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Jon
Kennedy's 'Postcards from
the Nanty Glo in My
Mind'
Where the rubber meets the road
Jonal entry 936 | Wednesday, November 2, 2005
Today's link on my ministry website, Xnmp, is to an essay by Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary of Louisville, Ky., which caught my attention by declaring, "the issues of abortion and homosexuality are likely to prove the two most divisive issues Americans have faced since the Civil War." I've been writing since the mid-1960s that the gay movement is going to be the most divisive development in churches in our time, and this has been and continues to be the case. And in Democratic-Republican political contests in the United States, no issue has been—nor does any continue to be—more divisive than abortion.
Though I was an ordained minister before I had ever heard a logical presentation of the arguments against abortion (and for "choice"), it was before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationally through its Roe v. Wade decision (1973) that I began staffing a pro-life table on the University of California campus at Santa Barbara. I've taken on liberal writers, especially the few who claim to be Christians, who begin their defenses of the Democratic position on the issue with "there is more to religious involvement in politics than abortion and homosexuality." Yes, there's lots more, but their point is beside the larger point: no issues are more important for the survival of Christian culture than these two. In fact, I would say the next 20 issues intersecting religion and politics are less important than these two. So I'm admitting: Dr. Mohler won my enthusiastic attention to his essay by saying what I'd long believed.
The reason they're so important is that these two issues represent the crux of the culture war, as Dr. Mohler argues: the liberal (or "Enlightenment") worldview of moral relativism (what's right or wrong for me may not be right or wrong for you) over against the biblical Christian worldview that moral truth is absolute, not relative; what's true in God's reckoning in His Word is true for all of creation for all time. Abortion is, obviously, a matter of life or death and the morally relative position that it is a matter of individual conscience, not of legal definition, to choose to end or sustain the life of the most helpless segment of the human population, the unborn. Futhermore, as one of the most widely practiced means of birth control in our generation, it is also an integral component of the sexual revolution.
The gay sex crusade is by no means the only influence for sexualizing our culture and declaring everything sexual a matter of taste or preference rather than a matter of eternally defined morality, but it is the most ardently pushed by a large organized "movement" of proponents and their supporters.
The climax of Dr. Mohler's essay is not optimistic:
| All matters of faith and morality are now considered by a majority of Americans to be issues of mere private preference. All truth is interior and privatized. This embrace of undiluted individualism underlies our current cultural confusion. The successive and progressive shift in the locus of truth and authority from the Christian worldview to the state to the isolated individual leaves the American public unarmed for authentic moral discourse. All that remains is utter subjectivity and the inevitable power struggles which will occur when ideologies and political agendas clash in the public square. |
Conservatives and
god-fearers who believe there is an absolute source of truth and law, seem to
have been winning elections and opinion polls, but out where people live, the
war has already been lost.
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