Monthly Archives: March 2009

Yes, Barack Obama’s associations mattered

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I know his apologists in the media and elsewhere didn’t want people talking about Tony Rezko, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright III, Bill Ayers, Fr. Michael Pfleger, Rashad Khalidi, Nadhmi Auchi, James Johnson, and Franklin Raines; I remember many solemn asseverations that talking about these people was just a distraction from the real issues, and a cynical attempt on the part of Republicans to play politics to bring Sen. Obama down.Except, it wasn’t, because his associations did matter. Granted, the fact that Barack Obama did business with Tony Rezko doesn’t necessarily mean he’s crooked, nor does his friendship with Rashid Khalidi necessarily mean that he shares Khalidi’s views on the Near East; these conclusions are not inevitable, but debatable. Even given that, however, the pattern of his associations told us some important things about his judgment of people—most importantly, that his judgment of people is quite poor, which should have led to the conclusion that his personnel judgment in staffing the Executive Branch was likely to be quite poor.And so it has proven to be. Tim Geithner was approved for Treasury despite being exposed as a tax cheat because the Senate was convinced that he was the best person for the job; instead, his performance has been abysmal, he’s a millstone around the president’s neck, and Washington’s thousand little knives are already out for him. Of course, it would help if the administration didn’t keep losing nominees for the rest of the senior positions in the Treasury Department, and particularly for the #2 slot. Equally of course, tax problems haven’t just been for Treasury appointees, since failure to pay taxes was one of the things (though not the worst) that forced Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, and have caused problems for other appointments as well, including White House Counsel Greg Craig.Then there’s Vivek Kundra.  Kundra was President Obama’s choice as Chief Information Officer for the administration; now he’s taking a leave of absence after the FBI raided his old office and arrested two people, including one of his former top aides, Yusuf Acar.  According to the Washington Post,

the conspiracy, which operated for at least a year, worked like this:Acar approved work with a vendor, such as Bansal’s AITC, to arrange the purchase of goods such as software. The vendor ordered fewer items but billed the District for a larger amount. Bansal, Acar and others then split the proceeds, FBI officials said.Acar also approved fraudulent time sheets for nonexistent employees, [FBI agent Andrew] Sekela wrote. Acar and the others split the proceeds paid by the D.C. government, Sekela alleged.Authorities traced more than $200,000 in payments last year from Bansal’s firm to a private company, Circle Networks Inc. The firm is co-owned by Acar, even though he is prohibited from having an interest in any company doing business with the city, Sekela wrote. Circle Networks generated about $2.2 million in revenue through D.C. government contracts, the agent wrote.

As Ed Morrissey notes,

Kundra himself hasn’t been implicated in wrongdoing, but it does raise the question of exactly what Kundra did as the head of DC’s technology office. Acar worked as Kundra’s aide, and at best one can say that Acar managed to run this ring right under Kundra’s nose. Kundra had to approve, explicitly or tacitly, the payroll for the agency, which employed less than 300 people. Any competent chief executive of a firm that size would know how many employees worked for him and how much they cost; in fact, it would be one of the primary issues on their agenda. . . .The best we can say about Vivek Kundra in this episode is that he’s incompetent as an executive.

And then there’s the saga of Chas Freeman:  a paid apologist for the House of Sa’ud who’s changed his views on the Near East and Middle East for the sake of the Sa’udi oil money in his pockets; a man with financial ties to the Chinese government who defended the Tiananmen Square massacre—or more accurately, argued that the Chinese didn’t respond strongly enough to protestors.  Matt Welch of Reason examined Freeman’s views and concluded,

This is the definition of clientitis; it exhibits not a “startling propensity to speak truth to power” but rather a startling propensity to lob bouquets at dictators.

As such, though Freeman’s trying to blame his withdrawal on the Israel lobby, there were far broader concerns about his appointment, raised by Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Jonathan Chait as well as Republicans, than just the anti-Israel views he evolved during his years on the Sa’udi payroll.  Anyone willing to change his positions to suit foreign governments willing to pay him, whether liberal or conservative, is the wrong person to put in charge of writing the National Intelligence Estimates on which so much of our foreign policy is based.These aren’t the only problems with the administration’s appointment process, either—we’ve also seen the appointment and unappointment of Anthony Zinni, dubious nominations at Labor and Energy, and a press secretary who’s Scott McClellan redux and has done the administration no good coping with the blowback.  All in all, it’s hard to argue with Billy Hollis’ summary of the situation:

An economic Trojan horse

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Michael Ledeen summarizes it this way:  “Obama told us he was going to use Congress to redistribute the wealth—explicitly. And he thinks it’s in the Constitution.”As a lolcat might put it:

“It” is the message Barack Obama delivered in a radio interview several years back, which is now embodied in his administration’s economic policy.  The audio of that interview is below; as Wizbang blogger Steve Schippert summarized it last fall,

Obama laments in the interview that the Warren Supreme Court failed to reinterpret the Constitution to read into it what was not there: Redistribution of wealth for “political and economic justice in this society.” . . .For Obama, the redistribution of wealth is a civil right that the civil rights movement failed to attain. To Barack Obama, the redistribution of wealth is basic “political and economic justice,” and one segment of society has the basic right to the money of other segments of society. He’s very straight forward about this.And while in the interview he did not think wealth redistribution could be affected through the courts, he was confident that it could be attained “legislatively.”

President Obama’s intellectual foundation on this issue is the work of two liberal French economists (if that isn’t a redundancy) named Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.  Daniel Henninger describes their work and its influence on the Obama administration’s economic strategy here:

Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography—”Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone’s life: “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. The President’s Budget and Fiscal Preview” (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it’s a must read.Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.


Bride of Rove summarizes Piketty-Saez thusly:

From what I gather they have been pulling together tax returns, tracking the rich and have determined that the rich have been getting richer faster than the poor have been getting unpoorer not so fast. Ok. I agree. It does take awhile to build that financial base and it tends to grow exponentially once you put that money to work. So if you have a lot, you make a lot proportionally. If you’ve got squat, you don’t tend to make much on nothing. You have to get a HS diploma, work hard, save and make good decisions. Sometimes you have to take a few risks. Eventually, if you keep at it, you will move up the scale faster and faster—except for now. But, yeah. There are poor people who never get ahead for a myriad of reasons and there are rich people who do better every year.Piketty and Saez believe that this is not fair.

They are making, as Henninger puts it, “a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.”  As a consequence of President Obama’s belief in that argument,

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.The “top 1%” isn’t just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to “pay for” the fact of their wealth—no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of “wealth” from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget’s “Top One Percent of Earners” chart.The White House says its goal is simple “fairness.” That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, “it is our duty to change it.”

In other words, the first thing you need to understand about this administration’s economic policy is that it’s not really about the economy.  It’s not about prosperity or economic growth or even helping the poor in absolute terms.  It’s about reducing the gap between the poor and the rich.  And what’s the fastest way to do that?  Make the rich poorer.In my book, this sort of thing boils down to letting the sin of envy drive economic policy—and envy is a deadly sin for a reason.  It will probably accomplish its purpose; but it will probably also make everyone worse off in the process.  That’s a high price to pay for seeing the proud humbled.  It may well be God’s judgment on the proud of this nation, but even if so, I don’t think that justifies those who bring it about.

Credit to Patty Murray

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Back when I was still officially a Washington resident, I had and took a couple opportunities to vote against Patty Murray for Senate, and if I had another chance I still wouldn’t vote for her; but I have to give her credit for this one.  As you may have seen (since it’s all over the Web; emphasis mine),

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.But the proposal would be “dead on arrival” if it’s sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget. . . .Currently, veterans’ private insurance is charged only when they receive health care from the VA for medical issues that are not related to service injuries, like getting the flu.Charging for service-related injuries would violate “a sacred trust,” Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis said. Davis said the move would risk private health care for veterans and their families by potentially maxing out benefits paying for costly war injury treatments.

That’s just disreputable—especially coming from the Secretary for Veterans’ Affairs, the guy who’s supposed to be the advocate for veterans in the administration.  Kudos to Sen. Murray and her colleagues for telling the administration to forget about it.Update:  Jon Stewart absolutely trashed the administration over this (transcript here):
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The importance of theories in conflict

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Yesterday I quoted G. K. Chesterton, from one of his short stories, on the importance of the theories we hold about life, the universe, and everything; Chesterton, speaking there through the character Gabriel Gale, declares (correctly) that “most men are what their theories make them.”  The economist and columnist Thomas Sowell understands this well, as you can see in this interview (video below) he gave Peter Robinson last fall for Robinson’s program “Uncommon Knowledge.”  As Sinistar of C4P sums it up,

In the interview . . . Sowell talks about his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions and the 2008 Presidential Election. . . .Sowell states that “visions . . . are the implicit assumptions by which people operate” and that with regards to politics, these visions can be divided into two camps—a constrained view and unconstrained view. To put things another way, these visions are your “gut feeling” or views on how the world works, and they will color your views of how you approach many political and social issues.The unconstrained vision suggests that human nature is changeable and that society’s and the world’s problems can be solved if rational plans are enacted. The constrained vision, on the other hand, banks on the concept that human nature is static and flawed, and that there are limitations to what can be done.

Of particular interest to those of us who are supporters of Sarah Palin,

[Dr. Sowell] briefly mentions the smears against Gov. Palin and how it relates to the concepts discussed in “A Conflict of Visions”. . . . It is a very enlightening interview, and I encourage people to watch the whole thing. However, if you just want to hear Sowell briefly talk about the smears against Gov. Palin and how these conflicting visions relate, you can fast forward to the 30 minute mark. (I suggest starting 28 minutes in for the lead-in to the discussion.)

Living in Laodicea

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“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me
on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”—Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV)I laid out below (or attempted to lay out, anyway) my principal concern about the iMonk’s recent jeremiad (a term I use as a compliment, be it noted) in the Christian Science Monitor.  I agree with him that there are far too many churches in this country that aren’t about the gospel, that have given themselves over to the idolatry of causes (whether political, cultural, or otherwise), and are doing a poor job of teaching the gospel to their children (in part because most of the available curricula are terrible).  I even went so far as to say the other week that “too many churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.”  But to make blanket statements about “evangelicalism” as if that’s just the way evangelical churches are, which is what it seems to me Michael Spencer was doing (and, imho, too often does), strikes me as unfair; I know a lot of churches that aren’t like that, too.  For my part, I know I do an imperfect job, but I do my level best to preach the gospel, week in and week out, and to see to it that our teachers teach the gospel—and I’m just not that unusual.  Rather, I’m a lot more typical than a lot of the critics of evangelicalism realize.  (And I’ll tell you this, too:  even among those big-church-with-hip-worship-team pastors, in my experience, there are those who really do care about the gospel; as they’re struggling free of the attractional paradigm, a lot of them are doing so with a real sense of relief.)That said, if this were still mostly an intramural conversation among evangelicals, I’d still be less concerned; even if I think Spencer’s argument is overstated, I do recognize that overstatement has its uses for getting people’s attention (as Flannery O’Connor memorably argued).  What concerns me now with its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor is how it’s likely to be used, and the purposes for which it’s likely to be used:  to beat up on people, and to push political agendas.  That, I believe, will be truly unfortunate—and quite possibly, ironically enough, serve to worsen the very situation Spencer was aiming to address.  That bell can’t be unrung, of course, and we can’t control what people outside the church will make of or do with his argument; but there’s one thing we can do, which is the one thing we need to do anyway:  rather than pointing fingers (whether at the iMonk, or at those whom he critiques, or at the media, or anyone else), we can stop, open our hearts, and examine ourselves.We have a model for this, as Jared Wilson pointed out earlier today, in Ray Ortlund, who responded to Spencer’s piece with a moving and thought-provoking meditation on this passage from Revelation, the letter to the church in Laodicea:

This was the church in Laodicea. This is too many churches today. We focus on our strengths and successes. And there is just enough good going on in our ministries that we can plausibly refuse a blunt reappraisal of our weaknesses. But the Lord is saying, “That whole mentality is wrong. It is lukewarm. It makes me want to vomit (verse 16). . .  I am confronting you that you don’t love me wholeheartedly, so that you go into repentance and reevaluation and change. Here’s what you need to do: Stop telling yourself you’re okay and go back into re-conversion (verse 18). Change your complacency into zealous repentance (verse 19). Hey, are you listening to me? I’m that faint voice you can barely hear any more. I’m outside your church, banging on your door. You didn’t even notice when I walked out. But I’m back, one more time. If anyone in there is listening, just open the door and I will come in. I won’t smack you down. I will befriend you (verse 20). The others in your church may or may not join us, but all I’m asking for is one open, honest heart.”Usually, our churches settle for half-way remedies, which is why they limp along in mediocrity. But every now and then, someone humbly opens that door, and Jesus walks in. He is ready to bless any church if anyone there is willing to start admitting, “I am not rich, I have not prospered, and I need everything.”

The path to life doesn’t begin with gathering political power and influence, or with building up money and possessions and prestige; it begins with that humble admission that those things aren’t really what matters, and that in truth, we really do need everything from Jesus.  May God humble our pride that we may truly depend on his grace.

An object lesson in humility

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A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse’s posts, I wrote the following:

it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.

That was something I’d been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I’d come up with on my own.  Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton.  Here’s the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.

The coming evangelical collapse?

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The iMonk, Michael Spencer, has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor has taken notice.  Yesterday, they ran “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” a condensed version of his argument, in their op/ed section—to considerable notice.  After all, Spencer’s thesis is attention-grabbing (and easily exaggerated to be even more so), and one of the things he gets right—that evangelicalism is strongly identified in the popular understanding “with the culture war and with political conservatism”—means that his argument is seen to have strong political repercussions, and thus generates interest far beyond the circles of those who actually care about the problems and paucities of evangelical theology and praxis.I’ve been thinking about Spencer’s argument since he first posted this series, and meaning to interact with it here; I haven’t felt I had the time or energy to do so in detail (and anything less would be insufficient), but I think it’s important to do so, and all the more so now that he’s hit the mainstream.  I appreciate a lot of his critique, because the church in this country has some serious weaknesses, and religious complacency is definitely one of them in many areas; but I think his argument has serious problems as well which need to be considered and evaluated.The biggest one is definitional:  Spencer’s thesis is essentially about a word, “evangelical,” of which the definition is problematic in several respects.  In the first place, it’s viscerally problematic for him (and for others).  Mark Twain is credited with the line, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”; as far as I can tell, if the funeral Spencer is predicting actually comes, he will thoroughly approve.  I don’t deny that he has good reason for his negative associations with the word “evangelical,” but I do believe that his negative response to the word leads him (and others) to paint with a broader brush than is warranted, and to tar a lot of people unfairly.This goes along with the second problem, which is that the way that the word “evangelical” is used—its assumed definition—is problematic, because it’s extremely fuzzy.  This is the first issue John Stackhouse raised against Ron Sider, and it applies here as well:

What does Sider mean by “evangelical”? He doesn’t actually say. . . .Does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider’s own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It’s not clear. And it never gets clearer.

This same “terminological confusion” applies to Spencer’s argument:  about whom, exactly, is he talking?  This fuzziness creates two problems.  One, it accepts and encourages an operating definition of “evangelical” that is disconnected from the core of evangelicalism and is based instead on cultural factors, then uses that definition to draw conclusions about that core.  Thus, for instance, if his statement that “evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism” is true, it’s at least as true that a lot of people have come to be identified as evangelicals because they’re politically and culturally conservative and want to attend a church that agrees with their beliefs; the problem is as much one of accretion of nominal Christians as it is of evangelicalism selling out to “Christianity And.”  I talk more about the idolatrous character of American politics than most people, but I still think it’s important to differentiate here.  The problem is less about evangelicalism going off the rails than it is about a number of the people in the pews not being evangelicals at all, but merely fellow-travelers.Two, this fuzziness allows Spencer to generalize his own experience and the view from his window to a greater degree than is actually warranted.  He declares, for instance, that

There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.

I’m sorry, but while that might be true in his experience, it isn’t true in mine, and I know an awful lot of colleagues who would similarly demur.  For one thing, while I know it’s trendy in some places to beat up on megachurches, and I’ve taken a club to them myself once or twice, there are a couple of points which need to be made on this.  One, the real issue with megachurches isn’t their size, but rather the attractional approach that built so many of them (and far more smaller churches); and two, as the attractional paradigm is failing—and failing its practitioners as much as anything—more and more people are becoming aware of the fact, and turning away from it.  I’ve heard statements a number of times lately from large-attractional-church pastors to the effect that “I love the ministry but I hate what I do.”  There’s a growing and broadening awareness that the attractional paradigm has built institutions but not the church, and with it a growing and broadening aversion to servicing the institution anymore.  What we’re seeing, in many of these churches anyway, is the abandonment of the model born out of the awareness that the model isn’t the gospel and doesn’t serve the gospel.  What we’re seeing is a trend that could lead, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, to the conversion of many megachurches to the gospel.Of course, there are and will be many more that continue on in the the “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented” model that has worked for them to this point; I suspect that they will shrink, as “customers” move on to other things, but I expect we’ll also see shrinkage among those who abandon that model, as people complain that “it isn’t our church anymore.”  Well, no, it’s God’s church, which is part of the point.  This does mean that I agree with Spencer that we should expect decline in the numbers of culturally-identified evangelicals, but I disagree with him on where that’s likely to come from:  I think  it will largely come from the decline of the megachurch, as the paradigm he identifies continues to fail, and as churches which have used it successfully to build numbers shift away from it in pursuit of something else (the gospel, one hopes).That said, characterizing the evangelical world outside the megachurch as composed solely of “dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile” is simply wrong.  Certainly there are some of both; on the other hand, there are also new churches whose foundations are strong and whose future is vibrant, and there are a lot of established churches that are a long, long way from dying.  Granted, these churches face a significant demographic challenge in attracting the unchurched among Gen X and younger, and granted, there are many established churches that will fail to do so; but that’s far from a new phenomenon.  I was taught in seminary that churches have a normal life-cycle, and that when they enter the decline phase, some manage to reverse it, some try to do so and fail, and some don’t even try; churches dying is a hard reality, but not a new one.  It’s also not an inevitable or a universal one, because some churches do revitalize themselves for a new period of effective ministry.  Those that don’t, make way for new church plants to take their place.  We’re seeing both those things in the American church—maybe not in Michael Spencer’s experience, but certainly elsewhere.What’s more, we’re seeing some denominations rising to the challenge of supporting, encouraging, and equipping that new growth—my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is an example of that.  Spencer asserts that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant, but he doesn’t support that and I don’t believe it; when it comes to denominations, I don’t get the sense that his horizon extends very far beyond the Southern Baptist Convention.  Some denominations will become largely irrelevant, those being the ones that are all about politics (whether external, national politics or internal, ecclesiastical politics)—such as, alas, the one in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA)—if they don’t change their ways.  Those that follow the RCA’s path of refocusing themselves on being a support structure for the mission of the local church, rather than on using the resources of the local church as a support structure for the agenda of the national office, will be completely relevant; and as long as they dedicate their efforts to planting and supporting new churches and revitalizing older ones, the survival rate among both types of congregations should be considerably higher than Spencer’s prediction implies.Of course, this begs the question:  will those churches be truly evangelical in any meaningful sense?  Will they be gospel-centered and gospel-driven?  No doubt, some won’t be.  Having charged Spencer with conflating that which is truly evangelical with that which is not, I don’t want to be guilty of the same thing by implying that all church plants and revitalized churches are or will be gospel-driven.  Sadly, there’s nothing new about that; from what I can see, the only times and places in which the church has truly been united around the gospel have been times and places of external persecution, in which it was publically unprofitable to be a Christian and the gospel was the only intelligible reason to join the church.  As long as there are other reasons to do so that make sense to the world, people will do so for those reasons.  Nominalism isn’t an evangelical problem, it’s a problem for all streams of the church in all ages in which Christian faith is publicly acceptable.There is, of course, much more that can be said in regard to Spencer’s essay, and I do want to take some time later to respond to some of his individual points.  My great concern, though, is that the heart of his argument is muddled because he fails to define and delimit whom he means when he says “evangelicals,” and thus that he’s able, in my judgment, to draw conclusions which are rather more sweeping than his actual evidence warrants.  That said, the issues he raises are ones to which all who care about the church in this country, and particularly that the church should be about the gospel mission of Jesus Christ, should consider very carefully—we should all examine ourselves most closely to see whether we’re affected by the problems he lays out, and if we are, we’d best address them pronto.  As Spencer says (and on this I agree with him whole-heartedly), we live in a crux time in which “the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential.”  May God so move our hearts to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness that we may avoid the former and realize the latter, not for our fame and profit but for his glory.HT:  Jared Wilson

Jesus loves Osama—and that’s not the worst of it

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This is spot-on:

A couple of years ago, the Telegraph ran a story entitled Church’s ‘Jesus loves Osama’ sign criticised. Apparently, some Baptist churches in Sydney, Australia, put up signs which read simply, “Jesus Loves Osama.” Smaller print at the bottom contained the Biblical reference supporting that assertion: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).The signs were apparently not well received. Even the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, commented on the sign, noting the church “should have chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.” . . .So, what’s so shocking about the “Jesus Loves Osama” sign? It isn’t that someone might understand that the church is saying that a human being’s killing of thousands of people is somehow morally acceptable. . . . No one who has the most basic understanding of Christian teaching would arrive at that conclusion. It isn’t that the church’s priority is wrongly focused. . . . The “Jesus Loves Osama” sign is a statement of straightforward Biblical truth.
The problem is this: we don’t want God to love Osama bin Laden. We want there to be people who do such awful things that God’s love doesn’t extend to them. We want some people—a very select few—to burn in hell. Our skin crawls to hear that some people like Osama bin Laden who have done great crimes may not pay for those crimes in the great hereafter. “Where’s the justice in
that?” we cry. It isn’t justice. It’s compassion. It’s mercy. It’s forgiveness.

This is the scandal of the gospel (or part of it, anyway):  “God loves everyone” actually means God loves everyone, including the people whom we don’t like and who hurt us and whom we consider enemies and of whom we don’t approve.  He loves those awful liberals and those awful fundamentalists and those awful atheists and those awful evangelicals, and those awful Republicans and those awful Democrats, and yes, those awful terrorists and those awful militarists, and pretty much anybody else that you might consider awful, just as much as he loves you.  And we really don’t want him to, and he does anyway; and not only does he love them, Christ died for them on the cross just as he did for you.  Whomever you define as “us,” and whomever you define as “them,” Christ died and rose again for both, and he loves both, and offers the free gift of salvation to both.  That, and nothing less, is the gospel.HT:  Shane Vander Hart

The importance of theory

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“Most modern people have a curious contradiction; they abound in theories, yet they never see the part that theories play in practical life.  They are always talking about temperament and circumstances and accident; but most men are what their theories
make them; most men go in for murder or marriage, or mere lounging because of some
theory of life, asserted or assumed.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Shadow of the Shark.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton

Do these taxes feel high to you?

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Though the theory underlying the Obama administration’s response to the current economic crisis is usually described as “Keynesian,” it’s interesting to note that John Maynard Keynes himself would demur.  Michael Barone puts it well when he writes,

“Animal spirits,” said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.Keynes, a subtler analyst of market economies than the single-minded booster of high government spending that so-called Keynesian economists depict, knew whereof he spoke. People don’t just respond in linear quantum jumps to the incentives and disincentives they perceive around them. They perk up when their animal spirits are aroused, and they slump down into inertia when they are not.

A good illustration of this comes from, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg.  Read the link, then check out this video (they’re from different parts of the conversation):

My wife watched the clip and read the transcript, then looked at me and said, “I didn’t think Whoopi was a Republican.”  She isn’t, but she sure sounds like one here; and if someone like Whoopi feels this way, you can be sure a lot of other rich folk do too.  I think Barone’s argument goes a long way to explaining why.

The Clintonites managed to hit a sweet spot with the 39.6 percent rate. It was a number that started with a three. To high earners, not bothering to calculate exact returns to the last decimal point but just concentrating on the big picture, it seemed that the government was taking just about one third—hey, maybe a bit more—of their incomes. They would get to keep the other two thirds, pretty much. So they proceeded to try to make intelligent investments and to earn large amounts of money without being preoccupied with how much the government would snatch from their hands.Quite a contrast with the 1970s, when the high income tax rate was 50 percent, and 70 percent on “unearned” (i.e., investment) income. In that environment, the animal spirits of the productive class were directed away from making productive investments and toward sheltering their income from seizure by the government. . . .I think there is a serious risk that the Obama tax proposals are going to bring back those days. Yes, they call for returning the high income tax rate only to the sweet spot of 39.6 percent. But they also want to reduce the amount of the mortgage interest and charitable deductions for high earners, which would channel less money to charities and more to the government (and thus to public employee unions and, through them, to the Democratic Party) and would raise the effective rate on high earners to above 40 percent—a number with a four in front of it.Add on to that the state income tax rates of 10 percent or so in place or in contemplation in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California—states with more than a quarter of the nation’s high earners—and you are looking at income tax rates above 50 percent.When you get a number with a five in front of it, you are in grave danger, I submit, of directing the animal spirits of our most productive citizens away from productive investments and toward tax shelters: “Those bastards want to take half my money, and I’m not going to let them get it.” You are at risk of directing our economy back into the unproductive slog of the 1970s and away from the robust growth of the 1980s, 1990s and most of this decade.

His argument is, in essence, that most economic actions aren’t purely rational responses to a detailed command of the facts, but rather are in response to more general perceptions, and that these perceptions don’t shift gradually, little by little, but rather tend to do so all at once when a particular threshold is crossed.  As he notes,

When gas prices earlier last year were at $2, $2.50, $3 and $3.50, most Americans opposed oil drilling offshore and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When they hit $4, opinion shifted. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the governor of Florida suddenly favored offshore oil drilling. As for Alaska, nuke the caribou!

This suggests that taxes can in fact be higher than most conservatives would prefer without causing much of an adverse effect, as long as they don’t feel higher to the folks whose investments drive the economy; it also suggests, though, that if you overshoot your target even a little, the adverse effect of your miscalculation is likely to be a lot worse than you would consider to be rational.  If Whoopi’s reaction is any guide, I suspect the Obama administration isn’t going to know what hit it.