Christless Christianity: Getting in Christ's Way by Michael Horton

What would things look like if Satan actually took over a city? The first frames in our imaginative slide show probably depict mayhem on a massive scale: Widespread violence, deviant sexualities, pornography in every vending machine, churches closed down and worshipers dragged off to City Hall. Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer "Yes, sir," "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full on Sunday ... where Christ is not preached.

Not to be alarmist, but it looks a lot like Satan is in charge right now. The enemy has a subtle way of using even the proper scenery and props to obscure the main character. The church, mission, cultural transformation, even the Spirit can become the focus instead of the means for "fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith" (Heb. 12:2). As provocative as Barnhouse's illustration remains, it is simply an elaboration of a point that is made throughout the story of redemption. The story behind all the headlines of the Bible is the war between the serpent and the offspring of the woman (Gen. 3:15), an enmity that God promised would culminate in the serpent's destruction and the lifting of the curse. This promise was a declaration of war on Satan and his kingdom, and the contest unfolded in the first religious war, between Cain and Abel (Gen. 4 with Matt. 23:35), in the battle between Pharaoh and Yahweh that led to the exodus and the temptation in the wilderness. Even in the land, the serpent seduces Israel to idolatry and intermarriage with unbelievers, even provoking massacres of the royal family. Yet God always preserved that "seed of the woman" who would crush the serpent's head (see 2 Kings 11, for example). The story leads all the way to Herod's slaughter of the firstborn children in fear of the Magi's announcement of the birth of the true King of Israel.

The Gospels unpack this story line and the epistles elaborate its significance. Everything is leading to Golgotha, and when the disciples-even Peter-try to distract Jesus away from that mission, they are being unwitting servants of Satan (Matt. 16:23). "The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers"-not simply so that they will defy Judeo-Christian values, but "to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake" (2 Cor. 4:4-5).

Satan lost the war on Good Friday and Easter, but has shifted his strategy to a guerilla struggle to keep the world from hearing the gospel that dismantles his kingdom of darkness. Paul speaks of this cosmic battle in Ephesians 6, directing us to the external Word, the gospel, Christ and his righteousness, faith, and salvation as our only armor in the assaults of the enemy. In Revelation 12, the history of redemption is recapitulated in brief compass, with the dragon sweeping a third of the stars (angels) from heaven, laying in wait to devour the woman's child at birth, only to be defeated by the ascension of the promised offspring. Nevertheless, knowing his time is short, he pursues the child's brothers and sisters. Wherever Christ is truly proclaimed, Satan is most actively present. The wars between nations and enmity within families and neighborhoods is but the wake of the serpent's tail as he seeks to devour the church, employing the same tried and tested methods: not only martyrdom from without, but heresy and schism from within. In the rest of this article, I want to suggest a few of the ways we are routinely tempted toward what can only be called, tragically, "Christless Christianity."

Denial: The Sadducees

The modern spirit has been dedicated to shifting authority from the outside (the church or the Bible) to the inside (reason or experience). Kant said the one thing he could always trust was his moral intuition, which led to the irrefutable fact of "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." The Romantics said we should trust our inner experience. In fact, was it not the desire to usurp God's throne that motivated the rebellion of Lucifer as well as Adam and Eve?

Whenever we determine what really matters by looking within ourselves, we always come up with law. Some would object, "Not law, but love." However, in the Bible, the Law simply nails down what it means to love God and our neighbor. Long before Jesus summed up the Law in this way (Matt. 22:39), it was delivered by the hand of Moses (Lev. 19:18, 34), and Paul reiterated the point (Rom. 13:8-10). We were created in the image of God, without fault, entirely capable of carrying out God's moral will of making all of creation subservient to God's law of love. The Fall did not eradicate this sense of moral purpose, but turned us inward, so that instead of truly loving God and our neighbor, we suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. The fall did not even mean that people became atheists, but that they became superstitious: using "God" or "spirituality" and their neighbors for their own ends.

The Enlightenment philosophers were right when they recognized that morality is the common denominator of humanity. Yet they concluded from this that whatever came to us from the outside-the reports of historical miracles and redemption-was the least essential to true religion. "All we need is love" and "All we need is law" make exactly the same point. Duty, love, or moral and religious experience lay at the heart of all the world's religions-their insides-while the historical packaging (stories, miraculous claims, creeds, rituals) are the outer shell that can be tossed away.

Kant distinguished these in terms of pure religion and ecclesiastical faith. The former has to do with our moral duty. The latter consists of doctrines of sin, the incarnation and atonement, justification, supernatural rebirth, the particular historical claims concerning Christ, as well as the official practices of the church (such as baptism and the Supper). The story of the death and resurrection of Christ, for example, could be accepted only to the extent that it represented a universal moral truth (like self-sacrifice for others or for one's principles). Taking it at face value actually undermined pure morality. If you look to someone else's sacrifice to save you, then you won't be as prone to fulfill your own duty yourself. One sect dealt with guilt by throwing children into volcanoes to pacify the gods, while Christianity says that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son ... " (John 3:16). Yet once religion is refined of such "superstitions," the residue left over is a pure morality that will at last lead us to build a tower reaching to the heavens. Trust your insides; doubt everything external to you. That was the lesson of the Enlightenment.

The problem, of course, is that we have an outside God and an outside redemption. Everything inside of us is the problem. The good news, however, is that the God who is completely other than we are became one of us, yet without succumbing to our selfish pride. He fulfilled the law, bore its judgment, and rose again as our solution to the curse of sin, death, and condemnation. Furthermore, he sent his Spirit to indwell us, making us new from the inside out, until one day our very bodies are raised. In one sense, of course, the Enlightenment was right: the law is in us by nature, since we are created in God's image. The gospel is surprising, good news that has to come to us from the outside. Everyone knows that we should treat others the way we would like to be treated ourselves: the Golden Rule does not by itself provoke martyrdom. It does not need witnesses and heralds. In fact, it did not require the incarnation, much less the atonement and resurrection.

So it's not surprising that the world would think that "all we need is love," and we can do without the doctrine, since the world thinks it can do without Christ. Doctrine is where the religions most obviously part ways. Doctrine is where things get interesting-and dangerous. As the playwright Dorothy Sayers said, doctrine isn't the dull part of Christianity, rather, "The doctrine is the drama." Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, wrath, and righteousness, original sin, Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably. If postmodernism is simply a revival of modern romanticism (experience as sovereign), then it's not very postmodern after all.

Historians often point out that for all of their differences, pietism and rationalism converged to create the Enlightenment. The heirs of modernity looked inward, to autonomous reason or experience, rather than outward, in faith and repentance toward a God who judges and saves. With Friedrich Schleiermacher, father of modern Protestant liberalism, the emphasis fell on Jesus as the supreme example of the kind of moral existence that we can all have if we share in his "God-consciousness." So while Christianity may represent the purest and fullest realization of this principle, other religions are in their own ways attempts to put this universal religious and moral experience into words. We just say things differently, but we are experiencing the same reality. Where Kant located the essence of religion in practical reason (moral duty), Schleiermacher located it in religious experience, but either way the self is made the measure of truth and redemption is something that we find within ourselves, even if it is "Christ in my heart." Revivalism, which is the mother of both Protestant liberalism and Evangelicalism, pressed the "deeds over creeds" and "experience over doctrine" thesis to its limits.

This means, of course, that Christ is not the unique God-Man, but the most divinized human being. The gospel is not what Christ did for me, outside of me, in history, but the impression that he makes on me, the nobility that he stirs up within me, to experience the same God-consciousness and love. Sin is not a condition from which I need to be saved, but actions that I can keep from doing with sufficient motivation and instruction. Christ's death is not an atoning sacrifice that satisfies God's just wrath, but an example of God's love that moves us to repentance. Hence, "What would Jesus do?" is the main question, not "What has Jesus done?" The inside takes priority over the outside.

Distraction: The Pharisees

In contrast to the Sadducees, the Pharisees were scrupulous. The outside mattered, but in a legalistic way. They believed in the resurrection, the last judgment, the truthfulness of the miracles reported in the Bible's historical narratives, and were so eager for the messianic age that they wanted everybody to get their house in order. Only when God's people obey the law in all of its details (even the rabbinical rules designed to guard against violating the actual prescriptions of Moses) would the Messiah visit Israel and vindicate his people in the last judgment.

Now what could be wrong with a call to moral renewal and national righteousness? But the Pharisees were distracted from the real point of the kingdom. Expecting a king who would overthrow Roman rule and reestablish the Mosaic theocracy, they missed the real identity of the Messiah and his kingdom under their noses. The disciples themselves were also distracted, routinely changing the subject whenever Jesus spoke of the cross as they neared Jerusalem. They were thinking inauguration day, with the last judgment and the consummation of the kingdom in all of its glory. Jesus knew, however, that the only route to glory down the road was the cross up ahead. For all their emphasis on external righteousness and behavior, they too affirmed salvation from inside: by moral effort.

Jesus contrasts the false piety of the Pharisee with the genuine faith and repentance of the citizen of his kingdom in his famous parable in Luke 18:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted. (vv. 9-14)

Jesus told the Pharisees, "You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15). While Jesus basically seems to ignore the Sadducees, since they probably viewed each other as irrelevant, he warns repeatedly of "the yeast of the Pharisees," which is "their hypocrisy" (Luke 12:1).

In the parable that Jesus tells, the Pharisee even prayed, "I thank you that I am not like this tax collector." The only thing worse than his hypocrisy and self-righteousness was that he pretended to give God a little credit for it. We have all witnessed awards ceremonies in which recipients acknowledged the many people without whom such success could not have been possible. This is quite different, however, from being a beneficiary of the estate of someone who, at the very moment of drafting the bequest, was treated as an enemy. Christless Christianity does not mean religion or spirituality devoid of the words "Jesus," "Christ," "Lord," or even "Savior." What it means is that the way the names and titles are employed will be removed from their specific location in an unfolding historical plot of human rebellion and divine rescue and from such practices as baptism and Communion. Jesus as life coach, therapist, buddy, significant other, founder of Western civilization, political messiah, example of radical love, and countless other images can distract us from the stumbling block and foolishness of "Christ and him crucified."

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the devil (Screwtape) catechizing his minion (Wormwood) to keep the Christians distracted from Christ as redeemer from God's wrath. Rather than clumsily announce his presence by direct attacks, Wormwood should try to get the churches to become interested in "Christianity and...": "Christianity and the War," "Christianity and Poverty," "Christianity and Morality," and so on. Of course, Lewis was not suggesting that Christians should not have an interest in such pressing issues of the day, but he was making the point that when the church's basic message is less about who Christ is and what he has accomplished once and for all for us, and more about who we are and what we have to do in order to justify all of that expense on his part, the religion that is made "relevant" is no longer Christianity. By not thinking that "Christ crucified" is as relevant as "Christ and Family Values" or "Christ and America" or "Christ and World Hunger," we end up assimilating the gospel to law. Again, there is nothing wrong with the law-the moral commands that expose our moral failure and guide us as believers in the way of discipleship. However, assimilating the good news of what someone else has done to a road map for our own action is disastrous. In the words of Theodore Beza, "The confusion of law and gospel is the principal source of all the abuses that corrupt or have ever corrupted the church." When God's Law (and not our own inner sentiment) actually addresses us, our first response should be, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner," not the reply of the rich young ruler, "All this I have done since my youth."

Another way we distort the proclamation of Christ in the "Pharasaic" mode is by what has sometimes been called "the assumed gospel." This is often the first stage of taking our eyes off of Christ. Even where Christ is regarded as the answer to God's just wrath, this emphasis is regarded as a point that can be left behind in the Christian life. The idea is that people "get saved" and then "become disciples." The gospel for sinners is Christ's death and resurrection; the gospel for disciples, however, is, "Get busy!" But this assumes that disciples are not sinners, too. There is not a single biblical verse that calls us to "live the gospel." By definition, the gospel is not something that we can live. It is only something that we can hear and receive. It is good news, not good advice. The good news is that, "But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the Law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe," since sinners "are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, received through faith" (Rom. 3:21-25).

When the gospel-that is, Christ as Savior-is taken for granted, we are no longer being constantly converted from our hypocrisy and self-trust to faith and love. Like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable, we thank God that we are not like others, but we are really trusting in our own "discipleship." The Pharisees were disciples too, and they had their disciples. But only in Christ is discipleship the consequence of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, rather than its own contribution to human redemption.

Jesus himself said, "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:28). When he was rebuked by his disciples for raining on their parade by talking about the cross, Jesus said, "It is for this reason that I have come to this hour" (John 12:27). When Philip asked Jesus to show them the way to the Father, Jesus said that he is the Way (John 14:8-14). Similarly, Paul told the Corinthians that he was not only single-mindedly determined to preach Christ alone, but "Christ crucified," although it is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks," since it is the only good news capable of saving either (1 Cor. 1:18, 22-30; 2:1-2). In other words, Paul knew (the super-apostles were always providing concrete evidence) that preachers could use the name of Jesus, but as something or someone other than the vicarious sacrifice for sinners.

The Greeks love wisdom, so show them a Jesus who is smarter at solving the conundrums of daily living and the church will throng with supporters. Jews love signs and wonders, so tell people that Jesus can help them have their best life now, or bring in the kingdom of glory, or drive out the Romans and prove their integrity before the pagans, and Jesus will be laureled with praise. But proclaim Christ as the Suffering Servant who laid down his life and took it back up again, and everybody wonders who changed the subject.

The church exists in order to change the subject from us and our deeds to God and his deeds of salvation, from our various "missions" to save the world to Christ's mission that has already accomplished redemption. If the message that the church proclaims makes sense without conversion; if it does not offend even lifelong believers from time to time, so that they too need to die more to themselves and live more to Christ, then it is not the gospel. When Christ is talked about, a lot of things can happen, none of which necessarily has anything to do with his doing, dying, rising, reigning, and return. When Christ is proclaimed in his saving office, the church becomes a theater of death and resurrection, leading to genuine lives of witness, love, fellowship, community, and service-yet always requiring forgiveness and therefore always coming back to the good news concerning Christ.

Today, we have abundant examples of both tendencies: denial and distraction. On one hand, there are those who explicitly reject the New Testament teaching concerning Christ's person and work. Jesus was another moral guide-maybe the best ever-but not the divine-human redeemer. However, evangelicals are known for their stand against Protestant liberalism. On the other hand, many who affirm all the right views of Christ and salvation in theory seem to think that what makes Christianity truly relevant, interesting, and revolutionary is something else. Distractions abound. This does not mean that Jesus is not important. His name appears in countless books and sermons, on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and billboards. Yet it has become something like a cliché or trademark instead of "the name that is above every name" by which alone we are saved.

Jesus Christ as the incarnate God in the merciful service of redeeming and reconciling sinners is simply not the main theme in most churches or Christian events these days. And what happens when we stop being reminded of who God is and what he has achieved in human history for a world in bondage to sin and death-in other words, when doctrine is made secondary? We fall back on our natural religion: what happens inside, that which we always know intuitively: law. "Deeds, not creeds" equals "Law, not gospel." For all their theoretical differences, liberals and evangelicals end up sounding a lot like each other. Evangelicals who say that they believe in Christ end up reducing Christ to a moral example just as thoroughly as liberals, not by outright denial but by distraction. The goal of this article is not to brand contemporary Christians "Sadducees" and "Pharisees," but to point out that one doesn't have to deny Christ and the gospel in order to end up with Christless Christianity. In fact, one can appeal to Christ and "make Jesus the center" in a way that drifts back toward "pure religion" (morality) and away from "ecclesiastical faith" (doctrine).

Today, partly in response to the appalling lack of genuine discipleship in a post-Christian era, many Protestants like Stanley Hauerwas and Brian McLaren encourage us to recover the Anabaptist legacy, which, as I mentioned, focused on Jesus as moral example. In A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren explains, "Anabaptists see the Christian faith primarily as a way of life," interpreting Paul through the lens of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount rather than vice versa. The emphasis falls on discipleship rather than on doctrine, as if following Jesus' example could be set against following his teaching. What happens when the Sermon on the Mount is assimilated to a general ethic of love (i.e., pure morality), and doctrine (ecclesiastical faith) is made secondary? Christ himself becomes a mere example to help people become better non-Christians. In fact, McLaren writes, "I must add, though, that I don't believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts." "I don't hope all Jews or Hindus will become members of the Christian religion. But I do hope all who feel so called will become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus." It is no wonder, then, that McLaren can say concerning liberal Protestants, "I applaud their desire to live out the meaning of the miracle stores even when they don't believe the stories really happened as written." After all, it's deeds, not creeds that matter. McLaren seems to suggest that following Jesus (pure religion) can exist with or without explicit faith in Christ (ecclesiastical faith).

There is nothing especially postmodern about any of this, of course. It is simply the legacy of the Enlightenment and its moralistic antecedents. If following Jesus' example of love (never mind his exclusive claims, divisive rhetoric, and warning of judgment) is the gospel, then, of course there will be many Buddhists and liberals who are better "Christians" than many of us who profess faith in Christ. As Mark Oestriecher, another Emergent church writer, relates, "My Buddhist cousin, except for her unfortunate inability to embrace Jesus, is a better 'Christian' (based on Jesus' description of what a Christian does) than almost every Christian I know. If we were using Matthew 26 as a guide, she'd be a sheep; and almost every Christian I know personally would be a goat." Yet at the end of the day, "radical disciples" will burn out, too, and realize that they, like the rest of us, are hypocrites who fall short of God's glory and need someone outside of them not only to show the way but to be the way of redemption. Although McLaren himself does not deny the Christ confessed in the creeds, he believes that what is most important about Jesus Christ is his call to discipleship, which allows us to participate in his redeeming work, rather than his unique, unrepeatable, completed work for sinners two thousand years ago.

In his book, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations, Dan Kimball, pastor of Santa Cruz Bible Church, announces the goal of the emerging church movement: "Going back to a raw form of vintage Christianity, which unapologetically focuses on kingdom living by disciples of Jesus." If we are allowed to pick and choose whatever we like from the New Testament (again, hardly a uniquely postmodern trend-Thomas Jefferson had his own edited version, the moral Jesus of love minus the Christ of "ecclesiastical faith"), we will always gravitate toward ourselves and our own inner experience or morality, away from God: the external authority of his law and redemption announced in his gospel. Emergent Christians recognize the hypocrisy of evangelical consumerism with remarkable insight, and properly recoil at the images of Christians one finds in The Simpsons' character Ned Flanders. However, they forget that before Emergent there was the "Jesus Movement" that turned into the megachurch movement that they recognize as deficient.

For all of their reactions, the "post-evangelical" emerging folks seem to follow the well-worn path of their revivalist forebears in seeing the church primarily as a society of moral transformers who preach themselves rather than Christ. Like many emerging church leaders (in continuity with my evangelical pastors growing up), Kimball invokes Francis of Assisi's famous line: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." "Our lives will preach better than anything we can say." But doesn't this mean to preach ourselves rather than Christ? The gospel that we preach is good news because it is not the story of our discipleship, but of Christ's obedience, death, and resurrection in our place. The good news is not, "Look at my life" or "look at our community"; it is the announcement that in Christ God justifies the wicked. Yes, there is hypocrisy, and because Christians will always be simultaneously saint and sinner, there will always be hypocrisy in every Christian and in every church. The good news is that Christ saves us from hypocrisy, too. But hypocrisy is especially generated when the church points to itself and to our own "changed lives" in its promotional materials. The more we talk about ourselves, the more occasion the world will have to charge us with hypocrisy. The more we confess our sins and receive forgiveness, and pass this good news on to others, the more our lives will be authentically changed in the bargain. With all due respect to St. Francis, the gospel is only something that can be told (i.e., words), a story that can be declared. When our lives are told within that larger story, rather than vice versa, there is genuine salvation for sinners and mission to the world.

Kimball writes that the "ultimate goal of discipleship ... should be measured by what Jesus taught in Matthew 22:37-40: 'Love the Lord with all your heart, mind, and soul.' Are we loving him more? Love others as yourself. Are we loving people more?" This is not a revolutionary, new message; it is the imperative preaching that many of us have always heard growing up in Evangelicalism.

For all of its incisive critiques of the megachurch movement, how different is the Emergent message from Rick Warren's call to "Deeds, Not Creeds"? These voices are right to remind us of what the law requires, and how Jesus in both his teaching and example exhibited the deepest demands that love places upon us. But if this is the good news, then we are all in trouble. As I grow in my holiness-realized in greater love for God and neighbor-I am actually more aware of how far I fall short. Therefore, on good days, I might answer Kimball's question with cautious optimism, on other days it might lead me to despair. But the gospel is the good news that I need on any day, leading me away from myself to Christ "who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).

Many conservative evangelicals and emerging "post-evangelicals" display their common heritage in an American revivalist tradition that Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as "Protestantism without the Reformation." In a recent issue of TIME on Pope Benedict's critical relationship with Islam, conservative Catholic scholar Michael Novak was quoted as saying concerning the pontiff, "His role is to represent Western civilization." There are a lot of evangelical leaders who seem to think that this is their job, too. The mission of the church is to drive out the Romans (i.e., Democrats) and make the world safe for democracy. The Emergent movement's politics are different: they lean left rather than right. For many reared on the "Christian America" hype of the religious right, this may seem like a major shift, but it's just a change in parties rather than a deeper shift from moralism to evangelical mission. The Emergent sociology is different, too: Starbucks and acoustic guitars in dark rooms with candles rather than Wal-Mart and praise bands in bright-lighted theaters. Yet in either case, moralism continues to push "Christ crucified" to the margins.

We are totally distracted, on the right, left, and in the middle. Children growing up in evangelical churches know as little as unchurched youth about the basics of the Christian faith. They increasingly inhabit a church world that is less and less shaped by the gospel through Christ-centered catechesis, preaching and sacrament (the means that Jesus instituted for making disciples). The songs they sing are mostly emotive, rather than serving to make "the Word of Christ dwell in [them] richly" (Col. 3:16), and their private devotions are less shaped by the practices of corporate prayer and Scripture reading than in past generations. Nothing has to change on paper: they can still be "conservative evangelicals," but it just doesn't matter because doctrine doesn't matter-which means faith doesn't matter. It's works that counts now, so get busy!

So now people are called to be the "good news," to make Christ's mission successful by living "relationally" and "authentically." Where the New Testament announces a gospel that changes lives, now the "gospel" is our changed life. "We preach not ourselves but Christ" (2 Cor. 4:5) has been exchanged for a constant appeal to our personal and collective holiness as the main attraction. Church marketing guru George Barna encourages us to reach out to the unchurched on the basis of our character: "What they are looking for is a better life. Can you lead them to a place or to a group of people that will deliver the building blocks of a better life? Do not propose Christianity as a system of rules but as a relationship with the One who leads by way of example. Then seek proven ways to achieve meaning and success." I am not at all implying that we shouldn't follow Christ's example or that the church shouldn't have models and mentors. What I am suggesting is that discipleship is teaching others, and teaching them so well that even when we falter as role models, the maturity of their own discipleship will not fail because it is grounded in Christ and not in us.

No matter what we say we believe about Christ's person and work, if we aren't constantly bathed in it, the end result will lead to H. Richard Niebuhr's description of Protestant liberalism: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross." According to University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith, the working religion of America's teens-whether evangelical or liberal, churched or unchurched-is "moralistic, therapeutic deism." And the answer to that, according to many megachurches and emerging churches is "do more; be more authentic; live more transparently." This is the good news that will change the world?

Christless Christianity can be promoted in contexts where either the sermon is a lecture on timeless doctrine and ethics or Christ gets lost in all the word studies and applications. Christ gets lost in churches where activity, self-expression, the hype of "worship experiences" and programs replace the ordinary ministry of hearing and receiving Christ as he is given to us in the means of grace. Christ gets lost when he is promoted as the answer to everything but our condemnation, death, and the tyranny of sin, or as the means to the end of more excitement, amusement, better living, or a better world-as if we already knew what these would look like before God addressed us in his law and gospel.

Back to Barnhouse's illustration. Of course, Satan loves war, violence, injustice, poverty, disease, oppression, immorality, and other displays of human sinfulness. And of course he is displeased whenever a cup of cold water is offered to a thirsty man in Christ's name. However, what he spends most of his time plotting is the displacement of Christ from the focal awareness, ministry, and mission of the church. Keeping unbelievers blind and believers distracted is his main strategy. Genuine renewal only comes when we realize that the church is always drawn to distractions and must always be redirected to Christ, always one generation away from becoming something other than the place in the world-the only place, in fact-where the finger points away from us to Christ, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29).

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1 The quotations from Brian McLaren are taken from his work, A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004) pp. 61, 206, 214, 260, 264. The quotation from Mark Oestreicher is found in Dan Kimball's The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for a New Generation (Zondervan, 2003), p. 53. The direct quotation from Kimball is from the same book, p. 26. The quotation from Francis of Assisi is taken from pp. 185 and 194 of Kimball's work. The TIME magazine article on Pope Benedict is from the November 27, 2006, issue, p. 46. George Barna's quotation is from his book Grow Your Church from the Outside In (Ventura: Regal, 2002), p. 161.

Michael Horton is the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of The White Horse Inn national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He is author of several books, including Power Religion, A Better Way, Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, God of Promise: Introducing Covenant Theology (Baker, 2006), and Too Good to be True: Finding Hope in a World of Hype (Zondervan, 2006).

Issue: "Christless Christianity" May/June Vol. 16 No. 3 2007 Pages 10-16

"Is Christianity Good for the World?"

Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson debate.

Five Basics for Political Involvement, by James Montgomery Boice

It has always been difficult for Christians to think in harmony about the state. This is due to two ambiguities. One ambiguity is that the church, although it should be sacred in the sense of being devoted wholly to God and his kingdom, is often quite secular and thus, to the embarrassment of many believers, frequently takes its authority, theology, agenda, and methods from the world. It is not noticeably unique. The other ambiguity is that the state, although established by God for the defense and wellbeing of its citizens, sometimes operates in a despotic and even demonic manner. So while Christians are called upon to honor and obey the secular powers, they must also at times be ready to challenge them in the name of God and his righteousness, and even disobey the state when its laws conflict with God’s.

Christians increasingly see the value of political involvement. But how should they be involved? And with whom and for what causes? To offer guidelines in these areas, we begin with some intentionally balanced statements.

1. Church and state must be separate from each other, in the sense that the church must not control national policy nor the state either establish or limit the free exercise of religion. But this does not mean that either church or state is independent of God.

The doctrine of the separation of church and state means that presidents are not to appoint clerics, define the doctrine or establish church polity, and clerical authorities are not to appoint presidents nor do the state’s work. Nevertheless, church and state are both responsible to God in whose wisdom each has been established. Each is to remind the other if its God-appointed duties, and recall it to upright, godly conduct if it strays. If Christians do not do their job of speaking to the civil authorities on moral issues, spiritual and moral principles will be eliminated from public debate, the state will become its own god, and the only functioning political principle will be pragmatism.

2. Christians are free to seek elected office, and some should be encouraged to do so. But elected officials do not have to be Christians to be effective leaders, and merely being a Christian does not in itself qualify one for any office.

The Westminster Confession of Faith, in its chapter on the “Civil Magistrate,” states rightly that “it is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate.” This means that it is as proper for Christians to engage in secular pursuits, such a politics, as to become missionaries and ministers. But while missionaries and ministers must be born again to perform their function, civil leaders do not have to be. A Christian does not have to vote for the “Christian” candidate if a choice is offered, and he or she can pray for and support an unbeliever of good character and ability with both thankfulness and enthusiasm.

3. The Bible gives Christians guidelines for approaching national and social problems, and Christians should seek to be consistently biblical in all their thoughts and actions. But the Bible does not necessarily give specific answers to problems, and reasoning from a biblical principle to a specific policy must be carefully done.

It is a valid complaint of seasoned politicians that many Christians leap too quickly from a valid truth of Scripture to a specific program and are overly hasty to denounce anyone who disagrees with their program as being unbiblical or anti-God. If Christians are to gain a hearing in the rough and tumble of the political arena, they must be willing to fill in the gaps, showing how a suggested program best expresses and advances the desired principle. Moreover, Christians must argue their case with unbelievers, appealing to them on behalf of what is good and not retreating into an unassailable citadel of “direct revelation.”

4. In attempting to advance a specific proposal, Christians must depend on moral suasion, asking God through prayer to give their reasoning favor with those having different points of view. But they must not retreat from this high position to tactics of mere naked pressure of coercion.

It is tempting to resort to such pressure. The political process is slow, riddled with compromise, and frustrating. Again there are many people who know only the tactics of public demonstration, economic boycott, media hype, and backroom power politics. Since these things often work for others, the Christian activist reasons that they should also work for him. Christians must not forget that the only truly lasting reforms come from God, and that they have usually been a product of periods of great spiritual awakening.

5. Christians must think, work, and pray effectively, trying always to place their specific programs within the framework of an overall Christian world and life view. And they must strive no less personally to model the reality suggested.

This is what that great statement in Micah 6:8 calls for: “What does the Lord require of you?” To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” To act justly does not mean merely to talk about justice or to get other people to act justly. It means to do the just thing yourself. To love mercy means that we are to be merciful consistently.

The final requirement is important: to walk humbly with God. Just because we have the Bible does not mean that we have all the answers, and we must not be afraid to confess that important fact. Rather, along with others we must humbly seek God’s solutions to our problems, recognizing that we ourselves may even be part of the cause.

This article was previously published in Eternity Magazine, September 1987, and has been edited for time-related references.

Four could reach 500-HR mark this season

In the first 120 seasons of major league baseball, which brings us through the 1995 season, 14 players hit 500 home runs. From 1972 through 1983, only one player, Willie McCovey, joined The Club. And from 1988 through 1995, nobody reached 500 home runs. In only three years in history have as many two players hit their 500th home run in the same season: 1967 with Mickey Mantle and Eddie Mathews, 1971 with Harmon Killebrew and Frank Robinson, and 2003 with Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro.

But this season, four players likely will hit No. 500: Frank Thomas (491), Alex Rodriguez (478), Jim Thome (477) and Manny Ramirez (475). If all four do, 10 members will have joined the 500 fraternity in 12 seasons after having only 14 in 120 seasons.

The Whistleblowers' Tale

The real disgrace at the World Bank.

The Realignment of America, by Michael Barone

The native-born are leaving "hip" cities for the heartland.

“What's now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.

Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation's fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That's the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.”

Rolling Stone editor: ‘U2 have the greatest live show’

Bono, U.S. lawmakers push education

Grace is a Thought That Can Change the World But It is Also an Imaginative Engine to Propel the Change

Where the War on Terror is Succeeding

November Surprise

"In spite of what the polls supposedly tell us, I strongly suspect that the Democrats may already have blown the 2008 election. Unlike the late Senator Aiken of Vermont, who proposed that we declare victory and get out of Vietnam, the Democrats want us to declare defeat and get out of Iraq. This, they imagine, is what the American people were demanding in the congressional election of 2006.

...I do think that they are in the process of ensuring their defeat in the next presidential election. In many respects, of course, the people of this country are very different from their forebears of 1812 and 1846. But I suspect that most of us are not all that different from them in how we view politicians who conspicuously fail to root for American troops fighting in the field, and who seem to think that they can get away with it by sticking the responsibility for the war on the sitting president of the other party. In 1972, this deeply ingrained American attitude still had enough life in it to give Richard Nixon, unpopular though he was, an overwhelming victory against George McGovern. Unless the American leopard has changed his spots since then, the Democrats are in for a very big surprise in November 2008."

Hamilton's just two good: Homers, defensive gems, ovations add to growing legacy

THE ENQUIRER/LEIGH TAYLOR

After celebrating his fifth-inning homer with teammate David Ross, Josh Hamilton thought it'd be neat to hit another. He did two innings later. He also nailed Colorado's speedy Willy Taveras at third base with a big throw and made a running, over-the-shoulder catch.

U2 Rocks the House (of God)

Bono inspires worship with an edge.

The Iraq Report IV: The battle for Diyala.

Diyala province has become one of the central battlegrounds between the Coalition and al Qaeda. Its capital, Baqubah, is just a short drive from Baghdad, and the province has suffered from and contributed to the ongoing violence in the Iraqi capital. In the months before the full complement of additional U.S. forces arrive in Iraq, U.S. commanders have reinforced their troops in Diyala in an effort to get this area under control before beginning major clear-and-hold operations in Baghdad. Al Qaeda has responded to this effort with a signifi cant surge of its own in the province, increasing attacks on coalition forces, local government offi cials, and civilians. Coalition attacks have been met with al Qaeda counterattacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces. Sectarian violence fell dramatically in Diyala in February 2007, as al Qaeda and other extremist groups fought coalition and Iraqi forces. But the terrorists are gradually losing control, local government is beginning to function once again, and the local population is turning against al Qaeda and toward cooperation with coalition forces in a manner similar to what has occurred in Anbar. Still, Establishing security in Diyala will be extremely difficult. Al Qaeda remains determined to reestablish its position in the province, and Iranian support for all sides in the ongoing struggle there fans the fl ames of violence as rogue Shiite militias challenge radical Sunni extremists.

Editor's note: The Iraq Report will be published at www.weeklystandard.com approximately every two weeks and will chronicle and analyze ongoing coalition military operations bothin Baghdad and throughout Iraq. To read the full report in pdf click here or on the image below.

Iraq Report I: From "New Way Forward" to New Commander, March 1, 2007

Iraq Report II: The Baghdad Security Plan begins., March 15, 2007

Iraq Report III: The Anbar Awakening: Displacing al Qaeda from Its Stronghold in Western Iraq., April 5, 2007

Inadvertent Truths: George Tenet's revealing memoir.

..."the book provides surprising evidence--some of it new--that Bush was right to take the war on terror to Iraq, and that he might be well advised to get more serious about Iran. Tenet offers this evidence inadvertently, for it undercuts the fashionable critique of the Iraq war that he now seeks to associate himself with. But precisely because the evidence cuts against Tenet's polemical thrust, it should be given considerable weight."

..."For instance, Tenet devotes several pages to a reexamination of the ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. And though he tries to stake out politically safe middle ground--by arguing against imaginary Bush administration officials who claimed Iraq was behind 9/11--he concludes that Iraq did have a relationship with al Qaeda that the Bush administration was right to be worried about."

..."Tenet also confirms an internal intelligence community dispute, reported in this magazine 18 months ago, over the debriefings of senior al Qaeda terrorist Ibn Shaykh al Libi. The story of al Libi's disputed claims provides an illuminating look at how Michigan senator Carl Levin has dishonestly (and dishonorably) driven mainstream news reporting on the issue of prewar Iraq intelligence."

..."Tenet also discloses new intelligence about the activities of the al Qaeda leadership living under what he calls "loose house arrest" in Iran."

..."In another section of the book, Tenet defends Dick Cheney against the ridiculous claim made in Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, that Cheney urged his colleagues to ignore evidence that did not serve his war- mongering purposes."

..."So there were significant and dangerous al Qaeda-Iraq ties. There were and are al Qaeda-Iran ties. Saddam's WMD programs remained a threat. George Tenet may not have intended to tell these truths. But he has."

..."Tenet had this to say about the CIA view of Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions:

[The CIA] assessed that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and that if he had to make his own fissile material, he probably would not be able to do so until 2007 to 2009. However, we indicated in the NIE that we had only moderate confidence in that judgment. We also indicated that [the Bureau of Intelligence and Research] thought that, although Saddam clearly wanted nuclear weapons, there was inadequate evidence to prove that he had an ongoing integrated and comprehensive program to develop them.

If Saddam could obtain fissile material elsewhere, it would not be hard for the regime to make a weapon within a year. After all, we believed that some terrorist groups could do so if they came into possession of the all-important highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

It's 2007. Fortunately, Saddam is gone."

An Incomplete Field: First impressions of the GOP's 2008 candidates.

How Credit-Card Data Went Out Wireless Door

Biggest Known Theft Came from Retailer With Old, Weak Security

Inside the Inside Story, by Douglas Feith

Reds' OF Hamilton wins NL Rookie of the Month

The Origins of "Geek" and Other Terms of Note

In the circus, a performer who sank sufficiently low would do horrible things (like biting the heads off live chickens) for booze money. That poor soul was called a geek. How it came to describe techies is unknown.

Clinton's PowerPointer

With Data and Slides, a Pollster Guides Campaign Strategy

One Choice in Iraq, by Joe Lieberman

In the two months since Petraeus took command, the United States and its Iraqi allies have made encouraging progress on two problems that once seemed intractable: tamping down the Shiite-led sectarian violence that paralyzed Baghdad until recently and consolidating support from Iraqi Sunnis -- particularly in Anbar, a province dismissed just a few months ago as hopelessly mired in insurgency.

This progress is real, but it is still preliminary...

Indeed, to the extent that last week's bloodshed clarified anything, it is that the battle of Baghdad is increasingly a battle against al-Qaeda. Whether we like it or not, al-Qaeda views the Iraqi capital as a central front of its war against us.

Al-Qaeda's strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. It is trying to kill as many innocent people as possible in the hope of reigniting Shiite sectarian violence and terrorizing the Sunnis into submission.

In other words, just as Petraeus and his troops are working to empower and unite Iraqi moderates by establishing basic security, al-Qaeda is trying to divide and conquer with spectacular acts of butchery.

Notes on a Scandal: How ethical are Paul Wolfowitz's detractors?

Lessons of the Libby Affair

"If there was a conspiracy, then, it was a conspiracy of dunces. At every stage where a top administration official could have exercised authority to ameliorate the problem caused by Wilson’s op-ed and Armitage’s indiscretion, that official failed to do so.

If a lesson about the Bush administration lies buried in this tale, it is close to the opposite of the accepted one. It is a lesson about an administration caught in an uncomfortable position as a result of one State Department official’s indiscreet remark to a skilled columnist, an administration straining to appear to be doing the right thing even at the expense of actually doing anything right. But the real lesson here has nothing to do with the Bush administration, any more than it has to do with prewar intelligence or with the First and Fifth Amendment rights of CIA officers.

The modern American government is a vast and largely self-sustaining bureaucracy. That bureaucracy acts, first and foremost, in its own interest, and not necessarily in the interests of its putative but temporary political bosses. The CIA, its intelligence having been challenged, sold out the White House on the sixteen words—even though that intelligence would later be upheld. The State Department, faced with the knowledge that one of its own was responsible for the Valerie Wilson leak, preferred keeping the White House in the dark to revealing what it knew. The Justice Department did what prosecutors do when ordered to investigate, which is to charge people with crimes.

In other words, the Republican party’s alleged “full control” of government prior to the 2006 midterm elections was more myth than reality. The Bush administration lost control of the Wilson story almost from the beginning, and while on a number of occasions it failed to exercise the control available to it, it was also denied the opportunity to control its fate by entrenched interests that no elected administration can ever fully master without the consent of the bureaucracy that supposedly serves it.

The President, however, does still hold one trump card, left in the hands of the chief executive by the founding fathers. The only unchecked power held by any single person in the federal government is the power to grant a pardon. That power is nothing more than the authority to restore personal liberty to another person—that is, to release a man or woman from the grip of the state.

Within hours of Libby’s conviction, Democrats, led by the Senate majority leader Harry Reid, called on President Bush to preclude the possibility of a pardon. This the President has of course refused to do. Neither has he yet offered a pardon. But there are good reasons, partly political and partly personal, for delay.

A pardon, it is generally agreed and the Supreme Court has ruled, carries with it the taint of guilt, and its acceptance an acknowledgment of guilt. This is something that Libby may yet hope to avoid. While he is due to be sentenced in June, his lawyers have announced their intention to appeal the conviction.

A pardon, whether it comes now or later, will inevitably occasion another round of scab-pulling about the case for the war and the administration’s commitment to the rule of law. It was partly out of a wholly unjustified fear of such criticisms that Libby was put in his current position in the first place. Before the President leaves office, it would be a rough sort of justice to defy those criticisms, and those who level them, by setting him free."

"More Than Enough Evidence"

What George Tenet really says about Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda.

On The Move, by Bono

"The one thing, on which we can all agree, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums and in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. 6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality." --Bono

This small book, based upon the speech given by Bono at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast, delivers an inspiring and powerful message. Here, in Bono's own words, is a reflection on his own faith and a challenge to people of all faiths to reach across boundaries and come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call "the least of these."

Head & Shoulders, Knees & Toes by U2

A Loser's History: George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.

Germs and the City

Two centuries of success against infectious disease have left us complacent—and vulnerable.

Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates

America’s first confrontation with the Islamic world helped forge a new nation’s character.

Reading the Constitution Right: Reading the Constitution Right

The Empire of Lies: The twenty-first century will not belong to China.

The long reach and ambitions of al-Qaida - details chilling plots to kill Gore, acquire nuclear weapons

Ask, Tell, Whatever? Gays-in-the-military comes up again

by MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS

For the first time since the 2000 presidential campaign, the issue of homosexuals’ serving openly in the military has moved to center stage. Encouraged by polls purporting to show that pubic opinion, both civilian and military, is now more receptive to the idea, Rep. Martin Meehan (D., Mass.), chairman of the relevant subcommittee, has revived his 2005 bill that would repeal the Clinton-era policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT). DADT prohibits military commanders from asking about a person’s sexual orientation and allows homosexuals to serve if they keep their sexual orientation private and don’t engage in homosexual acts. Meehan’s bill would replace DADT with “a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

The timing of this debate is unfortunate. As David S. C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, wrote in a recent letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), “The Global War on Terrorism is far-reaching and unrelenting.” A national debate on gays in the military threatens to cause “divisiveness and turbulence across our country, [compounding] the burden of the war.”

The most interesting aspect of the current debate is the change in tactics on the part of advocates of open homosexual service. In the past, they argued that this was merely the latest episode in a struggle for equal civil rights — often invoking President Truman’s postwar executive order that racially integrated the U.S. military. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll wrote in 2000 that “today’s soldiers and sailors reluctant to serve shoulder to shoulder with homosexuals are the progeny of racist and sexist soldiers and sailors who were told to get over it or get out.”

But now they argue that the exclusion of homosexuals undermines military effectiveness and is at odds with public opinion. This claim is made by both liberals and conservatives. For instance, in a letter to defense secretary Robert Gates asking him to “revisit” DADT, Senator Wyden wrote that the policy “makes absolutely no sense and undermines the fight against terrorism.” Wyden’s office has contended that dozens of homosexual service members with critically needed skills like proficiency in Arabic have been discharged, and that enforcing the policy costs hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Wyden has always opposed the exclusion of open homosexuals, but even some who once favored the exclusion are making the same argument. In January, retired Army general John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Clinton, wrote in the New York Times that he had reconsidered his position and concluded that the current policy should be reversed. He based his change of heart on his belief that the U.S. military has been “stretched thin,” and that public sentiment has shifted in recent years. Former Republican senator Alan Simpson has made essentially the same arguments in a Washington Post op-ed.

There are several problems with these arguments. First, the numbers used by opponents of DADT to support their position are questionable. For example, the main evidence for the contention that there is greater public acceptance of open homosexual service, both within and outside of the military, is a Zogby International poll published in December 2006. But as Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has pointed out, Zogby chose to highlight the response to an irrelevant question: “Are you comfortable interacting with gay people?” Seventy-three percent of respondents replied that they were. But in response to the central question (“Do you agree or disagree with allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military?”), only 26 percent agreed, while 37 percent disagreed and 32 percent were neutral. That is hardly indicative of overwhelming public support for open homosexual service.

The numbers purporting to show that military members favor open homosexual service are fishy as well. The Zogby news release stated that the poll was designed in conjunction with the Michael D. Palm Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military), an advocacy group that has long pushed for open homosexual service. This fact may or not have an impact on the credibility of the poll. But the polling sample does: It claims to be based on a sample of 545 people “who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan (or in combat support roles directly supporting those operations), from a purchased list of U.S. military personnel.” But, as Donnelly observes, the U.S. military does not sell or provide access to personnel lists.

The Zogby figures are further called into question by a January 2007 Military Times survey of active-duty subscribers, which found that while 30 percent thought that open homosexuals ought to be permitted to serve, 59 percent did not, and 10 percent had no opinion. The 59 percent opposed to open homosexual service was identical to that revealed by a January 2006 survey conducted by the same paper.

Then there is the question of the effect of DADT on the retention of crucial personnel, such as Arabic linguists. Advocates of open homosexual service have made a big deal of this, claiming, for instance, that 54 Arab linguists have been separated from the military because they were homosexual. But the Pentagon has argued that most of those who are counted among the 54 had not achieved linguistic proficiency, and that over a decade only nine qualified Arabic specialists have been separated because of the law.

But let’s address the broadest question: Why prohibit open homosexual service at all? Congress provided the answer in 1993, when it passed the current law: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service and presents a risk to the morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that underpin military effectiveness.”

An important element of war is “friction,” which Clausewitz described as “the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.” Clausewitz’s friction describes the cumulative effect of the small, often unnoticeable events that are amplified in war, producing unanticipated macro-effects. Military effectiveness aims at reducing the impact of friction and other obstacles to success on the battlefield.

Most research has shown unit cohesion is critical to military effectiveness and battlefield success. The key to cohesion is what the Greeks called philia — friendship, comradeship, or brotherly love. Philia is the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together. Its importance has been described by J. Glenn Gray in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle:

Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale. The commander who can preserve and strengthen it knows that all other physical and psychological factors are little in comparison. The feeling of loyalty, it is clear, is the result, not the cause, of comradeship. Comrades are loyal to each other spontaneously and without any need for reasons.

The presence of open homosexuals (and women) in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros will be unleashed into an environment based on philia, creating friction and corroding the very source of military excellence itself. It does so by undermining the non-sexual bonding essential to unit cohesion as described by Gray. Unlike philia, eros is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness, and favoritism, all of which undermine order, discipline, and morale. These are issues of life and death, and help to explain why open homosexuality and homosexual behavior traditionally have been considered incompatible with military service.

But can’t these problems be solved by enforcing regulations against fraternization and sexual relations among service members? There are indeed such regulations on the books, but they cannot always be enforced. And when they are not, the consequences extend far beyond the individuals involved. Over the past two decades I have seen the poisonous effects that personal relationships gone wrong can have in an academic setting. But no one died. In combat, the consequences could well be lethal.

Finally, some advocates of open homosexual service — e.g., Senator Simpson — observe that it has not had an adverse effect on other militaries in the world. But where it matters most — in combat units — these other militaries follow pretty much the same policy as the United States.

In the end, it is up to Congress to decide whether to change the law. As Prof. Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, dean of American military sociologists and the primary architect of the DADT policy, pointed out several years ago in the Wall Street Journal, there are foolish reasons for excluding homosexuals from the armed forces, but that does not mean we should ignore the good ones. Chief among the good reasons remains military effectiveness.

Mr. Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.

The Express Checkout, by Mark Steyn

Since I became National Review’s in-house Demography Bore, I get a gazillion e-mails a day saying: “Well, if the death of Europe is really happening, how come no one else is talking about it except you and a few other fringe wackos?” Actually, quite a few folks are talking about it. For example:

“The expected global upheaval is without parallel in human history.”

An extravagant bit of scaremongering from page 173 of my book? The late Oriana Fallaci with the swearwords cut out? No, it’s the United Nations Population Division discussing the latest official figures, and anticipating in the next four decades population transformation of a scale and speed never before seen. There will be a vast emptying out of Central and Eastern Europe: Germany’s population down 10.3 percent, Poland down 20.5 percent, the Russian Federation down 24.3 percent, Bulgaria down 35.2 percent. And in Western Europe the only population increase will be almost entirely due to the great migration from Africa and Asia.

To repeat: That’s not me, that’s the U.N. numbers. Since I turned into the Al Gore of the maternity ward (albeit with fewer celebrity groupies), I’ve been slightly bewildered by the opposing arguments. For example, several critics claim my figures are exaggerated — why, everybody knows Italy’s fertility rate isn’t 1.2, it’s 1.25; it’s absurd to suggest the Islamification of Europe will happen by 2025 or 2040, when it’ll only start to kick in around . . . Well, they don’t often go into that.

It’s a curious line of reasoning: Yes, we’re heading for the falls but not as fast as Steyn says; the Niagara’s running pretty slowly so there’s nothing to worry about. As it happens, I’ll stick with my timeline, because demographic change does, indeed, kick in pretty quickly. Take a population of 10 million. Let’s say 90 percent have 1.25 children per couple (which is the Italian fertility rate), and 10 percent have 3.5 children per couple (which is the estimated European Muslim fertility rate). Those nine million “Italians” will have 5.6 million children and 3.5 million grandchildren. The one million “Muslims” will have 1.75 million children and 3.1 million grandchildren. In other words, they’ll have pretty much evened up the score within two generations. And that’s before you add in continuing immigration, and, indeed, emigration (which is already becoming a factor in Dutch, German, and British demographic calculations) — not to mention accelerating rates of conversion.

In the shrewdest observation to mark the EU’s 50th-anniversary jamboree, Pope Benedict said: “One must unfortunately note that Europe seems to be going down a road which could lead it to take its leave from history.” It may be that an Islamified Belgium or Sweden will be a very pleasant place. Who knows? But that’s the crux of the matter: If you outsource your future, it will be determined by the fellows you give the contract to.

I wonder if His Holiness gets the e-mails I get: The shriller ones denounce me as “racist”; the calmer voices point out that Muslim countries such as Tunisia are already seeing birth rates fall to near-European levels. To deal with the “racist” charge first: Islam, of course, is not a race, and, as is already clear, there are plenty of takers for it among pasty-faced white blokes. But what I find odd is the idea that merely drawing attention to Europe’s self-extinction is “racist.” If he had a tail and hung from a tree in the rain forest or were shivering on that ice floe instead of Al Gore’s polar bear, we’d all be chipping in donations to the Save the Italian campaign. But, because he doesn’t, it’s “racist” even to discuss it.

So let’s clarify matters by looking at demography without any complicating White Anglo-Saxon Post-Protestants clogging up the picture. For a year or more now, there’s been a steady drip of “Who lost Turkey?” stories. The modern secular Muslim state — a country that gave women the vote before France did and was Israel’s best friend in an otherwise hostile region — certainly, that Turkey seems to be getting de-boned by the hour: It now has an Islamist government whose prime minister has canceled trade deals with Israel, denounced the Iraqi elections, and frosted out the U.S. ambassador because he was Jewish; a new edition of Mein Kampf is prominently displayed at the airport bookstore. In other words, the Zionist Entity’s best pal is starting to look like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan of the month.

But among all the lamentations, only Michel Gurfinkiel’s recent analysis in Commentary got to the underlying reality: Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there have been two Turkeys — the Turks of Rumelia, or European Turkey, and the Turks of Anatolia, or Asia Minor. Kemal Ataturk was from Rumelia and so were most of his supporters, and they imposed the modern Turkish Republic on a somewhat reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. In its 80-year history, the population has increased from 14 million to 70 million, but the vast bulk of that population growth has come from Anatolia, whose population has migrated from the rural hinterland to overwhelm the once solidly Kemalist cities.

Ataturk’s modern secular Turkey has simply been outbred by fiercely Islamic Turkey. That’s a lesson in demography from an all-Muslim sample: No pasty white blokes were involved. So the fact that Muslim fertility is declining in Tunisia is no consolation: All that will do, as in Turkey, is remove moderate Muslims from the equation too early in the game.

The U.N. Population Division says the demographic transformation underway is historically unprecedented. The Pope thinks that Germans and Poles and Italians have opted en masse for the express checkout. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but when complaceniks assure us there aren’t even any questions they’re either frauds or fools.

Tenet Tries to Shift the Blame. Don't Buy It.

Spirit Tech: How to wire your brain for religious ecstasy.

God Is in the Dendrites: Can "neurotheology" bridge the gap between religion and science?

God Is Not Great: Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion, Pt. 3

God Is Not Great: Was Muhammad Epileptic?, Pt. 2

God Is Not Great: Religion Poisons Everything, Pt. 1

This week Slate is publishing three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Sliming Wolfowitz: The World Bank President Did Nothing Wrong

by Christopher Hitchens

Holiday in Iraq

Over Christmas break, the author took his son to northern Iraq, which the U.S. had made a no-fly zone in 1991, ending Saddam's chemical genocide. Now reborn, Iraqi Kurdistan is a heartrending glimpse of what might have been.

by Christopher Hitchens April 2007

Shipmate: Writing The Nation's War Plan

New Baseball Drug Bombshell

An ex-Mets clubhouse hand pleaded guilty to distributing illegal steroids to players.

SI.COM: Names may follow

Buster Olney on the investigation

The Plague Fighters: Stopping the Next Pandemic Before It Begins

HIV, Ebola, SARS — any of the world's most horrifying diseases are caused by animal viruses that made the jump to humans. Now a UCLA scientist thinks he can stop the next pandemic before it even starts.

Drug Test Cowboys: The Secret World of Pharmaceutical Trial Subjects

Ball Busters: The Nerds Keeping Baseball Honest

Illustration by Nick Dewar

Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health

Can Music Survive Inside the Big Box?

Adam Lucas, 11, looks through CDs in the Rock/Pop/R&B music section at Wal-Mart in Canton, Mich.

Africans for Wolfowitz: Third World reformers resist a coup by rich Europeans.

Kermit sings Nine Inch Nails "Hurt"

The Return of the King: A new novel from the creator of Middle Earth.

My Dinner with Bono

Bono's journey from rock star to humanitarian exemplifies how important shifts in self-definition are to shifts in behavior

For girls who hate their bodies: a spiritual crisis

Financial Times: Industry caught in carbon 'smokescreen'

Industry caught in carbon 'smokescreen'

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on "carbon credit" projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a "green gold rush", which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go "carbon neutral", offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about DLR 68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to DLR 4bn in the same period.

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK's biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found "serious credibility concerns" in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

"The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it," he said.

These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.

Some companies are benefiting by asking "green" consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay DLR 4 to eliminate a tonne of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.

The FT has also found examples of companies setting up as carbon offsetters without appearing to have a clear idea of how the markets operate. In response to FT inquiries about its sourcing of carbon credits, one company, carbonvoucher.com, said it had not taken payments for offsets.

Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling "carbon credits" for burying the carbon.

There is nothing illegal in these practices. However, some companies that are offsetting their emissions have avoided such projects because customers may find them controversial.

BP said it would not buy credits resulting from improvements in industrial efficiency or from most renewable energy projects in developed countries.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Bream

2007-04-25 21:10:40

The Nuclear Wars

Men, women, marriage, children-and America's future.
by Claudia Anderson
04/30/2007, Volume 012, Issue 31

Marriage and Caste in America
Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age
by Kay S. Hymowitz
Ivan R. Dee, 192 pp., $22.50

Kay Hymowitz has brought good news and bad news back from her investigations into the state of matrimony in America. The good news--that most of the country has started to pull away from the un-marriage abyss--cannot take the sting out of the bad--that the near disappearance of marriage among the poorest Americans is producing a self-perpetuating proletariat lacking the culture of self-control, work, and committed relationships that is the lifeline out of poverty. The underclass is hardening into a hereditary caste.

It is the last two of the eight essays collected in this short and readable volume that announce the hopeful developments. "The End of Herstory" offers a refreshingly obvious explanation for the reluctance of most women to identify themselves as feminists: "Most women want husbands and children as much as they want anything in life." This truth is offensive to feminism, a grievance-based outlook "rooted in a utopian politics that longs to transcend both biology and ordinary bourgeois longings," Hymowitz writes. Feminism therefore "cannot address the reality of the lives that it has helped to change." In particular, its tedious dogma of 50-50 parity between men and women in all aspects of child rearing and home chores is simply irrelevant to the experience of normal families juggling their multiple tasks. What's more, today's young women, Hymowitz finds from her extensive interviews, are perfectly comfortable with the observation--anathema to feminists--that men and women are complementary and their differences are rooted in biology. Lawrence Summers's Harvard notwithstanding, apparently our long feminist nightmare is over.

Hymowitz clusters that happy turn of events with an array of positive trends under the heading "It's Morning After in America." The improvements over the last 10-15 years in the incidence of crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, alcohol abuse, early sexual activity, and more are already familiar. Behind them all, Hymowitz sees a "change in cultural beliefs" that is producing "a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful citizenry."

This cultural shift she traces to four causes: generational backlash, as Gen-Xers and Millennials resolve not to reproduce the divorced, blended, and single-parent families the Baby Boomers made; a resurgence of patriotism and seriousness among the young triggered by 9/11; the example of immigrants, with their strong work ethic and, in the case especially of Asians, high grades and stable families; and the opportunities extended by the information economy to "the hardworking, forward-looking, and pragmatic."

These mutually reinforcing influences have helped Americans recognize the damage done by "their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values." Now, says Hymowitz, "they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture." While we are unlikely to return to the status quo ante, this is, she concludes, "a moment of tremendous promise"--for some Americans.

But not for all. Most of the book is devoted to that portion of our cultural fabric that has slipped beyond the reach of self-repair. The saddest news she brings is the near disappearance among poor urban African Americans of the simple "life script" that leads out of poverty, the inherited "how-to" of successful adulthood, namely: Finish school, get a job and stay employed, get married--and then, and only then, have children.

And it's worse than that. Instead of positive guidance and examples leading them in a sound direction, young people in the 'hood are subjected to deeply disturbing influences. Hymo witz describes a "relationship dystopia." Growing up without fathers--sometimes without ever encountering a lifelong married couple--poor urban kids are surrounded instead by de facto polygamy: single or temporarily attached men with children by multiple women, and single or temporarily attached women with children by multiple men. The young are formed in the midst of the resulting "maelstrom of confusion, jealousy, rage, abandonment, and violence."

While this familial chaos correlates to a great degree with poverty, Hymo witz rejects the economic explanation for it--the argument that the lack of reliable breadwinners forces women to settle for children without marriage. She notes that teen birthrates were at their lowest, and illegitimacy rare, during the Depression, when unemployment reached a historic high of 25 percent. By contrast, between 1965 and 1991, while unemployment rose and fell repeatedly within a "normal" range, illegitimacy soared. She points out, too, that rural black populations in Maine, Montana, and Idaho have been largely exempt from inner-city-style family disintegration. Why? Because there, "mainstream norms" have continued to hold sway.

Hymowitz's greatest strength is her appreciation of the role of norms and values, ideas and beliefs, in shaping behavior. She recounts, for example, the dark story--equal parts scandal and tragedy--of black and white elites' ideologically based refusal to heed the warning of the Moynihan Report. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, documented alarming levels of illegitimacy in the "ghetto." But Moynihan's conclusion--"a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure"--was greeted with what Hymowitz calls "forty-plus years of lies."

There was the lie that the only problems were joblessness and discrimination. There was the lie that "the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang-up anyway." There was the lie that the poverty of single mothers was proof of patriarchal oppression and nothing more. And so Moynihan's call to action produced none--and today, the share of African-American babies born to unwed mothers, already 25 percent when he sounded the alarm, has nearly tripled, to 70 percent. To this day, it is newsworthy when a prominent person breaks through the denial and speaks plainly about the need to recover "Parent Power," as Bill Cosby has done--to large and enthusiastic audiences, Hymowitz notes.

Or take her interesting discussion of the distinctive mission of marriage in the American Republic--namely, to mold free citizens equipped for self-reliance and self-government. Breaking with the arranged marriages and authoritarian fathers of Europe, the theorists of the Founding generation prescribed a different style for the democratic family. By the 1830s, Tocque ville already observed in American homes a "familiar intimacy, which renders authority less absolute" and noted that "a species of equality prevails around the domestic hearth."

But American principles of equality and free choice contained within them the seeds of the divorce revolution. American individualism--progressively unmoored from the moral capital of biblical teaching, with its emphasis on love, fidelity, and self-sacrifice--led to the cult of self-fulfillment, of which recent generations have eagerly grabbed the rewards, and for which they, their children, and the country have paid dearly:

Think of the past several decades of high rates of divorce and illegitimacy as a kind of natural experiment testing the truth of the founders' vision. The results are in: if we forget that marriage is both a voluntary union between two loving partners and an arrangement for rearing the next generation of self-reliant citizens, our capacity for self-government weakens.

Given her interest in beliefs and culture, it is surprising that Hymowitz gives only the most cursory treatment to the decline of religious commitment in hastening the developments she deplores. Similarly, in her discussion of the "Morning After," she makes no mention of the renewal of interest in orthodox belief and morality among the young. (Colleen Carroll Campbell has described this on prestigious college campuses, among both Catholics and Protestants. Among evangelicals, the Joshua Harris phenomenon is worth noting: His I Kissed Dating Goodbye, published in 1997 when he was 21, sold over a million copies, according to his publisher. Like his three subsequent books, it calls for a return to chaste, marriage-oriented courtship.)

So what to do? These fine essays, along with the rest of Kay Hymowitz's intelligent polemics, embody a response rather than proposing one. Long associated with the "marriage movement"--an energetic and constructive alliance of social scientists, theologians and pastors, lawyers and judges, psychologists, counselors, and writers periodically convened by the Institute for American Values in New York--Hymowitz has surely contributed in some small way to creating the present hopeful moment for mainstream America. Whether or not similar efforts have the power to prevent the final entrenchment of a post-marriage under-caste in America, and even to begin the restoration of the black family, Hymowitz and her friends are right and valiant to try.

Claudia Anderson is managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Bono & The Cross

U2 to release DVD from PopMart tour

How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran

Lift provides happy homecoming for Marines

Sgt. Jose Galaviz of Dallas walks with 3-year-old daughter, Lilly, after returning from seven months in Iraq.

Marines, Sailors return from Iraq

Photos: More images from Wednesday's welcoming ceremony in Fort Worth.
Video: Friends and family members cheered the returning heroes.

America's Design for Tolerance

Religious conflicts in multi-faith America are mild compared with those in countries that have only one faith or virtually no faith at all.

"..Even in times and places where ­anti-­Catholicism and ­anti-­Semitism were common, the volume of actual blood and tears shed over differences of faith has been piddling compared with the effusions in Europe in the 17th century or the Middle East today. Perhaps the greatest struggle between tolerance and conformity to the majority’s mores occurred in the late 19th century when the federal government forced the Mormons to abandon ­polygamy."

Smoking Your Money's Worth

The source: “Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity” by Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia, in The American Economic Review, Sept. ­2006.

Boosting taxes on cigar-ettes may be hurting the health of those it doesn’t drive to quit, researchers at University College London have found. That’s because smokers, especially the poor, react to the higher cost of cigarettes by smoking each cigarette more intensively. They take more puffs, inhale more deeply, smoke closer to the end, and block the ventilation holes on the ­filter.

Several studies since 2000 have found that as taxes rise, cigarette consumption goes down. But economists Jérôme Adda and Francesca Cornaglia write that many adult smokers are compensating by extracting far more nicotine from each cigarette. They studied levels of cotinine, a byproduct of nicotine, in 20,000 Americans who partici­pated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2000. Their surprising finding: A one percent rise in taxes increased smoking intensity by 0.47 percent. And more intensive smoking is especially unhealthy. “Smoking a cigarette more intensively, up to the filter, leads the smoker to inhale more dangerous chemicals and has been shown to cause cancer deeper into the lung,” the researchers ­say.

Adda and Cornaglia write that most smokers would prefer to smoke more often but less inten­sively because the last part of a cigarette tastes worse. Tobacco near the filter or butt has been heated up by smoke. Less frequent but more intensive smoking also produces uncomfortable nicotine highs and lows during the ­day.

Today, combined federal, state, and local taxes range from a high of $4.05 a pack in Chicago to a low of 46 cents in South Carolina, and smokers are highly sensitive to price. A 10 percent increase in taxes results in an overall four per­cent decline in cigarette ­consump­tion—­with most of the “lost” sales involving teenagers and pregnant women, specialists say. Smokers are disproportionately likely to have low or medium levels of education, and to work in unskilled and manual occupations. Men and the young are more likely to smoke than women and older individuals, the authors ­write.

Smoking intensity also varies by race. Whites smoke about 40 percent more cigarettes per person than Hispanics and five percent more than African Americans, but blacks have the highest level of cotinine. Blacks extract 56 percent more nicotine per cigarette than Hispanics or whites, Adda and Cornaglia say. This figure helps explain the medical literature showing that even though African-American men are not the heaviest smokers, they have the highest incidence of lung ­cancer.

Losing Another War ... in Asia

'You have many friends [here]. But the attitude of many Asian nations is that China will be here for 2,000 years. America may go away.'

Off the Road: When did the travel bug become such a plague?

But what’s left for the casual traveler to discover? Since that day when the world was all before our unsettled ancestors, a lot has happened. Adam and Eve may have traveled light, but they did carry curiosity from Eden, and it was the best part of their legacy. All the brave individuals, down through the ages, who said to themselves, “I know what’s here, but what’s elsewhere?” and then set out to answer the question, made us a gift of the world they ­observed...

The great heroic age of travel and exploration is ended. The planet’s become a familiar sight to billions of ­people—­not because they’ve been everywhere, or anywhere necessarily, but because so many others have done the job for them and broadcast the results, in words and images. It’s not just the world’s signature architectural ­sites—­the easy stuff like Pyramids, Parthenon, Pantheon, Kremlin, and ­such—­or natural wonders, like the Nile in flow, that we recognize. Thanks to nature TV, we’re savvy about the world’s rarest flora, and practically on speaking terms with a lot of its fauna. Haven’t we all felt the pain of those hapless penguins, whose ­to-­and-­froing across Antarctica for the species’ survival seems hardly preferable to their fallback fate as a sea lion’s lunch? The camera can profile an insect borne from egg to oblivion on an indifferent carrion bird, or find the shyest mollusk mating in an undersea recess. It won’t be long before TV runs out of novel world, unless evolution picks up the ­pace.

“But isn’t it important to see for yourself? Travel broadens us, right?” How firsthand does experience have to be before it counts as experience? If you’ve seen pictures of the pigeons in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, do you need to have them hem you in on-site, while you confirm that the nearby basilica and the bobbing gondolas look . . . just like they do in their photos? If travel is indeed broadening, the benefits are entirely contained. What’s more numbing than to hear about somebody else’s trip? A routine of vacation slide shows, or maybe PowerPoint presentations, could break the steeliest ­terrorist—­or would The Hague cry “Foul!”

"Christ's Kingdom & the Missio Dei"; Mark 1 & Acts 1, By John Armstrong

ACT 3

ACT 3 is a ministry to advance the missional mandate of the Lord Jesus Christ in the third millennium, through the witness of Scripture and the wisdom of the Christian tradition.

Our Core Commitments

1. To advance worship in culturally accessible forms, through orthodox theology that is deeply rooted in the classical doctrine of the triune God and through humble collaboration and cooperation within the whole Christian Church.
   
2. To advance spiritual formation that renews and reforms the church by a growing love for God, neighbor and one another in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, so that the world may believe the Father sent the Son to save it.
   
3. To advance the mission of Christ’s kingdom by teaching believers and churches to engage both people and culture with the story of Jesus Christ.

Fuzzy Climate Math, by George Will

In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a "serious problem.'' Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.

For example, Democrats could demand that the president send the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate so they can embrace it. In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 in opposition to any agreement which would, like the protocol, require significant reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in America and some other developed nations but would involve no "specific scheduled commitments'' for 129 "developing'' countries, including the second, fourth, 10th, 11th, 13th and 15th largest economies (China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia). Forty-two of the senators serving in 1997 are gone. Let's find out if the new senators disagree with the 1997 vote.

Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist''? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases like infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year.

Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in Time magazine's "global warming survival guide'' (April 9), No. 22 says a BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for "climate change,'' that conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296 times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23 times greater) mean that "a 16 ounce T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate.''

Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity guzzling refrigeration, and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks.

Newsweek says most food travels at least 1,200 miles to get to Americans' plates, so buying local food will save fuel. Do not order halibut in Omaha.

Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan.

Opinions differ as to whether acid rain from the Canadian mining and smelting operation is killing vegetation that once absorbed carbon dioxide. But a report from CNW Marketing Research ("Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal'') concludes that in "dollars per lifetime mile,'' a Prius (expected life: 109,000 miles) costs $3.25, compared to $1.95 for a Hummer H3 (expected life: 207,000 miles).

The CNW report states that a hybrid makes economic and environmental sense for a purchaser living in the Los Angeles basin, where fuel costs are high and smog is worrisome. But environmental costs of the hybrid are exported from the basin.

We are urged to "think globally and act locally,'' as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has done with proposals to reduce California's carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent by 2020. If California improbably achieves this, at a cost not yet computed, it will have reduced global greenhouse-gas emissions 0.3 percent. The question is:

Suppose the costs over a decade of trying to achieve a local goal are significant. And suppose the positive impact on the globe's temperature is insignificant -- and much less than, say, the negative impact of one year's increase in the number of vehicles in one country (e.g., India). If so, are people who recommend such things thinking globally but not clearly?

georgewill@washpost.com

A journey of rediscovery

AP Photo/Karen Tam

Josh Hamilton seemed to be a picture of innocence after being selected No. 1 overall in the 1999 draft.

AP Photo/David Kohl

These days, Hamilton has us poring over box scores again, just like when we were kids.

Friends, Enemies and Spoilers: Two months in, the consequences of the surge.

It is no hyperbole to recognize that a precipitous American withdrawal would undermine the current positive trends and increase the likelihood of mass killing and state collapse. Painful and uncertain as it is, the wisest course now is to support our commander and our soldiers and civilians, as they struggle to foster security in Iraq and to defeat the enemies who have sworn to destroy us.

On Democracy in Iraq: It's starting to take root.

If the U.S. military can change the reality and spirit of Baghdad, the rest of Iraq will change too. Contrary to the despair of so many, internal Iraqi politics will probably be the easiest part of this campaign. In the next few months, of course, things could go to hell. One suicide bomber killing the right Shiite VIPs could threaten all. Yet with Petraeus, Maliki, and Sistani in charge, things may work out. If they do, we can only hope that by the time they do, the leadership of the Democratic party will have ceased to have anything in common with those Sunni Arabs who have always wanted the new Iraq to fail.

Can Petraeus Pull It Off? A report on the progress of our arms in Baghdad, Baqubah, Ramadi, and Falluja.

The Truth About China

By GUY SORMAN
April 20, 2007; Page A15

The Western press is full of stories these days on China's arrival as a superpower. A steady stream of Western political and business delegations visit Beijing, confident of China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But after spending all of 2005 and some of 2006 traveling through China -- visiting not just her teeming cities but her innermost recesses, where few Westerners go, and speaking with scores of dissidents, Communist Party officials, and everyday people -- my belief that the 21st century will not belong to the Chinese has only been reinforced. True, 200 million of China's subjects, fortunate to work for an expanding global market, are increasingly enjoying a middle-class standard of living. The remaining one billion, however, are among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. The Party, while no longer totalitarian, is still cruel and oppressive.

Its mendacity has been fully displayed in China's AIDS crisis. The problem is gravest in Henan province, where an untold number of poor peasants contracted AIDS during the 1990s from selling their blood plasma -- a process that involves having their blood drawn, pooled with other blood and then, once the plasma has been removed, put back into their bodies. China didn't conduct HIV tests and therefore ended up infecting donors by giving them back tainted blood. Victims are now reportedly dying in the hundreds of thousands.

The government's initial reaction was to deny that the problem existed, cordon off AIDS-affected areas and let the sick die (a pattern that the government tried to repeat when SARS broke out). In this case, police barred entry to villages where infected people lived (new maps of the province even appeared without the villages). Forced to acknowledge the problem after the international media began reporting on it, the Party nonetheless continues to obfuscate.

When Bill Clinton visited Henan in 2005 to distribute AIDS medicine, for example, the Party prevented him from visiting the worst-off villages. Instead, in Henan's capital city, he posed with several Party-selected AIDS orphans as the cameras clicked. It was an elaborate public-relations charade: China, with the West's help, was tackling AIDS!

Had Mr. Clinton been given a tour by Hu Jia, a human-rights activist, a far grimmer picture would have emerged. Only 30, he is a democrat and a practicing Buddhist who favors Tibetan independence. In 2004, Mr. Hu gave up studying medicine to look after Henan's sick. Months after Mr. Clinton's photo-op, Mr. Hu and I traveled to one of the villages that the former president missed: Nandawu, home to 3,500 people. It's not hard to visit -- you can get past the police checkpoint at the village's entrance by hiding under a tarpaulin on a tractor-trailer, and the police fear AIDS too much to enter the village itself.

What I saw there, however, will remain with me forever. The disease inflicts at least 80% of the families there; in every hovel we entered an invalid lay dying. Most of the sufferers had no medicine. One woman put a drip on her sick husband, a man who has been bedridden for two years and who is covered with sores. What did the bottle contain? She didn't know. Why was she doing this? "I saw in the hospital and on television that sick people had to be put on the drip."

As long as Mr. Hu worked alone to help the sick, bringing them clothes, money and food, the Party left him alone. But he has recently drawn attention to himself by urging the victims to form an organization that can demand more from the government. The Party will sometimes put up with isolated dissent, but it won't tolerate an "unauthorized" association. Several months ago, the government placed Mr. Hu under house arrest in Beijing.

But dissent cannot be stifled everywhere. There has been an explosion of revolts in the vast countryside. The government estimates the number of public clashes with the authorities (some occurring in the industrial suburbs too) at 60,000 a year. But some experts think that the true figure is upward of 150,000 and increasing. When, in late 2006, I reached one village in the heart of the Shaanxi Province after a 40-hour journey from Beijing by train, car and tractor, I saw no trace of an uprising that had taken place a month earlier. Alerted by a text message sent from the village, the Hong Kong press had reported a violent clash between the peasants and the police, leaving people injured and missing or even dead, with the authorities spiriting away the bodies.

I pieced together the reasons that had provoked the uprising. The village had a dilapidated school, without heating, chalk or a teacher. In principle, schooling is compulsory and free, but the Party secretary, the village kingpin, made parents pay for heating and chalk. Then a teacher came from the city who wanted to be paid more than his government wages. He demanded extra money from the parents. Half of the parents, members of the most prosperous clan, agreed; the other half, from the poorer clan, refused.

A skirmish erupted, and the teacher fled. The Party secretary tried to intervene and was lynched. Then the police roared in with batons and guns. The school has reopened, the teacher replaced with a villager who knows how to read and write but "nothing more than that," he admits.

The uprisings express peasants' despair over the bleak future that awaits them. Emigration from the countryside might be a way out, but it's not easy to find a permanent job in the city. All kinds of permits are necessary, and the only way to get them is to bribe bureaucrats. The lot of the migrant -- and China now has 200 million of them -- is to move from work site to work site, earning a pittance at best. The migrants usually don't receive permission to bring their families with them, and even if they could, obtaining accommodation and schooling for their children would be virtually impossible.

The fate of Chinese citizens often depends on where they are from. Someone born in Shanghai is considered an aristocrat and conferred the right to housing and schooling in Shanghai. Someone born in a village, however, can only go to the village school, until a university admits him -- a rare feat for a peasant. An American scholar, Feiling Wang, had come to China to study this system of discrimination, which few in the West know about, but the government expelled him.

Villagers often told me that it wasn't the local Party secretary whom they most hated, but rather the family-planning agents who enforce China's one-child policy, often subjecting women to horrific violence. The one-child policy is not only monstrous, it is yielding an increasingly elderly population in need of care -- a problem that a poor country like China is unprepared to handle.

Will China's surging economic growth end the rumbling discontent? Not according to the esteemed economist Mao Yushi, under house arrest for asking the government to apologize for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He doesn't trust the Party's claims of a 10% annual growth rate -- and why believe the official statistics when the Party lies so consistently about everything? Doing his own calculations, he arrives at a rate of about 8% per year, vigorous but no "miracle," as some in the West describe it.

Moreover, he believes that the current growth rate isn't sustainable: natural bottlenecks -- scarcity of energy, raw materials, and especially water -- will get in the way. Also, Mr. Mao says, the fact that investment decisions frequently obey political considerations instead of the market has helped generate an unemployment rate that is likely closer to 20% than to the officially acknowledged 3.5%.

Many in the West think that Chinese growth has created an independent middle class that will push for greater political freedom. But what exists in China, Mr. Mao argues, is not a traditional middle class but a class of parvenus, newcomers who work in the military, public administration, state enterprises or for firms ostensibly private but in fact Party-owned.

The Party picks up most of the tab for their mobile phones, restaurant bills, "study" trips abroad, imported luxury cars and lavish spending at Las Vegas casinos. And it can withdraw these advantages at any time. In March, China announced that it would introduce individual property rights for the parvenus (though not for the peasants). They will now be able to pass on to their children what they have acquired -- another reason that they aren't likely to push for the democratization of the regime that secures their status.

Because China's economy desperately needs Western consumers and investors, China's propagandists do all they can to woo foreign critics. "Do you dare deny China's success story, her social stability, economic growth, cultural renaissance and international restraint?" one Party-sponsored scholar asks me in Paris. I respond that political and religious oppression, censorship, entrenched rural poverty, family-planning excesses and rampant corruption are just as real as economic growth in today's China. "What you are saying is true, but affects only a minority yet to benefit from reforms," he asserts.

Yet nothing guarantees that this so-called minority -- one billion people! -- will integrate with modern China. It is just as possible that it will remain poor, since it has no say in determining its fate, even as Party members get richer. The scholar underscores my fundamental assumption: "You don't have any confidence in the Party's ability to resolve the pertinent issues you have raised."

That's true. I don't.

Mr. Sorman is the author of "The Year of the Rooster," Fayard (2006). This article was adapted from the spring issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

The Real World Bank Scandal: Why the bureaucracy wants to oust Paul Wolfowitz.

Write in Josh Hamilton for the All-Star Game

Cincinnati Reds' Josh Hamilton (33) is congratulated by Ryan Freel (6) and David Ross, after Hamilton hit a pinch-hit two-run home run in the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers, Monday, April 16, 2007, in Cincinnati. Milwaukee won 10-6.

Vote for the MLB All-Stars

Fans can vote on MLB.com up to 25 times now through June 28 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

VT and gun control

From Opinion Journal''s Political Diary...

Virginia Tech was, as many bloggers put it, a "danger-free zone for armed criminals." The school was one of many to prohibit all guns on campus. Last year, legislation to allow exceptions for licensed and trained gun owners failed to pass the Virginia legislature.

Virginia Tech officials falsely believed their policy meant more security, not less. Its spokesman, Larry Hincker, described the school's anti-gun policy in 2005 by saying: "We believe guns don't belong in the classroom. In an academic environment, we believe you should be free from fear." He proudly noted that students who had tried to bring handguns onto school property had been promptly suspended.

John Lott, a gun-control scholar, says the problems with such laws is that good intentions aren't enough. "What counts is whether the laws ultimately save lives. Unfortunately, too many gun laws primarily disarm law-abiding citizens, not criminals." He notes that some 40 states now have some kind of law allowing responsible citizens to carry concealed firearms. In most of those states, between 2% and 6% of all adults have such permits, thus giving citizens in a community the size of a university the knowledge that someone other than the local police will have access to self-defense.

Such laws have consequences. Mr. Lott and Bill Landes of the University of Chicago law school examined multiple-victim public shootings in the U.S. from 1977 to 1999 and found that when states passed right-to-carry laws, the rate of multiple victim public shootings fell by 60%. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell even more -- an average of 78% -- as the remaining incidents tended to involve fewer victims per attack.

The Fiscal Bottom Line

Just because something is simple and makes sense does not mean it isn't true -- even in Washington. Consider the proposition that tax cuts are good and tax increases are bad.

Tax cuts are good because they stimulate economic growth, making people better off by several multiples of the amount of revenue the government loses. A good rule of thumb is that a $1 tax cut induces $1 to $2 of additional economic growth. Conversely, tax increases are bad because they impair economic growth, making people worse off by several multiples of the extra amount of tax revenue the government collects. Generally speaking, each additional $1 of tax revenue costs the economy not only the $1 of tax but an additional $1 to $2 in lost income.

So why not cut taxes and spending? There is plenty of room for reducing the nearly $3 trillion federal budget, without cutting anything even resembling muscle and sinew. Another good rule of thumb (attributed to Milton Friedman) is that the government usually spends $3 to do a $1 job.

Imagine if all tax increases became the last instead of the first resort, to be used only after every ounce of political spoils, patronage, waste and just plain silliness had been squeezed out of the federal budget? And imagine -- if you can -- a government that keeps its hand out of your pocket, its nose out of your business, and does its own assigned tasks with cost-effective competence.

Nevertheless, just because something makes sense does not mean it will carry the day -- especially not in Washington. Consider the two versions of the truth that may be drawn from a recent study by Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard.

Reduced to its essence, Mr. Mankiw concluded that a $1 tax cut on dividends would reduce government revenue collections by about 50 cents, after taking into account taxes on $2 of additional economic growth induced by the tax cut. A $1 tax cut from an across-the-board rate reduction would cost the IRS about 77 cents, after taking into account taxes on the 95 cents of additional economic growth induced by the tax cut.

To the champions of bigger government, the important truth of the Mankiw study was that the amount of tax on induced economic growth was insufficient to make up for all of the revenues lost to the Treasury from the original tax cut. Ergo, the government has less money to spend. Ergo, tax cuts are bad.

To those of us who prefer economic growth over government growth, the Mankiw study confirmed a different truth. If Congress is willing to forego 50 cents of revenue, the economy would grow and people would have $2 more income. If given the choice, most people would take the $2.

Now apply the conclusions of the Mankiw study in reverse -- to tax increases. The results illuminate the high costs of providing the government with an additional $1 to spend. A purported $1 tax increase on dividends only nets the Treasury 50 cents -- but costs Americans $2 in lost income, plus 50 cents in tax. When a higher rate is levied on all forms of income, an attempted $1 tax increase yields only 77 cents -- but costs Americans 95 cents in lost income plus 77 cents in tax. If the government were to kick up the tax increases enough to collect a full additional $1, the cost to the public would be between $2.25 and $5, counting both tax paid and income lost. A May 2006 study by Harvard's Martin Feldstein, "The Effect of Taxes on Efficiency and Growth," confirms the disproportionately large economic losses associated with tax increases.

The economic losses that result from increased taxes fall mainly on low- and middle-income earners in the form of salary increases not obtained and jobs not gotten (or lost); and this burden applies irrespective of whether those who lose out pay or do not pay income taxes. The regressive nature of the adverse economic fallout from high taxes cannot be avoided by concentrating those taxes on ostensibly rich capitalists. In fact, Mr. Mankiw's study confirms that concentrating taxes on capital exacerbates the damage to the economy.

Unfortunately, the new party in power in Congress has threatened to impose higher tax rates on dividends, capital gains and the incomes of upper-bracket taxpayers in general. They will tell the public that they are raising $50 billion of revenue from the malefactors of great wealth and that they will spend this money wisely.

A decent respect for the truth would, however, require them to warn the American people about the most likely results of the tax increase. The higher tax rates will cost them about $60 billion in lost incomes and jobs. Because of that economic damage, the revenue yield from the tax increase will be only about $33 billion, not $50 billion. And at the margin, the entire $33 billion will be spent on perks, pork, patronage and other waste.

Mr. Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of Treasury in the Ford administration. Mr. Frenzel is a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who served on the Ways and Means and Budget Committees.

Trinitarian Marriage, a sermon series by Joost Nixon

Marriage, Singleness, and Celibacy 54 min
Marriage pt 2 50 min
Trinitarian Marriage 43 min
Starting a Family pt. 3 - In Laws 48 min
Unknown and Frustrated - (featured in Vol. 19/1 of Credenda Agenda, p. 20) 39 min
Starting a Family pt. 4 34 min

"In the modern world of male and female relationship, men are more like Francis Drake than John Smith. They are interested in conquest, visiting women like cities along a coastline, stopping only long enough to raid and despoil. There is no real penetration of the interior before boredom strikes and they move on. The result is invariable devastation. But many Christian men, though they can say they are the husband of one wife, are injudiciously bored with their wives. There has been conquest -- they "got the girl." But now that they have her, they only nibble and set her aside. There is headship with no dominion; conquest without exploration. Leif Erickson may have landed at Newfoundland, but he knew nothing of Ol' Muddy, or Pike's Peak, or the Painted Desert. He never tasted a Georgia Peach, or was cowed by an electrical storm in Denver. He may have landed, but he never really explored.

...The problem is that men think of the wedding as "mission accomplished." They've landed her and now she can't run off without getting into trouble. But a wedding is mere admission to the ride, not conclusion of the ride. The covenant is a license to know -- not evidence that you have known. It is a license to know her sexually. License to know her heart. License to probe her fears, to visit the dark places under the stairs.

These differing expectations and orientations produce unimaginable exasperation. The wife longs to be known and loved. The husband piddles around, splashing the beach, when there are mountains to scale, rivers to navigate, cornfields in which to lose oneself. He thinks he is done. She wonders why he doesn't get started. She is a feast on a table, but her husband isn't hungry (except for sex). She is as unsatisfied as a Ferrari stuck in first gear.

If men were faithful to pursue their wives as they ought, they would be less bored and more fruitful. But pursuit is so much more than flowers and sex, or dinner and a movie. Pursuit is not allowing the curiousity you once had about her to dwindle. It is asking questions that have not been asked. It is not assuming you know what she thinks. Pursuit requires time and zeal, preparation and forethought. And as you seek to live with your wife "according to knowledge" you will find that your marriage is much more challenging, and much more rewarding, than you ever thought."