The New York Times, Barack Obama, and Racial Conflict

It is important to realize that the conflict now convulsing our country is entirely manufactured by the Left, and is based on rock-solid lies. People are dying, again, because of Left-wing lies -- and the deaths you hear about, are only the tip of the iceberg. When the police are forced out of a poor neighborhood through hostility, who will surge into the power vacuum? Who will become more brazen, more oppressive? Drug dealers.  Pimps.  Thugs.  Why do you suppose the murder rate has soared since Ferguson, a series of riots whipped up from lies, like meringue on a pie, made from one broken egg and lots of empty air? Read this and understand what is going on.

Why is the Left trying to whip up racism and create hatred against whites and against the police right now?  No doubt motives vary.  But what is clear is that the presidency of Barack Obama has failed, and failed badly: war, not peace, has broken out around the world, our radical enemies have become more active not less, America is being attacked by terrorists, the National Debt has grown, the economy has not, America is being surpassed as we speak by China, Iran hates us all the more, for all Obama's generosity.  And, of course, the Democratic Party (like the Republican Party) has offered an utterly obnoxious candidate for the next president (along with a socialist even to the left of Barack Obama!)

See what Vladimir Putin did when the Russian economy collapsed: demonize America, manufacture a few local enemies, and his approval ratings rose to 80%!

Nationalism doesn't work for the Left, but hatred and divisiveness does.  

Never mind that if you demonize police officers, innocent people will be oppressed and sometimes killed.  Never mind that an unpoliced neighborhood is a neighborhood that business does not want to invest in.  Never mind that all these cities where conflict is occurring, have been run by the Left for decades now, or that the stats show the police are actually doing a pretty good (and very difficult) job.  Never mind the lessons of Detroit.  

Demonize "the pigs."  Blame Whitey.  

And our Nobel-Prize winning president, in his diffident and snarky way, cheers Black Lives Matter on, surreptitiously throwing kindling onto the fire of the very racial conflict he was supposed to solve.  

But solving conflict and making peace is the job of the police, not of left-wing radicals like Barack Obama and the New York Times.  

In Defense of "Christian" Civilization

Recently, I responded to Andy Rhodes, a former Christian with a lot of tough questions about Christian thought and the Christian record.  In that post, I offered some ideas about the Problem of Pain.  Andy responded with a couple dozen or so posts, which I don't have time right now to fully answer (or even read, because that will start me answering).  Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll take the time to sift through and respond to those posts more completely, because we do welcome serious challenges. 

But I would like to answer some of Andy's points on the relationship between Christianity and the western record.   This begins by delving into politics, on which of course Christians have different opinions: as a conservative, I'll freely share my own.  Then we get more specifically into the Christian record in reform.   

Not all Control Freaks live in China . . .

"You have to break a lot of eggs to
make an omelette."

This morning, Carson Weitnauer, a Christian who works with students on East Coast campuses, pointed out an article in the New York Times about the cruelty and now uselessness of China's one-child policy.  It described how millions of women were forced to have abortions, even at eight months, and treated with extreme savagery.  (As, of course, were the babies.)  It told of intrusive government checkups (a mild way to put it), and how women flee to remote, unsanitary barges to give birth away from the government's prying eye.  The article also referred to infanticide, which is often also carried out, skewing the sex ratio and (though they didn't point this out) leaving tens of millions of men without the chance to marry.  (China's future warriors, one might guess.) 

And yet all this has now apparently become unnecessary. The birth rate in China, as in most of East Asia and the world, has fallen dramatically, and is now well below replacement level. 

The callousness and fanaticism (also sheer stupidity) of some of the comments New York Times readers, liberal and no doubt mostly secular Americans and Canadians, concerned over "the Environment" (a god to which we must sacrifice our children, now) were almost as disheartening as the article itself.

Seven of the first 13 comments took that tone.  I've copied them here, with a slightly lengthened version of my reply, following. 

How Christ Liberates Humanity: 151 proof texts.

Twice in the last few days I ran into some version of Christopher Hitchen's aphorism, "Religion Poisons Everything," and responded with incredulity.  Of all the historical claims out there, it seems to me this is among the easiest to disprove. (Not even counting the almost-literal sense in which, for instance, religion has not yet frozen the liquid iron whose circulation creates the Earth's magnetic field, or cause any stars to explode or any comets to leave their orbits.)

Limiting ourselves to human history, I am tempted to respond by appealing to all the wonderful things Taoism or Confucianism have done for East Asia -- to catch the fanatics off-guard, and try to shock them out of the little worlds of prim skepticism in which they imprison themselves.  It is painful to think how arid the history of Chinese art would be without the fantastic bronzes of ancient Chinese graves, with which aristocrats set themselves up for the next life, the bold colors of esoteric Buddhist mandalas, the misty, myterious landscapes of Zen painters, or Chinese rock gardens, suffused with Taoist readings of the natural landscape. 

But the title of this blog is Christ the Tao.  And I do think Jesus Christ is the source of near-universal  liberation, that has overthrown oppression and made the world a dramatically tonier address in our little galaxy. 

Let's begin with the second and more substantial of these two challenges, from the Bengali atheist, Taslima Nasreen, who also quotes PZ Myers, and my initial "shoot-from-the-hip" reply.  After that, in answer to the question of whether I've actually read any history books, I'll offer a list of 145 texts, mostly books, which show how the Gospel has changed the world.

My hope is reading some of these books will put even atheists in the mood to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Christmas being just around the corner. 

How Missions, not "Enlightenment," creates Democracy.

Robert Woodberry

Lately I've been reading four very different works that demonstrate the same point: how biblical teachings have liberated a huge portion of humanity, even non-Christian societies, and how the Gospel continues to have this effect.  Two of these works are contemporary mission stories: Melanie Kirkpatrick's Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad, and Brian Hogan's autobiographical There's a Sheep in my Bathtub: Birth of a Mongolian Church Planting Movement. 

The other two works are historical, and more academic.  One is a manuscript kindly sent me by Oxford historian Allan Chapman, of his new book refuting "Enlightenment" charges against Christianity about science, and showing how the Gospel midwifed the birth and nurtured the growth of modern science.  Lacking permission, I won't be quoting that book, which is due to be published next year, but I may refer to some of its contents.  The other work is a cautiously-phrased, extensively-footnoted, and mathematically-sophisticated article entitled "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," by Robert Woodberry, a political scientist at the University of Singapore.  (Woodberry tells me he plans to publish a more accessible book arguing the same ideas.)

All four tend to confirm, in different ways, the thesis of a fifth book that I finished a month or two ago: The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, by my friend, the Indian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi.  The Bible is, it seems, responsible for most of the good parts of modern civilization, the reform movements Enlightenment philosophers often take credit for, and that get discussed in text books and lectures with nary a positive mention of Christianity.  (I may deconstruct one particularly aggregious CNN smeer against Christianity in a coming post.) 

Woodberry's article will be the focus of this post, illustrated and extended by reference to the other three.  (Vishal's book, and the new book on Christianity and the history of science, will be reviewed separately, the Lord be willing, in the future.)   

America's War on Children.

Like every great nation, the United States has committed great sins from time to time.  Our first great sin was chattel slavery.  Beginning in part with the Quaker Benjamin Lay in a suburb of 18th Century Philadelphia, an army of Christian reformers in the English-speaking world, then outside it, set their faces against this sin, sacrificing time, money, and reputation to bring about the liberation of Africans, and slaves of all races in every part of the world.  America suffered its worst rending in the course of repentance, our bloodiest and most horrible war. 

Our second great sin, no doubt, was mistreatment of Native Americans.  (Or first, the dates are fuzzy, but clearly we continued robbing Indian land decades after the War Between the States.)  Michael Medved argues, in Ten Big Lies About America, that the extent of that crime is often exagerrated.  No doubt he is right, and certainly far more Native Americans died of Old World diseases than were killed intentionally.  And it would be a gross mistake to portray the indigenous tribes themselves as peaceful noble savages: a rough rule of thumb seems to be, the higher the American civilization, the more beating hearts its gods required to renew the universe.  But that's no excuse.  Americans often murdered Indians and stole their land, even relatively peaceful, settled tribes like the Cherokee and Nez Perce.  This was undoubtedly a terrible crime.

Mostly, America has repented of those sins, and the races have made peace. 

But could we now be committing a sin every bit as great?  Might the repentance required to recover from our third great sin be as deep and as heartfelt?  Could it be that, while the church seems to have been marginalized in modern American society, with few prominent public spokesmen (no Augustine, Anselm, Wilberforce, Jonathan Edwards, or even Billy Graham to focus the attention of the public on behalf of the full claims of Christ), the Gospel remains precisely what is needed to keep America from collapsing in on itself, and devouring its children?  Let me propose that such a role still lays claim on the Church, as it did in the days of Bartholome De Las Casas, Benjamin Lay, William Wilberforce, and Charles Finney.  Our calling now, as then, remains to preach and model repentance, and lead America, however painfully and expensively, out of abiding sins of oppression.  But let me also suggest that just as in the days of Wilberforce, because we have deep-seated interests in continuing to sin and oppress, repentance will not come quickly or easily. We will be despised, called names, perhaps even treated with violence.  But it is the duty of the Church to call our nation to repentance, whether in a short or long period of time. (As it is the duty of Christians in other nations where the same sins are being committed.) 

Our greatest social sin is no longer racial, but generational. 

We are gravely sinning against our children. 

The issue that comes to mind for many Christians, when I say that, will be abortion.  But let me propose that abortion, including partial-birth abortion, is not the only or maybe even greatest manifestation of that sin.  In fact, it is part of a coherent pattern, that makes the full extent of the crime even clearer. 

I propose that three crimes against the next generation are complementary manifestations of selfishness and oppression:

(1) The abortion of unborn children. 

Let us admit that modern Americans have become tone-deaf to the cries even of full-term babies allowed to die after they have been unsuccessfully aborted, as Barack Obama voted to allow in the Illinois legislature.  We do not hear them, anymore.  We think those who call out for them are affecting concern, maybe out of a desire to oppress poor women. 

In ancient Rome, Christians stood against abortion and infanticide. One has to assume the Gospel is still doing some good, because at least for now, society generally frowns on the latter. 

(2) The national debt.  If a child survives the abortion mills, we present her on birth with a present: a bill for all the spending we're doing on ourselves before she was born, that she will carry like a millstone around her neck for the rest of her life: $100,000, perhaps, or $500,000 for a family of four, some even say $1,000,000.  It is like  

Massive deficit spending is like selling our children into slavery to satisfy our own "needs."  What moral right do we have to spend so much, and ask our descendents to foot the bill?  The will also, of course, undermine the nation, along with the demographic implosion.  But we must face this, and recognize it as not merely bad policy, but morally wrong.  John McCain called it "generational theft," but I think the long, strange adjective diluted the heinous character of the crime.  We have become a nation of thieves.  Our victims are our own children. 

(3) Single parenthood.  Not only do we present surviving newborns with a bill they may never be able to pay, we also ensure that fewer and fewer will know what the word "Daddy," "Mommy," or in some cases either, means.  This ensures that lacking one or more parents, many grow up without the blend of love, structure, imagination, and discipline children need to thrive in our increasingly challenging world.  Thus, we create a disfunctional, often addicted underworld that loses the dignity of self-support. 

But the bigger crime, in my view, is to steal parents from our children.

I've sometimes felt nonplussed, substitute teaching in schools, at the difference between how Established (liberal) ideology seeks to protect children from some obvious, and some fanciful, dangers, while doing little to warn them of even graver dangers.  I'm glad Health teachers warn children against the dangers of smoking and drug use, and that this message is seconded in assemblies and by means of public notices.  What about sex, though?  Don't STDs also maim and kill?  Don't girls with babies wind up poor and dependent?  Don't children without Dads go into life with a distinct disadvantage?  Aren't they being ripped off in the most fundamental way?  Yet far too little is said to students about the dangers of careless sex lives, which one can observe already in high schools, even middle schools, to some extent.  ("This is not a movie theatre," I've been constrained to tell some students in class -- I would gladly say more, if I could.) 

Even Barack Obama can be understood as a lonely man, his faults perhaps traceable to "dreams of a father" who was absent in real life.  One can admire him for overcoming that dissability and for being faithful to his own children, even while abhoring many of his policies, as I do, which I believe undermine families.  But it was a crime for his father to walk out on his kids, a dastardly crime -- worse, maybe, than having your slave master sell you down the river to Louissiana, because he was his own master, and betrayed his own children.  And it is a sin more and more common in America today. 

We may be too close to these sins to recognize their full evil, the full toll in broken lives, spiritual wreckage, and ended dreams.  But is it likely that even chattle slavery, or the Indian Wars, damaged as many lives, as the toll of our present "War on Children?"

We have all met some of the victims of that warfare.  We are, indeed, all being victimized by the National Debt, and will probably soon see the whole world impacted, as select parts of it have already been impacted -- here a Greece in flames, there a Spain or Ireland in despair.  Yet the debt continues to grow, and no one now in power seems inclined to try seriously to reverse course. 

So if you have ever daydreamed about living in some heroic era, when you could stand and fight against some great evil -- the Titans, the Nazis, chattel slavery, the Inquisition, Attila the Hun, or Roman legions -- take heart!  Your hour of heroism may be at hand. 

This is part of the calling of the Christian church in our age: to stand up for our children. 

We will be despised and hated for doing so, as Christians who followed their Lord have often been hated. 

We must show that we stand for love, not because we hate those we stand against, or think ourselves better than them.  We must remind our opponents that by the calling of God, Christians have thus stood for two thousand years, from the time Jesus told the lynch mob, "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone," liberating a girl condemned to death, to the rescue by Christians of North Koreans who escape that evil regime into China at this very moment.  (About which I plan to write soon.) 

Despise Christians who stand up for the little ones, Western World, and you despise the source of your moral life, and which remains (not America, though America has often been an instrument through which God has worked) the genuine hope of mankind. 

More about that, here. 

Postscript: Several websites have linked to this post, and some interesting comments have appeared, below.  Here's a bit of backdraft from one of the comments.