Children in an Adult’s World

Western Cultural Imperialism At Its Most Dangerous

The debate about liberty, free-speech and the stance of Islam rolls on.  The West’s position is, shall we say, conflicted.  The Western Commentariat has been playing a divide-and-rule strategy.  It presupposes that Islam is a broad-church religion, with a wide range of variants, denominations, sects and opinions about Islam.

Simply put, the Commentariat assumes that Islam is just like modern Judaism and modern Christianity–both alike are festooned with multi-form denominations, traditions, beliefs, and expressions–yet these days they all tend to get along in an irenical co-existence.  In Christianity, for example, one has every kind of manifestation imaginable, from those that deny the existence of Jesus Christ right through to those who worship Him as Lord of heaven and earth.  But in both Judaism and Christianity alike there are, from time-to-time, extremist elements that have no legitimate claim to their respective religions.  Some Jews have  become militant zionists who murder innocent Palestinians.  Some Christians have engaged in a fratricidal war in Northern Ireland in recent history.  These extremist elements do not represent either Judaism or Christianity respectively.  Or so the narrative rolls.

The Commentariat believes Islam is just the same.  The terrorists, the suicide bombers are the extremists: the vast majority of Islamic believers are tolerant, peaceful, law-abiding citizens.  The strategic objective is to “reach out” to the mainstream, and isolate the extremists. Ben Shapiro provides us a recitation of with how the Obama administration has systematically and consistently played out this strategy. 

Is this view of the Western Commentariat a gratuitous, fabricated assumption, or is it based in reality?  The answer to the question is to apply a straightforward sociological test.  Mainstream Islam–by definition–can be seen in those countries which are Muslim countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Sudan–and so forth.  In these countries, Islam has become institutionalised.  Its influences can be observed.  Its culture can be studied.  These countries represent mainstream Islam. 

When we apply this canon, it immediately becomes clear that the Western Commentariat is simply engaged in wishful thinking.  Worse, it is engaged in a perverse form of Western cultural imperialism.  The Commentariat is assuming and operating as if the entire world were an extension of Western liberal values and secular mores.  It assumes the whole world is really a Western secularist world. 

We will cite one example, just to make the point–although it is so obvious, only the most wilfully blinded will not grant it.

Amnesty International is calling on Saudi Arabia’s authorities to quash the outrageous sentencing today of Raif Badawi in connection with an online forum for public debate he set up and accusations that he insulted Islam.  Raif Badawi, co-founder of the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals (about US$266,631) by Jeddah’s Criminal Court.

This kind of thing is found repeatedly in mainstream Islam. It is a praxis buttressed by teaching, law codes, tradition, and popular support.  Thus, we are on solid ground when we say that those Islamic folk in the West who are tolerant, peace-loving, gracious, respectful of the opinions of others, and who believe in free-speech are at the extreme end of the Islamic spectrum.  They are definitely not mainstream.  Today’s tolerant Muslim is the extremist Muslim, when considered on a sociological spectrum.

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

USA Today carried a piece by an Islamic cleric,  Anjem Choudary, whom the Commentariat calls an extremist and a hate preacher. He is also a highly educated man–which elicits more than a few genteel coughs amongst the Chattering Classes.  Our point is simple: Choudary is not an extreme Muslim; he is a mainstream Muslim.  It is only the Commentariat’s cultural hegemony and imperialism which prevents it seeing what is blindingly obvious to anyone except the self-duped.  

Here is Choudary’s apologia for Islam’s intolerance.  We defy anyone to prove that it is not the mainstream Islamic position, using the straightforward sociological test we have proposed above.  

Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, “Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.”

However, because the honor of the Prophet is something which all Muslims want to defend, many will take the law into their own hands, as we often see.  Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.  So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.

Anjem Choudary is a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia.

Anjem Choudary lives in the mainstream real Islamic world.  The Western Commentariat lives in a make-believe world.  Over the next fifty years, as the real, mainstream Islamic world confronts the West’s make-believe, mirage world which do you believe will win? 

We expect it is the world which is self-aware and not living in a childish saccharine, make-believe fantasy world that will make huge strides.  Islam is speaking and living the truth about itself; the West is in hopeless denial, both about itself and about mainstream Islam. 

 

Letter From America (About Oppression on College Campuses)

Colleges Use ‘Anti-Discrimination’ Rules Against Christians

Can school administrators decide who belongs in a Christian group?

By Molly Wharton

June 11, 2014 6:29 PM 

National Review Online

 

Bowdoin College’s evangelical group will no longer be recognized by the college starting next fall. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the college is demanding that any student should be able to run for leadership for any student group, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, but the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship disagrees.

“It would compromise our ability to be who we are as Christians if we can’t hold our leaders to some sort of doctrinal standard,” recent Bowdoin graduate and former leader of BCF Zackary Suhr told The Times.
The incident at Bowdoin has occurred at many other colleges and universities in recent years. While the universities present the absolute non-discrimination demands as an effort to rid their campuses of intolerance and exclusivity, religious students see it as an encroachment on their religious freedom perpetrated by liberal academia who are hostile toward conservative Christianity.

A study done by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research found that college faculty share significantly more negative feelings toward Evangelical Christians than toward any other religious group, with 53 percent reporting that had unfavorable feelings toward Evangelicals.
This is compared to just 3 percent who have unfavorable feelings toward Jews, 9 percent toward non-Evangelical Christians, and 10 percent toward Atheists. According to the study, these negative feelings are noted across disciplines and demographic factors. The study also found that the faculty are much less religious than the general public.

Evangelical and other religious groups say they welcome anyone, regardless of sexual orientation or religious beliefs, to participate in their activities. But their leaders, who oversee Bible studies and prayer services, should have at least a basic Christian faith, the groups insist.

Losing official school recognition can have real consequences for these religious groups. Often they lose the right to use the universities’ names, on-campus recruiting tools, and access to student activity funds or subsidized spaces for meetings and worship.

The California State University public system, which includes almost 450,000 students on 23 campuses, is also joining the campaign against evangelical groups. If Cal State’s chancellor has it his way, evangelical groups will also lose official recognition this summer due to their refusal to sign non-discrimination forms regarding the selection of their groups’ leaders.

Cal State Chico student Austin Weatherby believes that to lead a Bible study, one needs to believe in basic Christian principles. “We’re not willing to water down our beliefs in order to be accepted,” he said.
Susan Westover, a lawyer for the California State University System, said that though the campus welcomes evangelicals, there are no exceptions to the anti-discrimination requirements, which state that the no campus will recognize any student organization “unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students at that campus.” “Our mission is education, not exclusivity,” she told the Times. There already is an exception in the anti-discrimination policy, however, as it states that social fraternities and sororities may impose a gender limitation.

At Vanderbilt, over a dozen religious groups have already lost the school’s official recognition, again for not complying with an absolute non-discrimination policy. Most, but not all, of these groups were evangelicals. Vanderbilt Catholic, now called University Catholic since they cannot use the name Vanderbilt, decided to leave the university, writing in an open letter:

“We are an open and welcoming community that people of all faiths can join, but we require our leaders to share this Catholic faith and practice. A student group led by those who do not share these things might be a very worthwhile and beneficial organization, but it would not be Catholic in the fullest sense of the word. These faith-based requirements for leadership are as important to the integrity of our organization as musical range is for a choral group.”

National Review’s David French wrote, “Vanderbilt’s embattled religious organizations welcome all students with open arms; Vanderbilt’s fraternities and sororities routinely reject their fellow students based on little more than appearance, family heritage, or personality quirks.”

Evangelical groups have also lost official status at Rollins College in Florida, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Tufts University.

Alec Hill, the president of a national association of evangelical student groups called InterVarsity, calls the evangelical groups’ loss of official recognition “absurd.” He told the Times, “The genius of American culture is that we allow voluntary, self-identified organizations to form, and that’s what our student groups are.”

– Molly Wharton is an intern at National Review.

Letter From America (About The Dark Ages, Part II)

Kirsten Powers: Liberals’ Dark Ages

Kirsten Powers 6:33 p.m. EDT May 15, 2014

USA Today

Each week seems to bring another incident. Who will the thought police come for next?

Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.   How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

 

Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can’t have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the “right” things in their life off the set? In this world, the conservative Tom Selleck never would have been Magnum, P.I.

This week, a trail-blazing woman was felled in the new tradition of commencement shaming. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde withdrew from delivering the commencement speech at Smith College following protests from students and faculty who hate the IMF. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, this trend is growing. In the 21 years leading up to 2009, there were 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking because of protests. Yet, in the past five-and-a-half years, there have been 39 cancellations.

Don’t bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as “a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully” and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a “psychotic mass murderer” and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women’s studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus’ “free speech zone” (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla’s Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn’t, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people’s lives, its members haven’t stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that’s how these things usually end.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY.
H/T Whaleoil

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

All Stove In

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Friday, April 4, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Andrew Sullivan should receive real credit for saying, as he did, that if the treatment of Brendan Eich is what the gay rights movement is all about, then he, Sullivan, wanted to be dealt out. Eich is the Mozilla CEO who was forced to resign because he donated money a few years ago in defense of heterosexual marriage, which is to say, marriage. In a tweet the other day, Andrew said, “The hounding and firing of @BrendanEich disgusts me – as it should anyone interested in a tolerant & diverse society.”

For those who are opposed to this sort of business, they will have many opportunities to register their dissent. There will be a steady stream of them. As I put it the other day, in this Tolerance Parade, the elephants just keep on coming — ow.ly/vprzA

This stand means that Andrew is not a hypocrite, and I am glad for it. When I debated him a while ago, he said that he would be opposed to some of the things that we opponents of same sex mirage were predicting would come from all this. And good to his word, this incident shows that he meant what he said. He is no hypocrite. If Andrew comes to read this, an honest well done from me.

But the fact that he is not a hypocrite does not keep him from being a patsy. He is like an idealistic revolutionary who labored for years to overthrow the czar, only to have Lenin, three weeks after the revolution, send around a couple of the boys to put a bullet in his head.
It turns out that those adversaries of the revolution knew what they were talking about when they argued it is easier to keep the monkeys in the cage than it is to get the monkeys back into the cage. Our “crazy talk” predictions, laughed at by people like Andrew, are steadily, slowly, inexorably, coming to pass. He who says A must eventually say B.

But Andrew, to his credit, opposes this thuggish behavior. He is wanting to be a classical liberal on this. As he put it, he wants society to be “tolerant and diverse.” And this kind of intolerista warp spasm is nothing of the kind. It is not classical liberalism or, if it is, it is Stage IV classical liberalism. Mencken once described this sort of thing very ably. He said that democracy was the process of establishing truth by means of counting noses, and promulgating it afterward with a club. And here we are.

And so it is that I want to point out what is actually going on. It is not the death of evangelical religion, it is not the death of biblical Christianity, and it is not the death of natural marriage. In times like these, when it is easy for the Church to be at its worst, we frequently find the Church at its best. So what this actually is, what this actually indicates, is the death rattle of the secular project. It is the death of the liberal experiment — and they do not have a god who knows the way back from the grave.

I want to discuss this according to their avowed principles. Let us talk about this within the confines of what the principled liberals have declared to be their great triumph — the establishment of a neutral public space, which in their reckoning would include companies like Mozilla and Hobby Lobby. The issue here is not what I would like to see in an ideal biblical republic, or how I would define the public space. I would like companies to be able to sack someone for his views, but I would want that freedom to be granted across the board to all companies.

No, the issue here is what is classical liberalism going to do about this outrage — on their terms? The answer is nothing, because they are impotent. They have unleashed forces they do not understand, and which they now find to be overwhelming. The whole thing is way beyond them now. They are like a hapless John Kerry, explaining once more to Vladimir Putin that this is the 21st century, and that he can’t just “take Crimea.” To which Putin replies, “Yes? Watch me do.”

The heyday of liberalism in America was probably the civil rights movement. They were up against a segregated establishment that had significant inertial force, but which was nonetheless guilt-ridden because of how blacks had been treated. It felt like a real battle to them. They had the high moral ground. They had dedication, youth, energy, and bad folk songs. They had a dream, and it didn’t involve Al Sharpton. They were going usher in an Eschaton filled with marshmallow clouds and unicorns.

But now . . . something like this happens, and it is evident that this is now standard operating procedure. This is a world in which error has no rights. The central ideal of their whole project is insulted, and with the back of the hand, but because it is done for the sake of irrational lusts, instead of thoughtless bigotries, there is nothing the liberals can do about it. And so they all stand there, hands in pockets, wishing it were a little black girl wanting to go to school — that way they could call out the National Guard. But alas, the victim is a smart, rich, white guy — like most of them — who really wanted to live in a free country — unlike most of them.

This helpless, hapless state of affairs is because the liberal project is rapidly assuming room temperature. All four hooves are pointed at the sky. Their secular city is a smoking crater. Their ship, the USS Mutual Respect, has foundered on the rocks of our public lusts. Their polity ideals are on the fritzing haywire. They are laid-up, stalled out, caved in. Their alabaster blocks for building the new city of man turn out to have been the kind of material they use to make castle walls at Disneyland. They are all metaphored out, and all stove in. I could go on in this vein, but I trust the point has at least been approximated.

And this death of liberalism is a really good thing for real Christians. The apostle John tells believers this — “little children, keep yourselves from idols.” This tells us that the little children of the church are susceptible to that temptation. But the temptation has to be cleverly presented. Your average Christian is not drawn to the yawning maw of Molech. He is easily drawn to the hazily defined god of secularism. He will not be drawn to the next outré Tolerance Fruit Parade. So why should we lament the death of an idol that really was a snare to us, just because it leaves standing an idol that won’t be?

Once the secular experiment is revealed to all of us as a sham and a fraud, there will be many hundreds of thousands of Christians who stop following a tiny Jesus in the privacy of their own hearts and homes. They will then walk out into the daylight of the public square, blinking.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Put an Egg In Their Shoe

Posted on Monday, February 24, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

In just a moment I would like to interact with a post by Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt, which you can read here if you haven’t already. In one sense, I wish they hadn’t written that thing together, because I have some respect for Kirsten Powers. She has done some very fine against-the-tide work on things like international persecution of Christians, and on the Gosnell horrors.

I don’t know as much about Merritt, but what I have seen seems to indicate someone who is being wafted along by the breezes emanating from the Zeitgeist Wind Farm, which is a bad metaphor because that’s not how wind farms work. To change metaphors, it is as though they happened to be at the same place on the road because she was walking into a great city while he was walking out of it. Anyhow, however they came to say it, what they said needs a response.

But before saying anything about their argument, I want to say something else about a necessary scriptural backdrop to all such discussions.

As conservative Christians, we are accustomed to discuss homosexual issues in the light of Romans 1. There Paul tells us that our gay pride parades are the result of refusing to honor God as God, and refusing to give Him thanks (Rom. 1:21). Nothing is plainer to exegetes — who are not selling out, or who don’t have a gun to their head — than the fact that an apostle of Jesus Christ taught us that for a man to burn with lust for another man was unnatural, and that for a woman to burn with lust for another woman was even more unnatural. But that is not the point I would like to make, although the point I need to make assumes this. We need to go on to see that this chapter teaches us something else quite important about our current controversies.

The wrath of God is described in this chapter (Rom. 1:18), and it is described as God giving people over to their desires (Rom. 1:24). The mercy of God is found in the restraints He places on us, and His wrath is revealed from heaven whenever He lets us run headlong, which is what is happening to us now. This wrath is described this same way again a couple verses later. God gave them up to dishonorable passions (Rom. 1:26). It is repeated a third time just a moment later. God gave them up to a debased mind (Rom. 1:28). When God lets go, that is His wrath. As Lewis says somewhere, Heaven is when we say to God “thy will be done.” Hell is when He says that to us.

So what consequences follow when He lets go? What does this wrath look like when it is visited on a culture?

The next point is often missed. This progression amounts to the wrath of God being revealed against us because we are being delivered up to the tender mercies of the wicked, which are cruel (Prov. 12:10).

Notice Paul’s description of what these people are like outside the bedroom. Right after his observations on men burning in lust for men, and women for women, he gives us an additional character description.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful . . .” (Rom. 1:28-31).

Now who do you want to put in charge of the new civility? Who do you want as an arbiter of true sensitivity in speech? Who should run the training seminars for all the big corporations on what “hate” is? Who should set the boundaries for acceptable public discourse? Who should be the appointed gatekeepers on what constitutes tolerant speech? For any Christian who has read Romans 1 rightly, not these people.

They don’t know what tolerance is. They don’t know how to spell it. They hate the very idea of it. They have taken the biblical doctrine of tolerance and have filed it into a shiv, so that they might smite us all under the fifth rib, as Joab did to people. This should not be surprising to us. Someone who finds the anus of another the object of his desire is not someone that I would trust to determine whether or not this sentence is a hate crime. They are liars and filled with all malice. They are backbiters, overflowing with malignity. They are implacable.

So if you want to form a brigade of tolerance cops, that is bad enough, but then, when you want to staff the whole brigade with these people, the entire spectacle turns into how the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights would look if Bosch had just taken three hits of acid just before painting it. The way of peace they have not known (Rom. 3:17). There is no fear of God before their eyes (Rom. 3:18). The only thing that their lawlessness can really do well is breed more lawlessness (Rom. 6:19). So I know! Let’s put them in charge of civility in public discourse.

This is the wrath of God upon us, and the wrath of God delivers us over to more than just our demented lusts. It delivers us over to the ministrations and judicial processes of those who refuse to tolerate any rebuke of their lusts, whether the rebuke is express or implied.

So then, on to the central argument presented by Powers and Merritt. They point out that there are more ways to be unbiblical in weddings than homosexuality, which is quite true, and they wonder why photographers don’t refuse to do weddings for people who are on their third unbiblical marriage. Two quick points, and then to the real issue. First, all such professionals should have the full right to refuse service to anyone, whether or not they are spiritually consistent in the exercise of that right. Second, the reason service is being refused in the cases of homosexual weddings is because the sin involved is flagrant and obvious, and results in something that is not marriage at all. It is same sex mirage, not same sex marriage. A photographer would have to hire a private detective to find out if the previous heterosexual marriage ended on biblical grounds.

With the homosexual marriage, the perverse nature of the proposed arrangement has been brought to him, and is standing right on the other side of counter, as much as to say, “whatcha gonna do about it?” So this evangelical photographers, bakers, etc. are not pushing. They are pushing back. Homosexuals are pressing this issue with bakers, photographers, and so forth because they are full of the malignity that Paul described for us earlier. They are the ones picking a fight, and I hope they get a real one.

But now let’s go to the heart of the principle that Powers and Merritt are advancing. They are arguing that if an activity is legal, and if someone has a privately-owned business that is open to the public, and a little bell that rings when you open the door, then that someone should be required to provide their professional services to any customer who walks in, so long as they are not required individually to “affirm” whatever they believe to be the sin in question. They can be required to make the sin look good, just so long as they don’t have to sign a paper saying that it is good.

Now to think this “protection” will last any time at all in our current climate is to be a black belt naif. The quaint idea is that liberty of conscience means that we don’t have to affirm that homosexuality is normal. Are we allowed to affirm the contrary? I am glad that Powers and Merritt want to leave us something, but this standard is already under assault, as we speak. So can I be a television broadcaster, or a public school teacher, or a newspaper columnist, or a weatherman, and I can post on my own Facebook page that homosexual behavior “is disgusting,” and I can do this without activists calling for my head and my job, in that order? The only thing to do here is express the wish that Powers and Merritt would get out more. This kind of “protection” is like hoping that we will be spared the worst ravages of the tsunami because the children have built us some sturdy sand castles on the beach.

So let’s see what this principle of theirs would look like if applied in other sectors. Does the proprietor of a business for the public have the right to decline service to someone because that someone’s behavior is offensive to them, although perfectly legal? Powers and Merritt say no, and urge us all to grow up. So . . . a web designer who wants to decline his services to a men-only golf club? A printer of business cards who did not want to serve Gosnell prior to his arrest? A graphic designer in Nevada who does not want to design any newspaper ads for the Moonlight Bunny Ranch?

Someone might say that these scenarios are not realistic, because nobody in those categories is (currently) demanding to be served. The Moonlight Bunny Ranch guy knows not to call the ad agencies that have that little fish on their web site. Right. But the issue is the principle. Suppose he did come into my little graphics shop, and I am being advised in the back room by Powers and Merritt. They are willing to show me the way Jesus would have done it, had He been a graphic designer. My customer thinks my first draft was okay, but he came back in because he wants me to “make her tits bigger.” That’s what draws most of their clientele, he explains. Wait, I say, because I have to do a quick consult on the back room — I fortunately happen to have a couple of experts back there. What, in the column they have written, would give me the right to go back out to my almost customer in order to tell him to put an egg in his shoe and beat it?

Read over their column again. Nothing they have argued would give me that right. And this means that their argument is not just inimical to religious liberty, but also to personal liberty generally. Not good at all.

Normophobia

Carl Trueman Finds the World to be Upside Down

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name.

Posted by Carl Trueman

Reformation 21 Blog

Every now and then I find myself reminded of just how much the world has changed.  One such moment came for me on Saturday.  I was up in Boston to preach for my friend and fellow member of a certain parachurch blacklist, Mike Abendroth. On Saturday afternoon, he offered to take me to Northampton, location of the early ministry of Jonathan Edwards.   As I always try to travel light, I ditched my jacket but had no choice but to wear my chinos and a button down shirt for the trip.  In short, I had the humiliation, as an OPC man, of walking around Northampton looking like some newly-minted associate pastor at your typical PCA church.

We went to Starbucks.  There I saw a lady who was, as we would say back in Blighty, clearly a ‘bloke’ dressed as a ‘bird.’  Now I have seen transgendered people before.
  On one level, the sight no longer shocks me as it once did, though I have to say that I can never overcome my firm belief that men usually make remarkably ugly women.  And I can assure you that this chap was no exception to the general aesthetic rule.

What surprised me, however, was how everybody else in the coffee shop (including, I have to confess, myself) simply went about their business as if everything was normal.  And, of course, the reason was simple: everything was indeed normal.  The sight of a man dressed as a woman is no longer weird. It is part of the rich tapestry of everyday life.  My grandfather would have had no categories even to compute such a sight; but now it passes without so much as snigger or a nudge-nudge.

None of this would have been so bad except for the fact that it was clear as I walked up the  street in Northampton that one or two heads were turning to stare at the weird guy dressed like a PCA associate pastor.   My very nondescript, ordinary, balding, middle-aged blandness made me stand out as utterly weird.  Even Mike’s soul patch and sub-AC DC standard tee gave him a little bit of cover; my wing tip shoes simply sealed my fate.   Indeed, I have to say that I have never been subject to such evident and oppressive neophiliac normaphobia in all my life.   The sooner normaphobes are categorised as hate criminals, the better it will be for those of us who belong to the despised minority of the once but clearly no longer normal.

Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade.  You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.

And the second thing that came to mind were the lyrics of a Jagger-Richards song: ‘Just as every cop is a criminal And all the sinners saints’.  That is surely a brilliant statement of the topsy-turvy morality of the world which sin has produced and in which we now live. 

Oh, and the name of the song?  ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, of course