Secular stereotypes about religion die hard. On February 1, 1993, Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf wrote that politically conservative Christians are “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Reinforcing the stereotype, during the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama said that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion.”

However, author Charles Murray shows that not only is this liberal trope false—it is less true than ever before. Unfortunately, that’s not all good news for Christians.

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“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.” --William Wilberforce

As discussed in Part 1, it took nearly a half-century of dedicated advocacy by William Wilberforce and his Clapham friends before emancipation became reality in the British Empire. It was a frustratingly long time, but across the Atlantic, the prize took much longer to achieve and exacted a much higher price.

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[Ed. note: This is the first installment of Annie Provencher's new column for BreakPoint. The first two paragraphs below explain her column's title, "Through the Window." --GRD]

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Lord Jesus,
Let us look at the circumstances of our lives, the moments that fill our days, and the things that surround us as we look through a window: with our hearts set on seeing what is real and knowing what is true.

War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg, is the tale of a boy and his horse . . . or perhaps more aptly put, a horse and his boy.
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Syncretism (noun): “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.”

I first heard of syncretism in a seminary course on missions that I took many years ago. It plagues missionaries across the world. New peoples in new places come to faith in Christ, but their old religion dies hard, and their old customs linger. Before long they become set in new patterns, more Christian than the old, but still not fully and truly Christian.

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Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Isabella Baumfree are legendary figures in the U.S. abolitionist movement. They are among the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Christian faith was a source of strength during the long struggle for freedom and civil rights. Collectively, their moral conviction and courage helped to secure the liberties ofwhich everyone today is a beneficiary.

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A belated Happy New Year! Is it 2013 yet?

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Are we alone in the universe? Inquiring minds want to know.

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It seems peculiar that the gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent centers not on Christ’s first coming, but his second. In all three liturgical years, the gospel passage is taken from the Olivet Discourse -- Jesus’ rather lengthy response to the eschatological curiosities of the disciples. But maybe that is not as peculiar as it seems.

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It was about a dozen years ago that our church’s pastor came back from a pastors’ conference and told us our denomination was growing rapidly everywhere in the world except North America. We were shrinking here, he said.

I remember what I thought. I don’t remember if I said it to him out loud. In a way I hope I didn’t, because it was overly simplistic, but still I think it was on the right track. The problem, I thought then and still think now, is that this denomination’s leaders overseas understood that they were missionaries. Its pastors at home didn’t.

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Reader: What follows is the latest installment of The Swillpit Chronicles. Chronologically, past installments are: The Matter of Abortion, The Matter of Stem Cells, On Science and Origins, Evolution Narratives, Toward Nihilism or Spiritualism?, Carnal Knowledge, The Immunized Believer, A Useful Religion, Doomsday-ism, and The God of Science.

The Swillpit Chronicles, No. 11, “’Tis the Season”

Dear Swillpit,

It’s that time of year again! The weeks -- no, months -- of preparations for the Event reached febrile proportions just a few weeks ago. “Black Friday,” they call it. Oh, the irony!

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The other night on Fox Chicago News, Robin Robinson, one of the anchors, had the poor form to say that there is no Santa.

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In Part 1 and Part 2, we found that when we plunge down the rabbit hole of reality and enter the realm of photons, electrons, and quantum wave functions, what we discover is weirder than we ever could have imagined.
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“Numerous assaults on our conception of reality are emerging from modern physics. . . . [But] I find none more mind-boggling than the recent realization that our universe is not local.” -- Brian Greene, physicist

 

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I was a music major at Michigan State University, where for four years I played trombone under the direction of Kenneth Bloomquist, MSU’s director of bands. He was a demanding musician and a very capable leader. He was also famous for “Bloomquistisms.” One of his classics was “How could you get out of bed in the morning, knowing you were going to make a mistake like that today?”

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“Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things, the meaning of which we don’t know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature.” -- Niels Bohr, on the task of physics Read More >

In today’s America, conscience is said to be king. Those who have conscientious objector status are exempted from the battlefront. In state-run schools or prisons, those who cannot eat meat out of ethical or religious conviction are often provided a vegetarian alternative. Those who choose to act on same-sex attractions increasingly are celebrated rather than pitied. It is not our role to question that choice, we are told. “Do not judge,” the arbiters of conscience say. What counts is that we are free to follow our conscience, wherever it might direct us. Read More >

On the floor of the Darwinian exchange, traders bark, “Evolution is fact, Fact, FACT!” But it’s a fact that has proven to be a hard sell.
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“Seed for the sower and bread for the eater.” -- Isaiah 55:10

They are everywhere: dangling from limbs, nettled in shrubs, sprouting from grass, blowing across your driveway, maybe even clinging to your shoe laces. Seeds are so commonplace and visually unexceptional that we are hardly aware of them, even less of what they contain.

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Five years ago, my friend Douglas and I went on a 2000-plus kilometer road trip through northern Spain and southern France. For part of the trip we followed el Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage that ends at the Galician city of the same name, where the remains of James the Apostle are said to be buried.

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Mitt Romney served as a Republican governor of a highly Democratic state. He turned around the nearly bankrupt Salt Lake City Olympics. And in the early going in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney, who hails from a successful political family, has shown the ability to smoothly and convincingly speak to the country’s frightening economic challenges, exuding executive experience and financial competence. Clearly Romney, who was unsuccessful in his attempt at the 2008 nomination, has earned his position as one of the GOP’s frontrunners.

Yet Romney’s impressive (albeit imperfect) professional resume will never convince a huge chunk of the country’s citizens to vote for him—including many evangelical Christians. Nor will anything else he says or does during the primary season or—if he gets that far—the presidential campaign. And this is not just because of disagreement with his political policies—that accounts for some of it, but not all. What’s the other reason?

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