of the subjects of “Paul Among The People” by classicist Sarah Ruden.

The “Paul” being referred to was of course the apostle Paul, whom many moderns at best regard as “grumpy” when it came to women and sex.

As Ruden says, “Paul was not a 20th-century feminist . . . but [modern women are] the beneficiaries of a very long list of reforms. [And] Paul, I think, got all that started.”

To understand why that’s the case, it helps to remember that much of the sexual activity Michael Kruger refers to was far from-consensual. It was little more than “institutionalized violence,” which included “the rape of slaves, prostitution, and violence against wives and children.”

Paul’s denunciation of the sexual mores of his time was a part of his larger message “of all people being sacred children of God” and an expression of outrage at how they were being treated.

In other words, it was a message of true freedom.

Thus, when Christians refused to share their wives, it was a gift to their wives, who, in pagan society, had no say in the matter. When they honored women pledged to perpetual virginity, they were setting young women free from being treated as assets by their father in cementing alliances with other families.

Christians weren’t anti-sex, they were pro-human dignity. So much so that their sexual morality and vision for marriage shaped and transformed the culture around them. Not the other way around.

And that’s something modern Christians would do very well to remember.

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

Earlier this year, I told you about some of the challenges in reaching Millennials for Christ, that is, young adults aged roughly 18 to 33. While 55 percent of Baby Boomers say they’re religious, only 36 percent of Millennials do. “Today,” University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox notes, “fully 29 percent of Millennials consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, a record postwar high. They are also much less likely to describe themselves as ‘religious’ compared with earlier generations of Americans.”

Well, how is this rising generation connecting to the Bible? In a word, poorly. According to a new study by the Barna Group, “Non-Christian Millennials hold ambivalent and sometimes extremely negative views about the Bible.”

How negative? The first thing to know is that a full 62 percent of non-Christian Millennials have never even read the Bible. Friends, that’s the kind of world in which we live—one with tremendous ignorance of God’s Word. It’s no wonder that the nation has gone so far downhill, so fast, because we can’t expect people to live like Christians if they aren’t Christians, and especially if they don’t even have a passing acquaintance with the Scriptures.

Non-Christian Millennials’ unfamiliarity with the Bible, however, has not kept them from forming an opinion on it—an extremely negative one. Barna says that nearly half believe “the Bible is just another book of teachings written by men that contains stories and advice.”

The most common words they use to describe the Bible are “story,” “mythology,” “symbolic,” and “fairy tale.” Fully 30 percent of Millennials allow that it’s a useful book of moral teachings, but nearly as many—27 percent—agree that the Bible is “a dangerous book of religious dogma used for centuries to oppress people.”

Almost one in five say the Bible is “an outdated book with no relevance for today.” I don’t know about you, but those numbers kind of make me want to weep.

Although we obviously have a long way to go to overcome this prejudice, I’m glad to say that the survey gives us some pointers on how to do it—and how not to do it.

First, how not to do it: Barna suggests reading your Bible around a non-Christian Millennial is not likely to spark much spiritual interest—the opposite, in fact, is more likely to be true. According to Barna, “When they see someone reading the Bible in public…they assume the Bible reader is politically conservative…; that they don’t have anything in common with the person…; that the Bible reader is old fashioned…or that [he or she is] trying to make a statement or be provocative….Fewer than one in 10 non-Christian young adults indicate any kind of positive response.”

So what is a more effective approach among this group? According to Barna, “personal interactions” with people who have benefited from the Bible tend to bear the most fruit.

As we’ve said before, Millennials value relationships. We don’t need to be Bible scholars—although of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But we do, however, need to practice what the Bible preaches, and be neighborly.

And there’s more good news. The survey suggests that Millennials are fully capable of holding orthodox views about the Bible and the Christian faith. Nearly all self-identified Millennial Christians who attend church at least once a month and who describe their religious faith as very important to their lives believe the Bible contains everything a person needs to know to live a meaningful life and that it’s the actual or inspired word of God.

So when it comes to Millennials and the Bible, is the glass half full, or half empty? It all depends on us.

It is important that we continue to think.

Conservatives must rigorously apply the full capacity of our reason and intellect to evaluate any substantial idea. It’s possible that this is one reason why conservatism has lost so much ground over the past three decades. At some point along the way, we stopped challenging and defeating the failed ideas of the Left; either because we took it for granted that Americans understood the worth of conservatism, or because those with the best means of conservative communication weren’t equipped to fulfill that task successfully. Even today, despite the fact that we have a number of large, articulate voices fighting the good fight, we continue to allow flawed logic to pass as if it was valid. Any time we allow the discussion to move forward under illogical premises, we lend credibility where there should be none.

Thus modern liberalism, founded on the failed political fallacies of generations past, has staked its exclusive claim to be the default setting for American intellectualism, thereby drawing young minds as moths to a funeral pyre. Overwhelmingly, it’s the conservative who is painted as a luddite; this despite the fact that modern liberalism still drives the same broken-down ideological Yugo with nothing more than a fresh coat of Kool-Aid-red paint. Somehow we are idiots because we don’t believe in ideas which have failed whenever they have been implemented. And we allow this slander to stand.

The Neo-Utopianism of modern liberalism is a perfect example of an idea which must be strenuously challenged and defeated. This concept of a unified, benevolent government which triumphs over greed, corruption, and ignorance to create a blissful and progressive utopia has been selling t-shirts in this country ever since Dear Leader won the Democratic primary in 2007. It has become so prevalent (and powerful) that many of the feckless, so-called conservative politicians have decided to adopt this ideology instead of fighting it. If it weren’t for talk-radio and a handful of reliable, conservative writers and filmmakers, we might be neck deep in Michelle’s Government cheese (lactose free!). Lord knows the ones who’ve who should be protecting us from totalitarian utopianism want nothing more than to get their hands on the soft-tyranny machine known as the government of the United States of America.

Why does Utopia fail? Why is it such a bad idea, apart from the fact that it has never worked? For the same reason in each and every case: some people suck. In a sense, we should agree with Jean-Paul Sartre when he wrote, “Hell is other people”. Conservative thought says that this is true, but not in a misanthropic sense. Sartre is correct because the downfall of Utopia is humanity itself, more specifically a subsection of humanity which will never buy into the namby-pamby idealism which Utopia requires to function.

During a recent trip back home, I wanted to provide my family with an authentic glimpse at the weird underbelly of Oregon. Our last night there, I booked us a room at a popular hotel east of Portland. The facility is a former “poor farm” of the county, which began housing and feeding the area’s paupers in the mid-19th century. Since then, it was purchased and rehabbed into a hotel by a successful Oregonian brewery. The site boasts a brewery, a winery, a handful of restaurants, an outdoor concert venue, a small movie theater, and even a seven-foot tall bronze statue of Jerry Garcia. As we arrived and walked around the property, it was apparent that the facility was alive with a bohemian spirit of jubilance which is quintessentially Oregonian. We walked through the gardens, picking and eating berries from the wild berry bushes on the property. Then we dined on food at the main restaurant which had been grown in the same gardens we had just perused. Finally, we headed up to our room, which was decorated entirely with a hand-painted mural, depicting a local folk hero. It was a blissful evening and a truly unique experience and I was proud of myself for introducing my true-blue Midwestern family to the best of Oregon’s eccentricities.

Shortly thereafter, the compost hit the fan.

After obtaining the keys to our domicile, we discovered that the bathrooms were communal, there was only 1 bed in the room for the 3 of us, and our windows opened directly onto a sun porch where I swear Cheech & Chong were reliving the good old days. (This is what happens when you hire hippies to run the reservation desk of a hotel.) Once we had taken a few trips up to the front desk, to get our reservation straightened out, we noticed that the hallways smelled like a cross between an aquarium that should’ve been cleaned out three weeks ago and poop. Those fun-loving bohemians who were inhabiting that peaceful community of love and peace spent the entire night running up and down the halls, puking in the communal bathroom next door, and screaming the lyrics to Phish songs in the courtyard outside the window of our new room.

This is why Utopianism fails and will always fail. There will always be those who selfishly exploit a situation for their own benefit, either through malice, ignorance, or selfishness. There will never be a time when everyone will willingly follow the rules to the benefit of all. That’s why utopian paradise quickly turns to dystopian totalitarianism; because some people won’t stop peeing in the pool. History and common sense demonstrate the foolishness of such ideology and yet it lingers in the air like the smog from Al Gore’s private jet. In the 80’s, conservatives like the Gipper, Margaret Thatcher, Solzhenitsyn, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, and others worked to deflate the intellectual viability of communism. They combated it so successfully that for a time communism became a laughing-stock amongst all but the most die-hard apparatchiks. If we mean to eliminate the progressive utopianism taking root in today’s America, then our burgeoning ranks of conservative political leaders would do well to follow in the footsteps of our conservative predecessors.

Writing in response to my article “Secularism Declares Open War On Religious Faith,” an atheist has assured his readers that there is no such war and that, more importantly, in order to avoid conflict with the larger society, I should simply keep my religion in the closet. He has thereby confirmed my article rather than refuted it, and the comments from his fellow-atheist readers only bring further confirmation.

Writing in the Thinking Atheist blog, Terry Firma mocked the idea that, “if you’re an evangelical Christian, ‘You have been marked, and you have been classified as a dangerous extremist.'”

Dismissing my statement that, “secularism has been waging war against religion for centuries,” Firma asks, “Don’t you think you might have that backwards, professor?”

Of course, a war has been raging both ways for centuries, but the point I was making was simple: Secularism in various forms has been in deep conflict with religious faith for centuries – in other words, this is not the first time such a conflict has arisen – but today, it is taking on an especially shrill form, as conservative Christians are being put in the same category as murderous terrorists (like ISIS and Boko Haram).

Yet rather than refute that point, Firma states that the criticism is not that far off target.

With reference to comments made my radio host (and atheist) David Pakman, whom I cited in my article, Firma writes, “I think Pakman’s comparison to ISIS is unhelpful, but it’s not incorrect. What would be incorrect is to say that conservative Christians go around cutting infidels’ heads off with abandon.

Pakman never goes there, obviously. He says the respective ideologies are similar, not identical; nor does he claim that the outcome of religious fundamentalism is the same no matter whether it’s extremist Muslims or hardline-conservative Christians we’re dealing with.”

Actually, Pakman is far less nuanced than Firma, which is one reason I cited him, and it is clear that Firma’s readers are far less nuanced as well, with choice comments like this one, from Debby, appearing at the end of his article: “I think that many of these religious whackadoos are only saying what even many more moderate Christians also feel. The fact is that people are standing up against Christian privilege in the US. The American Taliban (i.e. fundamentalists) simply don’t like having to consider other people have similar rights.”

In similar fashion, PsiCop branded me “an insanely paranoid religiofascist” and Seeker Lancer opined that when it comes to comparing conservative Christians to ISIS, “Maybe it’s unhelpful since it’s intended to incite but I say call a spade a spade.”

Again, this is what I was highlighting with the examples I cited in my article (in particular, the last three examples).

Yet Firma finds the examples to be very weak, even though I cited the UK gay activist (and atheist) Peter Tatchell, who recently released his “Manifesto for Secularism – Against the Religious Right,” in which he issued a “call on people everywhere to stand with us to establish an international front against the religious-Right and for secularism.”

So, a self-avowed atheist can call for a war against “the religious-Right,” by which he explicitly means the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda along with “the Christian-Right in the U.S. and Europe,” yet this secularist war against religion is merely a figment of my paranoid imagination. Really?

The problem for Firma, of course, is that he basically agrees with this mentality – although stating that Islam is more dangerous than Christianity – and to buttress his point about “the Christian-Right in the U.S. and Europe,” he points to Uganda, of all places. Uganda?

What does Uganda have to do with “the Christian-Right in the U.S. and Europe”?

Following the standard gay activist narrative, Firma blames Uganda’s harsh anti-gay bill on American evangelicals, although the truth is that: 1) The Ugandan leaders categorically deny that Americans were behind this bill, finding this accusation to be racist (since the American leaders in question are white), as if they didn’t have convictions of their own. 2) The main leader accused of inciting the bill, Scott Lively, publicly criticized the most controversial (and even draconian) measures of the bill, especially in its original form. 3) The other leader in question, Lou Engle, led a previously scheduled prayer meeting in Uganda (that had nothing to do with the homosexuality bill) and at that prayer meeting, simply encouraged the moral stand that Christian leaders were taking (without for a moment demonizing anyone or calling for harsh penalties against anyone).

Yet based on this slender thread (it’s not even that), Firma not only dismisses the evidence of the Tatchell manifesto, but he actually justifies lumping murderous terrorists together with godly, caring, conservative Christians in Europe and America.

Yet there’s more. Firma writes, “I’m not aware of any atheists who are interested in waging war on religious faith. Most of us, I’ll bet, are quite happy, if not adamant, to preserve the right to believe and speak as one sees fit for everyone, believer or agnostic.”

Surely, Firma has read the literature of the so-called new atheists like Richard Dawkins and his ilk, and he knows that Dawkins actually decries parents raising their children with religious beliefs, among other things, yet he is “not aware of any atheists who are interested in waging war on religious faith.” Really? (Ironically, Firma’s article was reposted on Dawkins’ website.)

Some of Firma’s readers were not convinced either, as C. Peterson stated that he was quite aware of such atheists, using himself as a case in point: “I am an unapologetic antireligionist who considers faith to be the primary root of all humanity’s problems, manifested partly by the inability to use reason consistently, and partly by the religions that faith spawns. All my ‘activism’ as an atheist is fundamentally a war on religion and on religious faith.”

Others added their “Amen” to his comments. Is anyone surprised?

Firma, however, had a proposal by which we people of faith could live in peaceful coexistence with the secularists: “As long as the faithful keep their religion out of the public square — that is, out of our public schools, and away from the business of a neutral government – we should all get along relatively well. If Mr. Brown seeks a truce between the religious and the non-religious, all he and his fellow believers need to do is (a) tone down the hateful rhetoric, all Jesus-like [in other words, do not express any moral viewpoints based on Scripture, even though that’s what Jesus did all the time]; and (b) keep their worship and their rule books confined to places where they are constitutionally appropriate. Problem solved.”

There you have it. There is no secular, atheistic war on religion, and whatever conflicts do exist can be resolved if we basically keep our religion in the closet.

Don’t hold your breath.

Written by Peter J. Leithart

A friend is encouraging pastors to run for political office. Like everyone, he’s worried about America’s future, and he’d like to see more experienced Christian leaders in public office. It’s a good ol’ American tradition that goes back to the Founding, and it will bear fruit and frustration, generate success and cynicism, in roughly equal measure.

However effective his campaign is, it’s a strategic error and perhaps reflects a theological mistake. The premise seems to be that pastors must become politicians to influence the nation’s direction, and that in turn suggests that the power of civil institutions is the greater than all others. The plan to push pastors toward politics seems to arise from the secular mentality that my friend so ardently opposes.

As pastors, pastors command unfathomable spiritual resources, the only resources with potential to transform the world. What Samuel Wells has said about the Church applies to pastors in particular: God gives “boundless gifts,” supplies “everything they need.” Love, joy, peace, and hope become flesh “through the practices of the Church: witness, catechesis, baptism, prayer, friendship, hospitality, admonition, penance, confession, praise, reading scripture, preaching, sharing peace, sharing food, washing feet. These are boundless gifts of God.” The pastor’s problem is not scarcity but excess: “God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, fathomless love: it is just too much to contemplate, assimilate, understand.”

Pastors look for alternatives when they lose confidence in the tools of their trade. How many pastors believe they are stewards of the mysteries of God? Do we act as if our preaching participates by the Spirit in the creating and re-creating eternal Word? Do we believe that the Word is a weapon of the Spirit, as Hebrews says it is? Are we persuaded that the water we pour does wonders, or that a little ritual meal forms the social body of the incarnate Son of God, the assembly of God among the nations? Do we believe that the God with ears to hear is judge of the nations?

Do we play it safe by limiting the effectiveness of word and sacrament to a “spiritual” realm? How many pastors have forgotten that they already hold public office?

If pastors don’t believe in what they’re doing, we have to look behind them to the institutions that trained them. For a couple of centuries, seminaries have specialized in undermining confidence in the Bible. Filled with what John Milbank arrestingly and accurately calls “false modesty,” otherwise orthodox theologians adjust to the prevailing secular reason. Some seminaries are liturgically anemic, when they teach liturgics at all, and so they produce ministers who can’t even identify half of the tools in their kit.

We don’t need to politicize the seminaries. God knows, we’ve had plenty of that. We need to equip pastors who realize the full weight of pastoral vocation. To that end, a grab-bag of suggestions:

• Get rid of Old Testament and New Testament departments and teach the Bible as one book, centered on Jesus.
• Teach in a way that encourages trust in the Bible.
• Spend a half-hour teaching the text for every minute reviewing the latest biblical scholarship.
• Establish maximally biblical training so pastors can form vibrantly biblical churches.
• Don’t let anyone graduate unless he knows the Psalms—all of them.
• Teach students to pray, and to make their prayers as vast as creation.
• Encourage future pastors to expect God to throw fire from heaven and shake the earth when the church pleads for justice.
• Teach liturgics as theology, and theology as liturgics.
• Don’t politicize the liturgy or sacraments; instead, explain how they’re already political.
• Teach future pastors that they’re engaged in Christian politics every time they call a congregation to confession, pronounce absolution, preach, preside at the Lord’s table, and dismiss with a benediction.
• Aim to produce ministers capable of both binding the broken and confronting the predators—ministers who share Jesus’s compassionate zeal.
• Make sure students are ready to pull the trigger of church discipline.
• Remind them that pastoral ministry is a form of cross-bearing, a form of sacrifice.
• Tell the timid to find another calling.
• Require students to spend ten hours a week at a homeless shelter.
• Encourage graduates to enter business or the military so that they learn to lead before they accept a call to lead the people of God.

For good or ill, pastors will have a major role in determining the future of the church and our country, but not primarily as pastor-Congressmen. The future rests more with pastors who aren’t tempted to run for office, not because they want to keep their cushy curate but because they are convinced that, teaching the word, offering prayer, sprinkling water, and breaking the bread, they are already at the center of the universe.

Peter J. Leithart is president of the Theopolis Institute. He is the author most recently of Gratitude: An Intellectual History. His previous articles can be found here.

This article was originally posted at the FirstThings.com blog.

Being a Believer in America has become a complicated business lately. I should probably clarify, I’m not speaking about just any sort of believer. After all, believing “there is no god but Allah” is not complicated. You’ll earn a scandalous amount of slack and dhimmitude from a general populace too credulous to believe your insincerity. And it’s not all that difficult being a believer in Scientology or the other cultish theologies either. If a doctrinal complication pops up, it’s easy enough to amend your “divine” revelation and carry on as if the golden plates had green-lighted caffeinated beverages from the beginning.

No, I’m speaking primarily of the complications involved in following one of the more orthodox faiths like Christianity, Catholicism, and Judaism. It seems the complication stems from an unprecedented number of non-believers opining about the dictates of our God and our faith. Anyone and everyone seems willing (and somehow qualified?) to open their mouths and reveal their biblical acumen, whether they’ve actually read a page from a Bible in their lifetime or not. True, we’ve always dealt with the Matthew 7 crowd, who learned one Bible verse and has been using it as a cudgel to defend their own iniquities ever since, but this is different.

We have Marxists in the Obama Administration telling us that Jesus was a refugee, in an effort to justify open immigration. There are Anarchists, squatting in tent cities, claiming that Jesus was part of the 99%. Nearly any Muslim you meet will be more than happy to explain to you that Christ was a prophet of Allah and was saved from the Crucifixion before He died on the cross. Celebrities of all stripes stand up to declare that there is no cognitive dissonance between their Christian beliefs and their support of the homosexual movement. Pastors and spokes-idiots from major Christian congregations have waved the rainbow flag, declaring that they “aren’t anointed” to speak on sin and that Jesus “never made a statement on homosexuality”. Well garsh, the Lord never made a statement on voter fraud or sex slavery either. Are you suggesting it’s time for Christians to embrace the rights of citizens to fraudulently vote as many times as they like, bringing along their indentured harem to help stuff the ballot box, Pastor?

Why all the biblical static? Why now? Christians have always been maligned for their abstinence from worldly indulgence. Why is there so much noise around the person of Christ and so much antagonism towards the historical Christian position? As with many of the flaws of our modern world, the most obvious answer is moral relativism. The more people are educated in our morally-bankrupt public schools, the more pervasive relativism becomes.

The Hegelian “synthesis”, which Francis Schaeffer warned about, has become pandemic. We no longer live in an antithetical world, where right and wrong are incompatible. Instead of thinking in terms of thesis/antithesis, the two are now combined into a synthesis, crowning error and hamstringing truth. This embrace of Hegelian philosophy means that incompatible beliefs can now be BFFs. This is how we can explain phenomena like Jews for Palestine, LGBT Christians, Materialist Philosophers, and Christian Anarchists. When truth can be whatever you decide to make it, don’t be surprised at what walks through the front door.

Another more culpable reason for the distillation and confusion of the Judeo-Christian moral ethic is the prevalence of Milksop Christianity. When we think about some of the boldest and most unabashed voices defending Christianity today, we think of the Duck Commander, Franklin Graham, and Clash Daily’s own Doug Giles to name a few. Yes, there are undoubtedly more, but not many. With all due respect to these brothers and sisters, their firm, biblical stance today wouldn’t have even moved the needle 100 years ago. We’ve become soft and afraid, so the bold seem a bit taller today than times past.

A majority of today’s believers are biblically illiterate, not being able to distinguish between Saul the son of Kish and Saul of Tarsus. As Pastor Smiley has said, “If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.” Let that wisdom marinate for a few… But it goes deeper than biblical illiteracy, today’s church is pusillanimous. Being illiterate when it comes to God’s word is inexcusable for a Christian, but being illiterate and scared? Abhorrent.

Yes, we serve a God who advocated a gentle answer and a loving response to nearly every situation. We also serve a Lord who thrashed a crowd of people when His Father’s house was suffering materialist prostitution. We serve a God whose Justice is as fearsome as His mercy is awesome. Read about the character of God in the words of His anointed messengers: the books of the prophets and the Psalms. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the rest are literal windows onto the visage of our God.

“Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully,
And cursed is he who keeps back his sword from blood.

“Make him drunk,
Because he exalted himself against the Lord.
Moab shall wallow in his vomit,
And he shall also be in derision.

“And Moab shall be destroyed as a people,
Because he exalted himself against the Lord.”

~Jeremiah 48:10, 26-27. 42

This is the Lord we serve and this is the standard of justice to which we will be called to account. Instead of being frightened by the prospect of social disapprobation, we should fear the One who can sweep a nation away for the sin of self-exaltation. Instead of being shouted down by those still in rebellion to their Maker, we should be emboldened by our God, who, though terrible in His wrath, extended a tender hand of grace to each of us, while we were yet steeped in sin.

Stop propagating the synthesis of truth and error. Don’t allow a strident enemy of God to dictate how He will be portrayed. Too often, we become like David’s brothers, huddled in the tent, playing Parcheesi while we try to block out the slanders of Goliath. Let us instead gather our smooth stones from the river and stand implacably for our God, come what may.

Regular readers have read John Stonestreet and me refer to religious freedom as the “first freedom.” You probably think that’s another way of saying that it’s the most important freedom.

Well, it is. But it’s also the source of all of our freedoms.

In a fantastic address at Cedarville University in Ohio, John quoted the French philosopher Luc Ferry, an atheist, who acknowledged the West’s debt to Christianity.

Ferry wrote that “Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

But Christianity’s contribution to our “democratic inheritance” was not limited to its ideas about human equality. It was Christianity that taught the West that there are limits to the state’s power and it made our ideas about human freedom possible.

The story that sums up this contribution is what German historians call the “walk to Canossa.” In 1077, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV traveled from Speyer, Germany, to Canossa Castle in Northern Italy.

The purpose of his “walk” was to ask Pope Gregory VII to lift his decree of excommunication against Henry. The reason for the decree was an issue that modern minds probably, but wrongly, find arcane: investiture, that is, who gets to select the bishops in a given territory, the Crown or the Church?

Pope Gregory insisted that it was the Church. Henry had insisted it was the Crown, or as we would put it, the State. As Wikipedia puts it, Henry came to realize that his position was “precarious.” So he sought an audience with the Pope. Upon entering Italy he put on a hairshirt and may have walked much of the way as a sign of penitence.

As if to show Henry who was the boss, the Pope kept him waiting three days while a blizzard raged, which is why Italians, who seldom miss an opportunity to tweak the Germans, call it the “humiliation at Canossa.”

The significance of this story goes far beyond medieval power politics. In his book, “The Origins of Political Order,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues that, at Canossa, the West gained the idea of an autonomous sphere of authority that could check a ruler’s ambitions.

Stated differently, without Canossa there is no Magna Carta, no parliaments, and thus, no freedom as we understand that word in the West.

What’s more, this sphere of authority leaned heavily on law as a source of legitimacy. This, Fukuyama argues, was crucial in the development of the rule of law in the West. When secular authorities enacted their own laws and established institutions, they were imitating the Church.

And all of this was only possible because the Church insisted that secular rulers had no authority in the spiritual realm.

A thousand-plus years later, secular rulers are once again trying to assert their authority over spiritual matters: From the HHS mandate to whether bakers have to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony.

Folks, it’s up to us to remind our neighbors that a state that can trample religious freedom is strong enough to put all of our freedoms at risk.

That’s why I really want you to hear John Stonestreet’s powerful, knock-out speech on religious freedom. Please, please, come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary. We’ll link you to it. You need to hear it—John lays out what’s at stake in the battle over religious freedom, and how by defending that freedom, we are defending all our freedoms, and the freedom of all.

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

Written by Dr. Wayne Grudem

It is deeply troubling to me to see a repeat of the situation in 1973 when the Supreme Court, by the exercise of raw judicial power apart from any Constitutional or legislative warrant, imposed abortion rights on the entire United States, against the will of the people. That decision remains untouched today, 41 years later.

Now by its October 6, 2014, abdication of responsibility in refusing to take any of the five challenges to same-sex marriage decisions that were sent to it on appeal, the Supreme Court has allowed the judges on the 13 circuit courts of appeals to impose their idea that same-sex marriage is a “Constitutional right” on most of the states in the United States. (Though the Constitution says not a word about same-sex marriage, and the original authors and states who endorsed the Constitution would have strenuously objected that no words in the Constitution meant or implied that.)

Here is the history: so far, 31 of the 50 states have actually voted to amend their state constitutions to define marriage as only between one man and one woman. In only 3 states, the votes in statewide referendums have gone the other way (Washington, Minnesota, and Maine), and in 10 additional states the legislatures have approved same-sex marriage (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York).

But the votes of the people in the 31 states, and their constitutional amendments, are now being struck down with the stroke of a pen by judges in one state after another.

Here’s how it happens:

(1) Advocates of same-sex marriage can always find some federal judge in every state who will issue a ruling imposing same-sex marriage on the state (there are 678 district judgeships in the United States).

(2) Then these decisions are appealed to a Court of Appeals. It is these Courts of Appeals that have been issuing decisions that overturn state constitutional amendments and impose same-sex marriage on the states, against the will of the people in those states. These decisions of the Courts of Appeals can then be appealed to the Supreme Court, but if it refuses to take the case (as it did five times on October 6), then the decision of the Court of Appeals stands as final law in that judicial circuit, covering several states.

Consequences: the most immediate consequence has been a significant increase in challenges to religious freedom. Last week the mayor of Houston sent subpoenas to several Houston area pastors demanding that they turn over the manuscripts from all their sermons and sermon notes related to homosexuality and gender identity. This is an astounding violation of religious freedom — a city demanding that it be able to inspect (and, presumably, issue legal penalties against) sermons that pastors preach from the pulpit. Such an egregious violation of religious liberty has never before happened in American history, as far as I am aware.

And this week two ordained pastors in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Pentecostals who are ordained with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, have been told by the city that they must begin performing same-sex weddings or face fines of up to $1000 and jail time – presumably for each time they refuse!

My expectation is this is just a hint of things to come for evangelicals who for conscience’ sake do not feel, before God, that they are morally justified in blessing a same-sex union as “marriage.” So will they have to violate their consciences or go to jail? That is the chilling threat.

Another consequence: I expect that now teachers in public schools will be legally required to teach that homosexual relationships are morally positive choice, one possible “good” choice even for elementary school children. Coming at a time when children’s individual sense of gender identity is in formation, this will result in much gender confusion among children – and, I expect, a significant increase in homosexual activity among adolescents. And what will the millions of evangelical Christians and devout Roman Catholics who now teach in public schools do? Will they be forced to teach as ethically good something that their deeply held moral and religious beliefs proclaim to be ethically wrong? Will they be forced to violate their conscience or abandon their teaching careers?

Another consequence: damage to future generations because of the loss of a societal preference for relationships in which children have both a father and mother. (When a same-sex couple adopts a child, that child is then legally separated forever from either its biological father or its biological mother.)

Another consequence: If we believe that disobedience to God’s moral laws always has negative consequences in people’s lives, then I think we must also expect that there will be significant harm in the lives of those people who engage in a homosexual lifestyle. If we love them, as God’s Word commands us to do, then we should also be grieved at the harmful consequences in their lives that will inevitably follow from their behavior.

Elections matter: When Christians tell me that elections don’t matter much, that God’s work will go on the matter what kind of government we have, I don’t think they have any idea of how oppressive government can become when its leaders are “those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression” (Isaiah 10:1 ESV). In my opinion, this verse surely applies to the judges who impose abortion rights on the whole nation in 1973, and it also applies to the judges who are imposing same-sex marriage on the entire nation in 2014.

And these decisions are the direct result of the election of President Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. When President Obama took office, only one of the 13 appellate courts had a majority of Democratic appointees (liberal judges appointed by Democratic presidents such as Carter and Clinton). Now 9 of the 13 appeals courts have Democratic majorities. These are the liberal courts that have been imposing same-sex marriage on large sections of the nation, against the will of the people in many states. This is a direct result of the 2008 and 2012 elections.

President Obama has now appointed 53 of the 179 appellate court judges in the United States (Edward Whelan, “The Senate and the Courts,” in The Weekly Standard, Sept. 29, 2014, p. 17), and those appellate courts have vast influence (99.9% of their cases are never taken up on appeal by the Supreme Court, but stand as settled law). ​​

I am asking Christians to pray for the outcome of the crucial elections on November 4, especially for the elections of members of the U.S. Senate, because the Senate has to approve all judicial nominations from the president. And please be sure to vote, and to help in any other way you can. This election will also have significant consequences for the nation.

Written by David Daniels

Jackie Hill-Perry considers herself not merely an agent of change, but its embodiment as well.

A Christian spoken-word poet from Chicago, Ms. Hill-Perry professes to be a former lesbian — a change she ascribes to God.

God, she says, “not only changes your affections and your heart, but He gives you new affections that you didn’t have.” Now married to a Christian man, the 25-year-old poet is pregnant with the newlyweds’ first child, which is due Dec. 13.

Her debut spoken-word album “The Art of Joy” will be released for free on Nov. 4 by Humble Beast record label.

Ms. Hill-Perry’s experience runs counter to pronouncements by gay rights groups that exclaim sexuality as an inherent, immutable characteristic. What’s more, her assertions come amid wide-ranging reports about the psychological dangers of so-called “reparative therapy,” which aims to change the orientation of homosexuals.

But she remains steadfast in her belief that anything is possible with God as she meets criticism — and outright contempt — for speaking out about her experience. And thanks to her nearly 65,000 followers on social media, as well as encouragement from famed Baptist theologian John Piper, Ms. Hill-Perry’s story has been far-reaching.

“The word of God itself, apart from Jackie Hill, testifies that people can change,” she said in a July 2013 report on Wade-O Radio, a syndicated Christian hip-hop broadcast based in New Jersey.

She was criticizing a lyric in rapper Macklemore’s Grammy Award-winning song “Same Love” that says “And I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.”

“I think we’ve made God very little if we believe that He cannot change people,” Ms. Hill-Perry said on Wade-O Radio. “If He can make a moon, stars and a galaxy that we have yet to fully comprehend, how can He not simply change my desires?”

Thousands of people on social media shared her comments — with approving or condemning remarks of their own. She estimates that about 40 percent of the messages she has received have been negative.

“On Twitter, this girl wrote me like 15 different tweets, pretty much saying that I was delusional, in denial and brainwashed,” Ms. Hill-Perry told The Washington Times.

After she married Preston Perry, another Christian spoken-word poet, in March, another Twitter critic accused them both of being gay and marrying to “play God to a bunch of ignorant people.”

Ms. Hill-Perry says she was sexually abused by a family friend when she 5. Around the same time, she experienced gender confusion that had coalesced into an attraction to women when she turned 17. She became sexually active with her first girlfriend, and then another. She became a regular at gay clubs and at gay pride parades in St. Louis.

While lying in bed in October 2008, she reflected on her lifestyle and had an epiphany that she addressed in her spoken-word piece “My Life as a Stud”: “Then, one day, the Lord spoke to me. He said, ‘She will be the death of you.’ In that moment, the scripture for the wages of sin equal death finally clicked.”

“What I had been taught in church until the age of 10 coincided with the truth in my conscious that a holy God and just God would be justified in sending me, an unrepentant sinner to hell,” she said, “but also that this same God sent His son to die on my behalf and forgive me if only I believe.”

She left her girlfriend and returned to church. The next year, she met her future husband at the first spoken-word event where she performed “My Life as a Stud.” Over time, she lost her attraction to women and gained an attraction to Mr. Perry, who she began dating three years later.

Now pregnant with a girl, Ms. Hill-Perry is concerned her daughter will face persecution for sharing her beliefs by the time she reaches 25 years old.

“I think we’re moving toward a time in our society when, in the next 20 to 25 years, Christians are going to see a massive amount of persecution when it comes to the topic of homosexuality, and there will be no such thing as tolerance for Christianity,” she says. “[People will believe that] if you’re a Christian, you are a horrible human being, period.”

“The true church of Jesus Christ will still stick to the Scriptures,” Ms. Hill-Perry says. “Now, those buildings that have people in them where the authority of God doesn’t trump their own feelings and emotions, I see a whole bunch of turning away from the faith — turning away from truth.”

This article was originally posted at the Washington Times website.