Dr. Mohler's Blog

July 2008

Teen Pregnancy, Hollywood Style

Early in July, OK! magazine featured a cover story about Jamie Lynn Spears and her new baby, Maddie. Newsweek reported that the magazine paid $1 million for the rights to publish photographs of the baby and mother. The young mom, now 17, is shown on the magazine's cover declaring, "Being a mom is the best feeling in the world." A good number of parents were understandably outraged.

This week, Newsweek is out with an article that questions how Hollywood is presenting teenage motherhood. The magazine reports that teen moms and their babies have become "a hot plot device lately."

"Many teen moms and the adults who deal with them are glad to see a conversation about teen pregnancy out in the open," Newsweek explains, "But they say that big parts of the story are being glossed over: how that baby bump came to be in the first place, and just how hard it'll be for a teen to raise a child."

Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina asserts that the Hollywood version of the teen pregnancy storyline lacks commitment, contraception, and consequences. Critics complained that the movie Juno mentioned condoms "only" twice. The assumption is clearly that teenagers simply will have sex, and the best parents can hope for us that it be "safe" sex.

Beyond that, "commitment" is the word one uses to avoid using "marriage." Waiting until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse is, for Hollywood, an unthinkable presumption. Teens are encouraged to establish "committed relationships" before sex. We can only wonder what kind of commitment would please Hollywood and its critics.

As for consequences, Hollywood generally abandons reality when it claims to present "reality" programming. The celebrity cult is even worse. The OK! magazine cover makes teen motherhood look positively glamorous. But, as one young woman responded to the OK! coverage, "I had a baby at 16, it was NOT easy, I did NOT look radiant and beautiful."

Then again, that kind of honesty probably wouldn't sell many magazines. Hollywood and the entertainment industry are selling their version of normal teenage expectation. Teen moms are, as Newsweek explained, "a hot plot device." Parents, you have been warned.

"A Knight of the Mind" -- Dawkins, Darwin, and the Battle of Worldviews

The Times [London] is out with an article headline that reads, "Dawkins Slaps Creationists into the Primordial Soup."  Now that grabs your attention.

Dawkins, pleased to be known as "Darwin's Rotweiller," has been given a new three-part television series in Britain, known as "Dawkins on Darwin." The British press is fawning in its applause, and Dawkins appears to be in rare form.

As reporter Kate Muir gushes:

Richard Dawkins is that rare specimen, a public intellectual, a knight of the mind who goes into battle against the ignorance and foolhardiness of the populace. Unlike the French, who worship their public intellectuals, giving them pet names such as les intellos, and airing them regularly on serious television and in print, the British like to shove academics into a musty corner, or laugh at them. This was not always the case: the Victorians, with their public lectures and royal societies, gloried in debate and celebrated the thrills of fresh knowledge.

That is a fairly representative understanding of the elite media. Those who do not accept the Gospel according to Darwin (or Dawkins) are simply ignorant, invincibly ignorant perhaps, and Dawkins is thus "a knight of the mind" who battles ignorance.

That approach is a blatant attempt to dismiss all debate over Darwinism or evolutionary theory. The methodology is simple to grasp -- just reclassify all opposition to evolution as ignorance and establish evolutionary theory as the only acceptable worldview. Muir paints Dawkins as an apostle for atheism, rescuing the public from ignorance. "In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on," she writes. "His audience is surprisingly grateful, and also relieved to see someone slapping creationists about and tossing them into the primordial soup, as well as explaining atheism positively."

This is the approach Dawkins himself admits taking, as Muir reports:

Dawkins says that natural selection is "the most important idea to occur to the human mind", the slow change of species over millions of ideas disproving the religious theory of intelligent design by God.

That we are still trying to sell evolution to a large part of the public bothers him. "It is weird in many ways that natural selection is still debated," he says. "But it is not debated by anyone who knows anything about it." Indeed, Dawkins refuses to share a stage with creationists. "I don't like giving them the oxygen of respectability, the feeling that if they're up on a platform debating with a scientist, there must be real disagreement. One side of the debate is wholly ignorant. It would be as though you knew nothing of physics and were passionately arguing against Einstein's theory of relativity.

At this point Dawkins is characteristically helpful in exposing the real worldview of evolution. In his words, evolution disproves "the religious theory of intelligent design by God."

In other words, Dawkins has as little respect for "theistic evolutionists" as he has for creationists. The theistic evolutionists believe themselves to have escaped the hatred of the Darwinists by trying to have it both ways. Dawkins will not allow that. His Darwinism allows for no intelligent design at all, and yet that is the very core of what is called "theistic evolution." The claim is that God "used" the process of evolution to create the cosmos, and living organisms in particular. The claim is extended to the human being with the argument that God intended the process of evolution to lead to this special creature.

Dawkins sees through all that, and dismisses the idea of any divine intelligence whatsoever. Any design violates the basic principle and mechanism of evolution.

He also sees something of equal importance -- that Christianity has no coherence without the biblical doctrine of creation. As Muir explains:

For Dawkins, there is a tree of life; not the one featuring Adam and Eve, but the one tantalisingly sketched by Darwin with the two words "I think" written above, showing how different species branch slowly off from each other over millions of years, until fish are on one branch, and apes on the opposite. If creationism falls, so, logically for Dawkins, does the rest of religion piled upon it.

This is another basic point of agreement.  If the biblical doctrine of creation falls, the entire storyline of the Bible falls apart.  The very essence of theological liberalism is to discard what the modern world finds offensive and save what parts of the Christian message can be preserved or salvaged.  Dawkins understands what many theological liberals do not -- that there is no way to save any coherent form of Christian truth without the biblical doctrine of creation.  Those who would abandon the biblical account of creation undermine the entire Christian truth claim.

It shouldn't require a "knight of the mind" to see that.

Election 2008, A "Focus on the Family" Broadcast

I was honored to be with Dr. James Dobson for a special broadcast of his "Focus on the Family Action" radio program. The program aired July 21 and has made news around the world. I appreciated Dr. Dobson's invitation, greatly enjoyed the conversation, and encourage you all to listen to the program, available here. Write and let me know what you think.

Together, we think through many of the issues facing Christians in the 2008 election. An Associated Press news story about the program is available here. I look forward to continuing this important conversation with you.

Integrity -- What's in a Word?

According to The Los Angeles Times, scores of United Methodist pastors in Southern California are planning to defy church law by performing same-sex marriages. The paper provides rather extensive detail about these plans, acknowledging that performing same-sex marriages could lead to disciplinary action against the pastors.

In addition, a large group of retired United Methodist ministers in the region has volunteered to perform the marriages on behalf of pastors who might be defrocked or disciplined if they performed the marriages themselves.

The paper's report includes some fascinating statements from pastors who plan to defy the discipline and doctrine of their church -- and the clear teachings of the Bible.

For example:

"I'm tired of being part of a church that lacks integrity," said the Rev. Janet Gollery McKeithen of Santa Monica's Church in Ocean Park, who plans to conduct weddings for two gay couples in August and September. "I love my church, and I don't want to leave it. But I can't be part of a church that is willing to portray a God that is so hateful. I would rather be forced out."

And:

The Rev. Sharon Rhodes-Wickett of Claremont United Methodist Church joined a retired deacon from her congregation to co-officiate at the July 5 wedding of two longtime members, Howard Yeager and Bill Charlton. The wedding was held off site -- at a Claremont complex for retired clergy and missionaries -- to avoid violating the rule against such ceremonies in churches. Rhodes-Wickett, who led the Lord's Prayer and gave a homily, said she hoped to avoid discipline by stopping short of actually pronouncing the couple married. That action was performed by the retired deacon, who also signed the marriage license. Rhodes-Wickett said she did not want Yeager and Charlton to leave her church to exchange vows. "This is my flock," she said, adding that the men have been together 40 years, 22 of them as members of her Claremont congregation. "It's a matter of integrity and a matter of what it is to be a pastoral ministry."

There is a very curious and revealing feature to these comments. Both of these pastors oppose and defy the Book of Discipline -- the authoritative teachings and policies of the United Methodist Church -- and they claim to do so in the name of "integrity."

Pastor Janet Gollery McKeithen said her church "lacks integrity" because it identifies homosexuality as a sin and prohibits pastors from performing same-sex unions. Pastor Sharon Rhodes-Wickett said that her act of defiance is "a matter of integrity."

Integrity is crucial to the Christian ministry, and it is a word that is integral to the matter at hand. What makes the use of the word by these two pastors so disappointing -- and revealing -- is that the word is used to mask and justify an act that lacks all integrity.

These two women are defying the very policies they are bound and committed to uphold. They sought and accepted ordination in their church knowing that these policies and doctrines were in place. They are defying their church, their doctrine, and the Bible.  They pledged to uphold these doctrines, but now they defy them.

Integrity would not lead these pastors to defy their church and violate their ordination vows, but to uphold them. If they cannot uphold these doctrines and policies, let them resign in conscience.

Sydney Biddle Barrows, the infamous "Mayflower Madam" convicted of running an elite prostitution service in the 1980s, once remarked, "I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity."

Misused in this way and employed as moral artifice, "integrity" is claimed where no real integrity can exist.  There is no "integrity" in running a prostitution ring, and there is no integrity in defying ordination vows.

Modernity, Madness, and Morals

Why do you do what is right, rather than what is wrong? That is hardly a new question. It troubled the minds of the ancients. Some felt that humans are naturally drawn to virtue, but they were hard-pressed to explain why some individuals seemed to resist this impulse. Others argued that society had to make a firm impression upon the young, inculcating a desire for virtue and character that was more external than internal.

Fast forward and the Victorians in Britain were convinced that a lack of virtue could be traced to either heredity or deprivation. Assuming the British middle class as normative, the Victorians offered the advice famously advocated by Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio -- "Let your conscience be your guide."

Experience indicates, consistent with what the Bible teaches, that this advice has limited value. The conscience is a human capacity for sure, part of the moral sense that testifies of the imago Dei, but it is just as deformed by the Fall as any other capacity. Conscience alone explains nothing. Many of the most heinous acts in human history have been done by individuals with a clear conscience. The conscience can lie, rationalize, and deceive.

More recently, moral philosophers have settled on a more clearly secular theory of morality -- rational choice theory. According to rational choice theory, people tend to settle on a moral code that fits their needs and leads, or is likely to lead, to their desired outcomes. In other words, individuals make a rational choice. A young woman might make a rational choice not to engage in premarital sex because she does not want to harm her reputation or opportunities or marriage. A young man might not shoplift because it would harm his chances of advancement. Rational choice theorists argue that their theory can explain virtually any human behavior, including moral choice.

We must admit that there is ample evidence to support this theory, at least in many cases of moral choice. This is a very significant insight for Christian theology, for it reminds us that when people make a choice to do good, it does not follow that they are good.

Take the example of two ten-year-old boys. One is considered a "good" boy because he is pleasant, respectful, obedient, and rarely breaks rules. The other boy is a "bad" boy who is markedly unpleasant, disrespectful, disobedient, and regularly flaunts his breaking of rules. Without doubt, we would rather that our own 10-year-old son, if we had one, would sit next to the first boy in class, rather than the second. But is the first boy really a "good" boy, and is the second really "bad?"

In reality, the first boy may have decided that being "good" works for him. His parents expect it of him. He is rewarded when he obeys (even if the reward is what merely comes his way with parental pleasure) and he is punished when he disobeys. He may have learned to play the game -- a game with far larger rewards later in life. Life goes much easier for this lad when he behaves well and is seen to do so -- so he does.

The second boy has no experience of similar controls. He does not expect life to go better for him if he behaves well. He may lack parents who would even teach him how to behave, much less reward him when he obeys and punish him when he disobeys. Instead, he learns that cutting corners, breaking rules, flaunting his misbehavior, and playing the part of the "bad" boy works for him. He gets more attention (even if negative attention) and gains the respect of his peer structure by misbehavior.

As twentieth century authors like Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut understood so well, standing upside-down works rather well when the world is upside-down.

Minette Marrin raises many of these issues in her insightful report on Britain's problem of criminal youth -- boys and young man who have rejected the social contract and are seemingly beyond the reach of those who would reform them.  In other words, these are young males who have made a rational choice to be criminals, she argues.

Her report was published in the July 13, 2008 edition of The Times [London].  As she makes her case, she also offers some important insights into how Britain negotiated away its common moral commitments.

She writes:

No one disagrees any longer that Britain is in parts and in places broken; Gallowgate [in Glasgow] is a horrifying microcosm of broken families, broken spirits, broken health and broken schools; it is a dark place of chronic unemployment, violence and crime, of disorder and fear -- a disgrace to the supposedly developed world.

It's also true that at long last people of all persuasions are beginning to recognise that this social breakdown is due in part to the abdication both of authority and of personal responsibility that began some time after the war. Some are inclined to emphasise the demoralising paternalism of the welfare state, others the permissiveness of the 1960s, but few now question this abdication, at all levels. Not only that -- taking personal responsibility is sometimes forbidden, or punished, as when misguided adults try to control delinquent children in the street.

However, while personal responsibility and shared morality are essential to a good society and the only glue for a broken one, neither can be had just by whistling for them. Both depend on an instinctive sense of a social contract. Conventional morality is meaningless to a boy who has nothing whatsoever to gain by good behaviour. Personal responsibility means nothing if you have grown up neglected, abused and powerless among adults who hardly know what it is and feel powerless themselves.

Those paragraphs contain crucial moral insights and social observations.  Many of those insights and observations would fit just as well with reference to American cities and American youth.  One important difference is that a smaller percentage of American boys and young men seem yet to have abandoned the entire social contract.

Then comes Marrin's key paragraph:

Morality depends on having something to lose. It isn't just a matter of learning right from wrong, least of all in a post-religious society. Morality is socially constructed. I will respect your property and your person because I want you to respect mine. We both have something to lose. One does not have to be educated in political philosophy to understand that ancient deal. But if I have neither property nor respect from anyone, what's in the deal for me?

With this paragraph she articulates rational choice theory in all of its plausibility and all its inherent limitations.  We must admit that much of what we call morality is indeed socially constructed -- matters of cultural context and custom.  But we fool ourselves if we believe that all morality is socially constructed.  Rational choice theory must assume that it is, but a bit of serious reflection is enough to throw all that into doubt.  The Christian worldview insists that morality depends ultimately upon the character of God. 

God's own righteousness is the ground of authentic morality and His revelation of what is right and what is wrong (as Paul reminds us, in nature, in conscience, in the law, in the Scripture, and in Christ) is our only sure guide.

Minette Marrin offers frightening insights in her important report.  These insights should humble the proud, and make us all a bit more aware of just why we "behave" when others do not.  A good dose of rational choice theory is humbling indeed. But, at the same time, we must be thankful that this is not where we are left.

The rational choice theorist has little or nothing to say to the boys and young men of Minette Marrin's concern.  The Christian church does have something to say -- the liberating truth of the Gospel.  But in order to be heard, we had better first be humbled by the honest recognition that we are not as "good" as we like to think.  We are all delinquents -- every last one of us.

At Least for the Moment?

Ellen Goodman is an institution at the Boston Globe and one of the nation's most recognized liberal columnists. She has a keen eye for detail, which often makes her columns interesting, and she is an unreconstructed liberal and feminist, undoubtedly shaped by her education in the 1960s at Radcliffe College and her personal experiences.

In her column published today Goodman addresses the controversy surrounding Thomas Beatie, the "man" who gave birth to a baby girl just weeks ago. Here is how Goodman described the situation:

For those of you who do not watch "Oprah" or read tabloids, Beatie is "The World's First Pregnant Man." While the title of "first" is in dispute, Beatie is certainly the most public transgender poster parent to have a baby bump plastered across the media. And now - pass the cigars - he has delivered the baby.

Unlike Oprah, I will spare you many of the medical details. Let us just say that Thomas was born Tracy and socialized enough into a traditional female role to be a finalist in the Miss Hawaii Teen USA contest. Then, a decade ago she had what we used to call a sex change operation but what some now call sexual realignment surgery. She had her body realigned to fit her self-image.

Goodman's writing is crisp and concise, but she runs right over some basic issues that are hard to miss. The first is the assumption that "sexual realignment surgery" can actually change a person's sex. The other (and obvious fact) is that Thomas Beatie is still functioning as a woman, even to the extent of retaining her reproductive capacity.

In other words, she had her physical characteristics changed -- at least some visible markers of gender -- so that she would appear as a man rather than as a woman. But -- and this is crucial -- the baby did not emerge from a man's womb. There is no such thing. The baby, we might summarize, was not fooled.

The state of Oregon now recognizes Beattie as a man and many neighbors apparently assumed the bearded person was a man, but all this just adds to the confusion -- and explains why this pregnancy ended up on Oprah, the television equivalent of a London tabloid.

Even Goodman understands that this case represents a confusion of elements, and that the parents will, in her words, "have an awful lot more 'splaining to do to their child." As she explains:

It is only recently that we began to look at the human body as a template to be altered as we please. I'm not comparing sexual reassignment surgery to liposuction, but if Thomas removed his breasts to fit the male model, how many women enlarge them to fit the female model? For that matter, it's only recently that we could reach into the pillbox and pull out male and female hormones.

Add to that the expanding gamut of reproductive technologies. Over Beatie's 34-year lifespan we have subdivided the word "mother" into its many parts. We now have genetic, gestational, and birth mothers, as well as the mothers who actually raise children. We have egg donors and surrogates. Grandmothers have carried their own grandchildren. Sisters have delivered their own nieces.

We are redefining what it means to be human, at least as understood within the culture, and we are making a mess of things. In the name of sensitivity and worshipping at the altar of undiluted personal autonomy, we are encouraging people to experiment with their lives by the most grotesque and extreme means. There is no limit to where this can take us. Oprah has also done shows on children -- even very young children -- who think they have been assigned the wrong body. Oprah Winfrey, true to form, chastised parents who do not want to encourage this self-discovery.

The most telling part of Ellen Goodman's column was its conclusion: "As for the baby? It's A Girl! At least for the moment."

At least for the moment? That is the perfect way for Goodman to end her column, for it is where her logic inevitably leads. At least for the moment.

What Should We Think About Archaeology and the Bible?

Archaeology is in the news again. An interesting juxtaposition of news stories concerns what might be the boyhood home of George Washington on the Rappahannock River and the claim that a collector has revealed an ancient stone tablet from Israel that might -- hold that thought -- speak of a resurrection just years before the time of Jesus.

The news about the home of the first president hit the media just in time for the Fourth of July. As The Los Angeles Times reported the story:

After years of searching, archaeologists have identified and excavated the boyhood home of George Washington, site of such legendary -- if perhaps apocryphal -- events as chopping down the cherry tree and throwing a coin across the Rappahannock River. The find indicates that the Washington family lived in a spacious eight-room home -- a sign that the family was well-off for its day -- and provides new information about George's childhood, a period that has remained largely obscured in the mists of history.

The account is interesting, as is the ruin of the home. It turns out that the property had been basically known and preserved. The discovery of the foundation and ruin of the home came as that property was more thoroughly studied. The most significant aspect of the discovery seems to be the fact that George Washington's father, Augustine Washington, was evidently a man of wealth. The eight-room home would have been a sign of exceptional wealth in that era of colonial Virginia. The discovery changes nothing of importance in our understanding of George Washington, but is obviously a site of significant historical interest.

The media attention devoted to what some call "Gabriel's Revelation" is a matter of greater controversy.

Here is the issue as reported by David Van Biema and Tim McGirk of TIME:

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet -- at least according to one Israeli scholar -- it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus' followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day -- and it might even hint that they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified. However, such a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts; they are useful to prove less-spectacular points and to stir discussion on the big ones, but probably not to settle them nor shake anyone's faith.

The tablet is owned by a Swiss-Israeli collector and it "came to light" about a decade ago. The tablet itself is interesting, but as Professor Ben Witherington of Asbury Theological Seminary argues in the story, the reading of the ink-on-stone text is contentious at best. As for the text itself, even if correctly dated to years just before Jesus, the text at the crucial line is smudged and the wording is unclear.

TIME's story concludes with this:

It remains to be seen whether Gabriel's Revelation, and especially Knohl's [Israel Knohl of Hebrew University in Jerusalem] interpretation, will weather the hot lights of fame. Even the authors of its initial research seem a little dubious about his claims that it is a dry run for the Easter story. But, as often happens in such cases, they seem better disposed to a slightly toned-down assertion: in this case, that the Gabriel tablet does indicate a very rare instance of the idea that a messiah might suffer -- a notion introduced in Judaic thought centuries before by the prophet Isaiah but which supposedly went out of style by Jesus' time. If that more modest theory gains traction, it will forge a link between a trend in first-century Judaism and one of Christianity's galvanizing thoughts -- that God might throw in his lot with a suffering or even murdered man -- that could contribute to a growing mutual understanding.

Van Biema and McGirk are helpful in acknowledging the fact that many supposed "discoveries" much-touted in the media turn out to recede quickly from attention. For example, they refer back to last year's media swarm over the so-called "lost tomb of Jesus," and note that "despite considerable initial hoopla" the entire story is still regarded as speculation by many. The media attention moved to other concerns long ago.

All this raises the whole issue of archaeology and the Christian faith. Christians are understandably interested in the archaeology of the lands of the Bible. After all, ours is a faith that makes historical claims about persons and events with specific places, timing, and details provided in the text of the Bible. This was true for Israel and it is equally true for the church.

Our faith looks to the fall of the walls of Jericho as Joshua and the people of God marched around its fortified walls, to Jerusalem and the building of the first and second temples, to Galilee and the miracles performed by Jesus, to Bethlehem and the birth of the Messiah, back to Jerusalem where Christ was crucified and raised from the dead, and to a host of other places where the Bible grounds God's acts in history.  Authentic biblical Christianity stands on these events as events in history, not as cherished myths.

For this reason, Christians are too often overly excited about the latest "discovery" that gains media attention -- either in elation or travail.  Archaeology is an important scholarly discipline, but it is not immune from ideology and many of the conclusions and arguments announced to the public are actually not at all what they first appear to be.  Furthermore, archaeology is largely a matter of historical reconstruction, often with little actual evidence.  As a rule, the more distant the time, the more difficult the reconstruction.  That makes sense, of course, as time destroys both evidence and the preservation of memory.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christians were tempted to argue that the historical claims of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) had been "proved" by the intense proliferation of archaeological investigations that marked the period.  This was the era in which William Foxwell Albright and his American Schools of Oriental Research were defining a new discipline known as "biblical archaeology."

Then, especially after World War II, a new generation of archaeologists argued that their findings effectively disproved the accounts of the Bible.  Kathleen Kenyon excavated Jericho and argued that the Bible's account was factually wrong.  Others made similar claims.

Those Christians who were tempted to place too much confidence in archaeological discoveries (and too little in the Bible's own claims of inspiration and authority) were shaken by Kenyon's "findings" and by similar accounts.  This same pattern appears when the media give attention to stories like the "lost tomb of Jesus" or the so-called "Gospel of Judas."

Archaeological findings are of great interest, of course.  But the key issue is what kind of authority we invest in archaeology in terms of authenticating or disproving the text of the Bible.  Christians err by accepting or investing too much evidentiary authority in archaeological "findings," whether considered to support or to question the biblical accounts.

Authentic Christianity is based upon the inscripturated revelation of God -- the Bible -- as our authority.  In the end, archaeology cannot prove or disprove the biblical text.  Nothing can be found, or not found, that should shake our faith in the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Word of God.  Archaeology can expand our knowledge and understanding, but cannot establish the authority for our faith.

That authority is the Word of God, and the Word of God alone.

______________________

See my posting at "The Reading List" for the Archaeological Study Bible, a great resource for expanding our knowledge of specific biblical texts.

Just What Are Schools to Do? The Aims and Purposes of Education

Schools are never just about education. For that matter, education is never just about education. The school as an institution is founded and supported as a means to some end. In ancient Israel, education was to produce a faithful member of the chosen nation -- a son who would bring pride to the family and his people and glory to God. In ancient Greece the school was to produce a productive citizen, wise and mature. Rome followed the example of Greece.

In the Christian tradition, education was first about making disciples. The earliest Christian schools were catechetical schools for new believers. The early church borrowed from the classical models and established new traditions.

Christianity and Christian culture would later give birth to monastic schools, the universities, and community schools. The university would emerge from the Christian conviction that all truth is established in the one true God, and is thus rightly studied as a unity -- in a university.

Many of the early community schools in Europe and England were established by churches and Christians who wanted to improve the prospects of the poor, especially the urban poor. This movement gained ground in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, as cities such as London, Manchester, and Liverpool filled with indigent children. The same was true of American cities such as New York, Boston, and (somewhat later) Chicago.

In the United States, the public schools emerged out of a vision to inculcate certain common values and a common vision of citizenship. This movement gained momentum in the early twentieth century, when "progressivist" educators saw the public schools as a mechanism to reduce the segmentation of urban areas into ethnic and religious enclaves -- a very real problem in cities like Boston and New York. The "common school" would produce a generation of Americans --not just Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others drawn by the great migrations to the United States.

Rather early in the twentieth century, that vision was modified to add other concerns. Theorists such as John Dewey argued that the public schools must be pervasively secular in a sense they had not been before. Dewey wanted to see the schools separate children from the religious prejudices of their parents. Front and center in his concern was the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, and much of the public momentum behind the movement was driven by explicit anti-Catholicism. Many Protestants bought into the secularization concept because they were pleased to see Catholic influence checked. They would later learn that what they had set loose against the Catholics would lead to unintended and unwanted consequences.

Later influences on the public schools included the emphasis on science and technology that came in the midst of the "Sputnik scare" and the Cold War. The federal government poured millions upon millions of dollars into science and math education in the public schools, afraid that young Americans were falling behind young Soviets in terms of scientific know-how.  Others wanted the schools to produce capable workers for the assembly lines and factories of the age of the machines.

The 1960s and later decades saw the public schools driven to take therapeutic concerns as a prime "educational" goal, with concepts such as self-esteem and "authenticity" coming to the fore. In addition, those with aggressive agendas concerning sex and sexuality education, "values clarification," and a host of other ideological fads and fashions pushed those agendas into the public schools.

Even as the early movement to separate children from the religious "prejudices" of their parents set the schools in opposition to parents, the same was true with much of the sex education that was established in the public schools during the 1980s and 1990s. Those battles continue today.

In reality, any debate over education is an ideological debate -- a worldview clash. There is no neutrality in education. The education is designed to produce some kind of result, some kind of citizen. There is no way that this can be separated from character, morality, and worldview.

All this comes to mind when looking at a news report out of Britain. The respected headmaster of an admired school is taking leave of his position -- resigning in protest of what he laments as the schools' descent into "social engineering."

As The Telegraph [London] reports:

A leading headmaster who is leaving one of the most popular schools in the state system to work in the private sector has accused the Government of turning teachers into "social workers and surrogate parents".

Rod MacKinnon, the head of Bexley Grammar School, south-east London, said schools were being forced to shun traditional lessons as ministers manipulated the education system for the purposes of "social engineering".

He said schools "cannot solve all of society's ills" and should be left to teach.

More:

"There are those who wish to use children and schools as social engineers with a view to creating a different society but we should not even be trying to do such things," he said. "Children need to be nurtured, educated and cared for, not thrown into the frontline of social reform. Muddled thinking is guaranteeing failure for the noble aspirations we all commonly hold for the education of the young."

Mr. MacKinnon reached the conclusion that school teachers "simply do not have the contact time to 'create' behaviours and attitudes within children. They are not – and cannot be – social engineers and social workers and surrogate parents, as well as subject teachers, all rolled into one."

That is an eloquent lament from an anguished educator. There are many American principals and teachers who share these concerns, and millions of citizens who should. Education is always controversial when worldviews and expectations collide -- and for good reason. Seen rightly, education is all about what we want children to know, how we want them to think, and what kind of people we want them to be. Education is never only about what most people think of as education.

An Argument Worth Defending

This is Albert Mohler for Townhall.com. The American experiment is now 232 years old – at least the way we count it. We date ourselves as a nation to July 4, 1776, even though the Declaration of Independence was actually signed the day before. No matter, it was announced on the fourth of July.

Those who signed that historic statement of liberty were putting their lives on the line. They knew that Britain would see them as traitors, even as the new nation saw them as patriots.

What so many fail to understand now is that the Declaration was an argument that had to be defended. That argument has now been defended over and over again, as each successive generation of Americans has to make the cause of freedom its own.

Independence Day is an American institution, and rightly so. Enjoy the fireworks, share a picnic, and fly the flag with pride. Happy Fourth of July.

[Click on logo to hear audio.]

[Thanks to readers who pointed out that the nation is 232, not 238 years old.]

Where Are Europe's Babies?

"You can't have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home." The statement, shockingly obvious as it may be, was offered by Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau. He was speaking of Europe's looming demographic disaster. As The New York Times Magazine reports this week, many Europeans are now asking, "Where are the babies?"

The cover story is by Russell Shorto, who contributes some of the most interesting pieces run in the magazine each year. As he makes clear in this article, the radical decline in birthrates will bring equally radical social challenges.

As Shorto explains:

In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the "replacement rate" -- the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country's current population level. At various times in modern history -- during war or famine -- birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to "low" or "very low" levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari -- the authors of the 2002 report -- saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country's population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: "lowest-low fertility."

This "lowest-low fertility" is disastrous in terms of economic, social, and political life. Europe's increasingly empty playgrounds and primary schools point to the looming reality -- a precipitously falling population. Add to this the fact that the population is also aging -- and fast.

More:

To many, "lowest low" is hard evidence of imminent disaster of unprecedented proportions. "The ability to plan the decision to have a child is of course a big success for society, and for women in particular," Letizia Mencarini, a professor of demography at the University of Turin, told me. "But if you would read the documents of demographers 20 years ago, you would see that nobody foresaw that the fertility rate would go so low. In the 1960s, the overall fertility rate in Italy was around two children per couple. Now it is about 1.3, and for some towns in Italy it is less than 1. This is considered pathological."

This population time bomb will reshape the world map. Global birthrates are falling, but some nations will clearly gain an advantage. As Shorto reports, for example, Spain will have relatively few young adults in just a few years, while India will have multiple millions. India, already emerging as a global powerhouse in technology and services, stands to gain even more.

The future favors the young, and Europe's major nations are headed toward graying populations. Strangely, the problem is more acute in the nations of southern Europe than in the north. Throughout the continent, the problems of demographic imbalance will tax resources and public life. What happens when those in retirement draw more than the economy will produce?

Some try to argue that these challenges will not spell disaster, but, as the comment by Carl Haub indicates, these arguments now strain credibility.

There are countless issues connected to these questions, but in the end, this represents a spiritual problem. Some try to explain the drop in birthrates by pointing to economic factors and the high cost of living. Economic factors play a part, no doubt, but families found ways to sustain themselves with children through far harder times than these.

This pattern seems to reflect, at least in part, a sense of cultural and spiritual exhaustion. Has Europe grown weary as a civilization. It would seem hard to deny that this must be linked to the rapid secularization of Europe.

At the very least, some in Europe now see babies and children as a hobby rather than a national priority. That path leads to a most depressing conclusion. As Carl Haub so eloquently explains, "You can't have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home."

A Worldview Gone to the Dogs . . . Literally

The news out of New York City has to do with Leona Helmsley, a woman whose name (plastered all over Manhattan) became synonymous with the materialistic excesses of the 1980s. Helmsley, who died last August, still manages to make the news -- this time with regard to her instructions concerning the multi-billion dollar trust she left behind. Her instructions: The entire trust is to be spent on dogs. Billions of dollars.

Leona Helmsley became a presence in the news and the media through her involvement in the management and promotion of the many properties held by her husband, the late Harry B. Helmsley, who built a legendary fortune in New York real estate. Their many holdings included New York's prestigious Helmsley Palace Hotel, for which Leona did her own television advertisements as the "queen" who stood guard over her palace.

As it happened, she was later to go to prison for massive income tax evasion. The media coverage of her fall was ruthless and savage, and there appeared to be few tears. To the contrary, reports emerged in the media and in the course of her federal trial that revealed her to be, if anything, more ruthless and savage than the media coverage.

As The New York Times explains, she "was best known for her sharp tongue and impatience with humanity." Further, "for many Americans, she later became a symbol of unbridled arrogance and belief in entitlement."

Well, she is about to become a symbol of something else -- someone who hated humanity so much that she has instructed that her billions be spent on dogs.

Here is how The New York Times explains the issue in today's edition:

Her instructions, specified in a two-page "mission statement," are that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, according to two people who have seen the document and who described it on condition of anonymity.

It is by no means clear, however, that all the money will go to dogs. Another provision of the mission statement says Mrs. Helmsley's trustees may use their discretion in distributing the money, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much anyway, given that its directions were not incorporated into Mrs. Helmsley's will or the trust documents.

"The statement is an expression of her wishes that is not necessarily legally binding," said William Josephson, a lawyer who was the chief of the Charities Bureau in the New York State attorney general's office from 1999 to 2004.

Still, longstanding laws favor adherence to a donor's intent, and the mission statement is the only clear expression of Mrs. Helmsley's charitable intentions. That will make the document difficult for her trustees, as well as the probate court and state charity regulators, to ignore.

There is one additional aspect of the story that deserves attention. According to sources who claim to have seen the document and know of its development, the trust was originally designed to "help indigent people" as a first goal, with the welfare of dogs a secondary goal. In 2004 she deleted the first goal.

The legal issues are unsettled, but an earlier will, involving a much smaller portion of the estate, was probated with her Maltese "Trouble" receiving a $2 million trust fund (Helmsley had set it at $12 million).  The paper reports that news of that trust fund set off death threats against the dog.  The canine is now protected at a cost of $100,000 per year.

The coverage in The New York Times reflects the judgment that this is a grotesque misuse of funds.  Millions of Americans are sure to recoil in revulsion at this woman's wishes -- even considering her priorities warped, weird, and immoral.

But why?  For the simple reason that we really do know that human beings are not mere animals.  This moral judgment is part of creation itself, and it is a powerful moral intuition.  We really do know that feeding fellow human beings is more important than feeding dogs, and that care for humans should take precedence over care for animals.

The biblical worldview honors animals as creatures in whom the Creator takes pleasure and in whose existence He is glorified.  But human beings alone bear the image of God, and can know the Creator.

Confusion about this abounds.  Radical animal rights activists claim no moral distinction between human beings and other creatures.  Spain proposes to give apes and other "hominids" legal rights.  Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University argues that some domestic animals such as cows and pigs should be granted moral preference over human infants in some situations.  Scientists grounded in a naturalistic worldview are more and more hard pressed to define just what makes humans unique as a species.  Leona Helmsley is not alone in her confusion.

Dogs can give humans so much pleasure.  Our home includes a relatively unintelligent but totally charming beagle named Baxter.  As a boy, I found that the wagging tail of a dog was irresistible as a sign of friendship.  As a rule dogs make few demands, crave human companionship, and love to be happy.  What's not to like?

But anyone who thinks that a dog is as morally significant as a human being is lacking in moral judgment.  If this were not the case, The New York Times would have buried this story in its legal notices. 

The case of Leona Helmsley -- whatever the eventual outcome of legal battles ahead -- makes this point with absolute clarity.  Her worldview had, quite literally, gone to the dogs. 

A New Search and Destroy Mission

Even before the Nazi Party came to power, the doctors of Weimar Germany began to divide humanity into those who should live and those who should die. They developed the category of "life unworthy of life" in order to designate those whose infirmity, deformity, race, or lifestyle rendered them subhuman in terms of rights.

Similarly, the eugenicists of the twentieth century -- in America as well as in Europe -- divided humanity into the "fit" and the "unfit," and called for more children from the fit, less from the unfit.

Now, word comes from London that a physician has used preimplantation genetic testing to allow a woman to become pregnant with a baby that is free of a breast cancer gene. In order to produce this baby, six embryos found to carry the gene were rejected.

As The Telegraph [London] explains:

Only one other woman is believed to have become pregnant after undergoing the same screening technique, called pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD).

Critics claim it is unethical because it means viable embryos are destroyed. There are also fears it could lead to the creation of "designer babies" that are chosen for their looks or intelligence.

The British woman said she felt she had to go through the invasive IVF treatment even though she and her husband are fertile in order to try and safeguard her child.

The paper went so far as to label the child a "designer baby." This is precisely what many ethicists fear. Viable human embryos were discarded because they were found to carry a genetic marker that involves a risk -- perhaps a significant risk -- of later disease.

Where does this stop? Proponents of the technology complain that using phrases like "designer baby" is unfair, since no current technology allows a parent to "order" a child complete with all chosen traits. But that complaint misses the point. The designation of any trait -- even the negative designation -- creates a designer baby. Someone has decided that some trait is unacceptable.

In this case it was a gene linked to cancer. What next? We already know that the vast majority of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are now aborted. How long before there is a preimplantation screen for that syndrome? Couples are now screening embryos for gender. How long before athletic ability or earning potential is linked to a gene? Blond hair? Blue eyes?

The Weimar doctors would be proud. The doctors behind this new technology assure us that their only concern is the improvement of human health. So did the Weimar doctors and the eugenicists. Health can be used as an argument for destroying life, it seems.

The tragedy is that vast millions of couples would almost surely take advantage of this technology should it become more widely available. The end would justify the means, they would rationalize.

The laboratory is now a dangerous place for human embryos. They can be destroyed for stem cell research, frozen pending sale, and rejected after genetic testing. This points to a very sad reality -- there is now a search and destroy mission targeting human embryos considered unworthy and unwanted.

Life unworthy of life. Where have we heard that before?