A Christian for Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey has had a massive impact on America, particularly on American women during the last two decades.  She went from being something of an undifferentiated talker to being a sophisticated promoter of all the things she found interesting as her own possibilities broadened exponentially.

The journey has encompassed weight loss, healthy eating, exercise, Toni Morrison, new fiction novelists, Dr. Phil, the spiritualist Eckhart Tolle, and, of late, Dr. Mehmet Oz.  When the book recommendations led to a couple of controversies, including one author preferring not to be recommended, she switched to a pure diet of more enduring volumes by authors like James Steinbeck.

She is on a ride.  She takes her audience with her on television, in magazines, and anywhere else she chooses to go.

My wife, a devout Christian, has often expressed her own desire that Oprah discover Jesus Christ.  From time to time I have thought about this.  If I wanted Oprah to turn her attention to Christianity on the chance that it might leave a lasting impression, who would be the best person to speak to her about it.

I think I would choose John Eldredge for the task.  There is much about his presentation that might resonate with her.  First, he is an actor who gives voice to his faith with charisma, passion, and verve.  Second, he cuts straight to the heart, talking about the pain we all feel in life and referring to our relationship with God as a romance.  Finally, he upholds the very serious idea that we can be in communication with God, that we can feel his presence in our lives.

John needs to invite Oprah and her friends out to Colorado for one of his famous retreats.

The City and The Wall St. Journal

The Wall St. Journal has an article up on the topic of evangelicals and intellectuals.  Now, this would normally interest me in and of itself, but the great part is that the piece mentions Houston Baptist University’s journal The City.

We founded the journal as something of an evangelical First Things a couple of years ago and the response has been fantastic throughout.

Here’s a clip from the article:

At this relatively early stage, most of the examination takes place not in the public square but on the campuses of evangelical colleges and in Christian publications, and much of the discussion is about the nature of the evangelical mind. This is seen most clearly in Houston Baptist University’s new publication The City. Its winter 2008 issue featured an essay by a young evangelical writer named Matthew Lee Anderson titled “The New Evangelical Scandal.” Mr. Anderson suggests that though new evangelicals are marked by a shift away from the ethos of their parents’ generation—including moralism, political partisanship and anti-intellectualism—the change is not as drastic as some have come to think and is actually just “version 2.0 of the seeker-sensitive movement: it’s trendier, better dressed, and more open to conversation.” The scandal, Mr. Anderson suggests, is that the perceived shift occurring among younger evangelicals is more a matter of expression than substance.

The New Ledger and The End of Secularism

My friend Ben Domenech and I founded The City together at Houston Baptist University.  He continues to be the  dominant force in the production of that journal and has gone on to found a fantastic website on politics and finance called The New Ledger.  I feel very honored that Ben has seen fit to post an interview with me about the book there.  And like many conversations between old friends, this one makes for good listening.

Pushing the Envelope, I Guess . . .

I once checked out the HBO show Deadwood.  It appeared to me to be an exercise in seeing how many times characters in a western themed drama could utter, mutter, or exclaim the f-word.

I am now watching TNT’s Men of a Certain Age.  HBO apparently rejected it.  The theory here seems to be that it will be interesting to have middle aged characters constantly using the d-word for a man’s anatomy as an insult.

The result is not terribly compelling.

White Horse Inn and The End of Secularism

Best interview yet with the guys from the White Horse Inn.  If you are crunched for time, start it up around the 20 minute mark.  Great questions.  And great commentary from the guys after I go off the air. (Just click on The End of Secularism under the Listen Now header.)

Highly recommended.

And, of course, here’s your obligatory link to the book.

The Professorial Lament . . .

John Stackhouse’s Strange View of the Manhattan Declaration

The well-known evangelical theologian and historian John Stackhouse has added his name to the ranks of Christians who don’t find much to like about the Manhattan Declaration.  There is a twist in this case, though.  He isn’t complaining about the alliance between evangelicals and Catholics, for example.  (Thank you, Lord.)

However, one of Dr. Stackhouse’s major objections is equally perplexing.  While he declares himself to be pro-life and pro-traditional marriage, he believes the call to enshrine those positions in the law is “philosophically and politically incoherent” if one is simultaneously calling for religious liberty (which the signers of the Manhattan Declaration do).

Before writing those words, Stackhouse might at least have thought a few moments about who we’re talking about.  Robert George is one of the main movers and shakers on this document.  And he happens to be a very important political philosopher in the American academy.

Now, disagreeing with Robert George is never evidence that one is wrong.  So what if Prof. George is a political philosopher of the top rank?  He certainly could be guilty of holding a “philosophically and politically incoherent” view on something.  Surely, he could.  And perhaps Dr. Stackhouse would be the guy with the right cut in his jib to effectively point that out.

But let’s consider the claim.  Does calling for religious liberty mean that one is disqualified from simultaneously attempting to make abortion illegal (to use one of his examples)?

I don’t think so.  Let’s take the shortest route to dealing with this claim.

If embracing religious liberty means that we should never attempt to embody moral propositions into the law, then we should not embody religious liberty in the law because it is a moral proposition.  A philosophy that leads to THAT result is incoherent.  The person who argues for religious liberty AND for other moral propositions in the law is on pretty sound footing in the vast majority of instances.

But if that seems like a cheap shot, we can go further.  Why do we value religious liberty?  We value religious liberty because we believe human beings possess an inherent dignity that entitles them to certain rights.  For a very large number of people, quite likely an absolute majority, our rights come from God.  Because God gives us certain rights, it is not the place of the state to abrogate them.  But regardless of whether we claim our rights come from God, we have embraced religious liberty as a right.  It is in tension with other rights.  It is not a trump card.  We do not accept any religious claim that would require freedom to kill another human being, for example.

Another right that we believe human beings have is the right to life.  It is very easy and requires no recourse to scripture to demonstrate that the unborn child is, indeed, a human being.  Given what I’ve said so far, is it at all difficult to understand that one could say religious liberty does not entail a right to be free from legal consequences for killing an unborn child?

No, it isn’t difficult.  There is no incoherency in arguing for both religious liberty and for the legal right to life of an unborn child.

Religion, Culture, and Humanity

I recently gave an interview to the Georgia Family Council (where I worked as a younger fellow) about my book for their website.  Here is an excerpt I think might interest readers:

What made you decide to write your book The End of Secularism?

I wrote this book for a few reasons. I detected that the moment might be right for someone to lay out a very rigorous critique of secularism. While it was once plausible to people that secularism might be a good, neutral solution to the “problem” of religious difference, it is more difficult to believe the same today. Secularists embrace a competing orthodoxy and they pursue the fulfillment of it. They like to think of themselves as referees, but they are actually just another team on the field.

In addition, I felt the need to help secularists and Christians to get a better handle on what secularism is and why it is an inferior solution to the separation of church and state rightly understood. We don’t need to evict religion from the public square. We do need to keep the church financially independent of the state — primarily for the good of the church, which I demonstrate through the example of Sweden — but we don’t need to politely excuse our religious beliefs and thoughts when it comes to public debate over values. Religion matters in politics. You can’t get away from it and bad things happen when you try. The Christian faith has been and continues to be hugely influential in encouraging many of the best things about our culture. Christianity is part of why we care about things like liberty, equality, mercy, and the sanctity of life.

Explain what you mean by “secularism” and how has it affected our culture?

The word secular once had a perfectly good meaning. It meant “in the world.” So, by that understanding, the Catholic Church even had secular clergy. But we have transformed the old meaning of “secular” to a new conception which requires that religion retire from the public square. In essence, the idea is that we will all be better off if religion is private, like a hobby. The problem, especially for Christians, is that we believe the resurrection of Christ is a real event in time and space and that if that is true, then it has the potential to affect the way we look at almost everything. And I would argue that influence has been dramatically for the good.

To the extent we embrace secularism, and almost all of us do to some degree, we focus more on material things because that represents reality to us. In America, our materialism mostly manifests as consumeristic and hedonistic pursuits.

Does secularism have an effect on how society views marriage and family

Unquestionably. If you buy into a purely secular view, marriage is nothing special. It is merely a contract (and not a particularly strong one) that people undergo when they decide to pursue life together for a while. While it can be inconvenient and messy to dissolve that contract, nothing tragic has happened. There has been no violation of any larger law. God’s conception of marriage doesn’t enter in. In fact, maybe marriage is just a cultural artifact that an enlightened, secular government merely needs to tolerate until it can be transitioned away.

Of course, we have seen this kind of change in the way we view marriage. It’s not just the effort to expand the meaning of marriage. The larger problem is that the state no longer values marriage as it once did. There is no bias toward keeping the family together. We no longer have the same concern for how divorce will affect the well-being of children, this despite the wealth of social science evidence chronicling the negative impact.

On the other hand, if you believe marriage represents a special relationship, one ordained by God, then you have a real reason, both as an individual and as a citizen in a political community, to seek to preserve it. This view, long the dominant one in western civilization, reinforces our best instincts about the family. It also happens to be much more humane to children and promotes human flourishing.

C.S. Lewis Makes Me a Good Father . . .

My son, Andrew (age 7) has been reading way too much Pokemon and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  The result has been an infusion of ideas and habits that aren’t necessarily all that helpful from a behavioral perspective.

Suddenly, I realized that maybe I, the scholar-father, should make sure he reads something GOOD.  Brilliant, I know.

So, last night I introduced him to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  I had him read the first chapter on his own.  He liked it and accurately reported back what happened.  I laid in bed with him and read the next couple of chapters.  I could tell he liked it because he occasionally finished a sentence ahead of me in a voice of wonderment.

Around 8 pm, I left him in bed with his lamp on and a bookmark in the book (he doesn’t tolerate folded corners like his old man).

When I checked on him before retiring myself around 11 pm, I could tell he wasn’t really asleep.  He knew that I knew and looked at me.

“Andrew, have you been up reading all this time?”

“I finished it.”

I asked him what character he liked the best.  “Aslan,” he said, but pronounced it OS-LAHN.

Daddy couldn’t resist rubbing the secret late night reader on the head and feeling rather triumphant as he walked out the door.

The Difference Between the U.S. and China

It’s the end of the semester.  A degree of giddiness creeps in.

My students and I have been working through the political systems of a variety of nations.  Yesterday, we talked about China.

China is a wonderful subject because any professor not completely sold out to Marxist fantasy gains the license to speak judgmentally about Mao’s ridiculous policies of The Great Leap Forward (in which the nation stopped producing food and tried to manufacture steel in backyards) and The Cultural Revolution (in which Mao deputized snotty teenagers to force their elders into self-criticism for improper revolutionary thinking).

But the fun begins to subside as you approach the present day.  I was explaining to the students that although the Chinese still have the Communist Party — and it is the only party permitted to operate — the nation has rejected communism.  Instead, they engage in a form of state-sponsored capitalism.

I began to say that the U.S. embraces private capitalism versus this state-sponsored capitalism of the Chinese, but then I realized that would be inaccurate.  The truth, I realized and said to the students, is that both nations engage in state-sponsored capitalism.  But there is a key difference.

The Chinese government owns companies that make a profit.  The United States government only owns companies that lose money.

And that is why they are loaning us money instead of the other way around.