We had a big discussion about this issue 3 years ago, but the Boy Scouts will not be evicted from a building they built but lease from Philadelphia for $1 a year.

A Philadelphia jury has ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts, meaning they will not be evicted from their home or forced to pay rent, at least for now.

Outside the courthouse, a lawyer for the Boy Scouts, Jason Gosselin, told Fox News the Scouts won on the most important issue, that of First Amendment rights.  The jury found the city posed an unconstitutional condition on the organization by asking it to pay $200,000 annual rent on property it was leasing for a dollar a year, in a building the Scouts built and paid for themselves, all because the city felt the Scouts were in violation of Philadelphia’s anti-discrimination laws.

"What we really want is to sit down with the city and resolve this matter once and for all" Gosselin says.

The Supreme Court ruled years ago that, indeed, the Boy Scouts can decide who is allowed to join.  Thus to purport to be shocked about the policies of a 100-year-old organization is incredibly disingenuous. 

Good morning.

[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#34. George W. Bush. Resolute witness  b. 1946 

 One of many things that agitated George W. Bush’s political opponents was the bold statement of Christian faith that made him one of the most visible—if not one of the most articulate—witnesses for Jesus Christ in the modern era. Bush’s public professions demonstrated the clumsy language and descriptions that evangelicals recognize as typical of new believers brought to the public stage. Bush attests that he came to faith in Christ in his mid-life as a result of wife’s influence and then a 1985 family weekend with Billy Graham.

 “Over the course of a weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul,” Bush says in his testimony. “It was a seed that grew over the next year. He led me to the path, and I began walking. It was the beginning of a change in my life. I had always been a ‘religious’ person, had regularly attended church, even taught Sunday School and served as an altar boy. But that weekend my faith took on a new meaning. It was the beginning of a new walk where I would commit my heart to Jesus Christ.”[1]

 His later-in-life conversion, although not uncommon, made him “among a small number of American presidents to have undergone a profound religious transformation as an adult.”[2] What matured his faith were the actions he took as a new believer: reading the Bible voraciously, becoming involved in a men’s Bible study, and committing to a regimen of regular prayer.

Bush said: “I have also learned the power of prayer. I pray for guidance. I do not pray for earthly things, but for heavenly things, for wisdom and patience and understanding. My faith gives me focus and perspective. It teaches humility. But I also recognize that faith can be misinterpreted in the political process. Faith is an important part of my life. I believe it is important to live my faith, not flaunt it. America is a great country because of our religious freedoms. It is important for any leader to respect the faith of others.”[3]

 One of the most striking differences in the actions of born-again president George W. Bush and two other modern presidents who professed Christianity, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—both Southern Baptists at the time of their presidencies—was the number of evangelicals that Bush surrounded himself with in his Administration.

 “Though Clinton talked often about his faith,” wrote Rice University professor Michael Lindsay in his book Faith in the Halls of Power, “the presidency of George W. Bush strikes many observers as the most evangelical in recent memory.”[4]

 “Bush surrounded himself with more evangelicals than any other U.S. president in the last 50 years,” Lindsay wrote. “Even among nonevangelicals [in the administration], there was a general affinity for religious faith.”

There was also divergence from his Democratic predecessors reflected in Bush’s views on the role of personal responsibility and government. Bush commented:

“The new culture has said: ‘Individuals are not responsible for their actions; we are all victims of forces beyond our control.’ We have gone from a culture of sacrifice and saving to a culture obsessed with grabbing all the gusto. We went from accepting responsibility to assigning blame. As government did more and more, individuals were required to do less and less. The new culture said: ‘if people were poor, the government should feed them. If someone had no house, the government should provide one. If criminals are not responsible for their acts, then the answers are not prisons, but social programs.’  For our culture to change, it must change one heart, one soul, and one conscience at a time. Government can spend money, but it cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives.” [5]

But more than anything Bush will be forever remembered as the president who guided the nation after the 9/11 attacks, and then as an unpopular war president. Taking a nation to war in both Afghanistan and then Iraq, and in the more vague War on Terror, subjected Bush not only with anti-war vitriol from the left, but also forced him as a Christian to consider the question of whether the conflicts were morally justified or just wars.

Christians since Augustine have used the Just War theory as a calculus for determining whether acts of aggression are morally justifiable. Historically the jus ad bellum criteria have included: just cause, right authority, right intention, proportionality, reasonable hope of success, and last resort.

There are, of course, different views on whether the conflicts that were begun under the Bush Doctrine of preemption and preventive action qualified as “just wars” using these critieria. One moral theoretician concluded:

“While there are on the face of it morally justifiable elements of the Bush Doctrine as a security response to terrorism, from the perspective of the Just War tradition the doctrine’s linkage with a power-driven, hegemonic foreign policy strategy undermines the moral credibility of the doctrine, and thus the moral credibility of the United States.” [6]

Others find moral justification for the Bush Doctrine. Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her book Just War Against Terror, cites the just war tradition as a source for legitimating her claim that it is the “burden of American power” to undertake the global war on terrorism. In her application of the just war criteria, Elshtain finds not only adequate reasoning for the Bush Doctrine conflicts, but overwhelming justification for these actions.[7]

It is perilous to analyze the personal faith of political figures in the context of their policies and popularity.  To label—as I am inclined to do–George W. Bush the most Christian president of the modern era brings both cheers and jeers. There is little doubt, however, that Bush best represents among U.S. presidents an evangelical figure that experienced a profound spiritual conversion, explained his faith in the language of evangelicalism, applied the movement’s moral criteria and spiritual disciplines, and worked for policies most important to the conservative Christian church.

[2] The Faith of George W. Bush, by Stephen Mansfield

[3] http://www.prayforbush.com/testimony.php

[4] Lindsay, D. Michael, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite; Oxford University Press: 2007.

[5] http://www.prayforbush.com/testimony.php

[6] http://www.trinstitute.org/ojpcr/6_1snau.pdf States.

[7] Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Just war against terror: the burden of American power in a violent world, ,Basic Books; 2003.

Good morning.

Well, I’ve started reading Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, and have gotten through the overview/introductory chapter and the first chapter as well. Mr Rajan in his analysis of the current recession blames it on what he terms “fault lines” where competing interests and actions of different organization, nations, and other groups, which taken by themselves individually are understandable and rational when they interact at their “boundaries” create phenomena he likens to the fault lines of geology. The first chapters of this book describe the major players and how they contributed to the recession and why what they were doing was rational and in their best interest. 

Remember that full-page ad that MoveOn.org took out to condemn General Petraeus (or as they called him, "General Betray Us")?  You may have forgotten, but MoveOn certainly does.  They kept that ad up on their website every since then.

Well, that is, until just the other day when it became clear that Petraeus would be replacing McChrystal.  Then all of a sudden >poof< the page itself, and one describing their rational for the ad, magically disappear from their site.  See, now that Obama has tapped him for a job, he’s not so bad after all.

Remember how the Soviets used to airbrush people out of pictures who had fallen out of favor with the Communist party?  You may have forgotten, but MoveOn certainly does. Inconvenient memory?  Scrub it away.

[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]

#47  Beth Moore. Ceiling breaker  b.1957

Beth Moore is a Bible teacher whose books, study guides and conferences have had an enormous impact on millions of Christian women. Oh yes; men, too—but keep that to yourself. There are enough evangelical churches that believe that women cannot teach men about spiritual things that successful female Christian leaders often mask the truth about the number of men who benefit from their teaching.

Moore is perhaps the best-selling female author among evangelicals in the last generation and a symbol of women who over the last decade have begun to break into the upper echelons of evangelical influence. At the center of the strongest resistance to an egalitarian role for women in the church, the Southern Baptist Convention, Beth Moore is among the most successful and perhaps the best-selling Baptist author, and a financial boon to the denomination’s B&H Publishing Group. For the longest time, when you walked into a Lifeway (SBC) Christian Bookstore it appeared there were only two authors at work:  Beth Moore and Henry Blackaby. 

Moore committed her life to vocational Christian ministry at the age of 18, but years later, when she was volunteering as a Sunday School teacher, she realized that she needed to learn more about the Bible. She went to a biblical doctrine class that gave her a deep yearning to know the Bible, and she began sharing her expanding knowledge through a weekly Bible study class. By the mid-1990s that class had grown to 2,000 women and she was speaking at churches throughout South Texas. It was then that B&H began publishing her Bible studies, leading to a national speaking ministry.

Moore founded Living Proof Ministries in 1994 with the purpose of teaching women about God’s Word. Moore writes books based on the regular Bible studies that she conducts at the Living Proof Live conferences and at her local church, First Baptist Church, Houston, Texas. Her books include Breaking Free, Believing God, The Patriarchs. and When Godly People Do Ungodly Things. Living Proof Live conferences are conducted in every state and have been attended by more than a million women. Moore began a radio ministry called Living Proof with Beth Moore in 2004, and she has a Bible study segment on the television program “Life Today with James and Betty Robison.”

The evangelical consideration of gender roles often puts men in the forefront and one result is that any listing of evangelical leaders is predominantly male. Despite this, there is no doubt that women are the primary strength of the modern church. This is not because of the positions they hold but because they are teaching the children in the churches and at home, they dominate in sheer numbers, they are more faithful in participation (including modern missions), they are frequently the real life examples and teachers of spiritual things to their spouses, and they are the most effective hounds of heaven. At times, superior teachers such as Moore, Anne Graham Lotz, Kay Arthur, Joni Eareckson Tada, Joyce Meyer and others have risen to the top as speakers and authors within a male-dominated subculture, and although they are restricted by conservative convictions on gender roles, we all find ways to listen in.

 Criticized for teaching men, Moore responded:

 “The ministry to which God has called me is geared to women. My conference and weekly Bible studies are entirely focused upon women. The only exception to an entirely female audience is my Sunday School class. Men continue to come and sit in the back. We never sought them but did not know how to deal with them. Would Christ have thrown them out? I just didn’t know. I handed the problem over to my pastor and under his authority; he said to allow anyone to come who chooses. I have wrestled with this and the Lord finally said to me, ‘I tell you what, Beth, you worry about what I tell you to say, and I’ll worry about who listens.’ My ministry is to women. That’s where my heart is. I make no bones about it. But what if men come and sit down? Do we stop and throw them out? I really don’t know. I just placed myself under the authority of my husband, my pastor, and my God.”

Good morning.

You can please some of the people, some of the time, but… Evidently, the city of New Haven has removed the words “in the year of our Lord” from its high school diplomas, this year (HT: First Things). From the school superintendent,

I’m surprised it took this long for someone to notice it. We certainly don’t want to offend anyone.

Well, actually, you are offending someone – me! I think what you really should say is that you don’t want to offend secularists.

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And here I thought they were communists. China is predicted, for next year, to surpass the U.S. in manufacturing output. Could there be a profit motive there?

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Who’s going where? Interactive map, from Forbes, showing the numbers of people moving to and from various counties in the U.S.

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When you outlaw guns… Over the weekend, in Chicago, 54 people were shot, with 10 of them being killed. Chicago has, since 1982, had a ban on new handgun registrations. Imagine how many people would have been shot had there been no handgun ban for almost the last 30 years. Oh no, wait – imagine how many people would have been able to defend themselves, if there had been no handgun ban at all.

As much as General Stanley McChrystal’s comments in his Rolling Stone magazine interview may accurately reflect the military’s view of Obama as Commander-in-Chief, he was wrong to make them to the news media.  He’s not the policy maker; Obama is. 

I disapproved of this sort of behavior under George W. Bush, and I want to say for the record that I disapprove of it under Barack Obama. 

That is all.

In his (always excellent) column yesterday, James Taranto noted that, earlier this month, President Obama was calling small-government conservatives hypocrites for expecting the government to lead in the Gulf oil spill issue.

In an interview with Politico, the president said: "I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending."

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

"Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much," Obama said. "Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms."

Got that? If you didn’t support Obama’s effort to take over the health-care system, you’re a hypocrite if you expect him to lead in a crisis, and the oil spill is the fault of the minority party in Congress for its hypothetical opposition that hypothetically deterred Obama from taking hypothetical preventive measures.

Obama makes it clear that he has no idea at all what the Tea Partiers are all about (or he does, and feigns ignorance to make some political points).  Small government types are actually more correctly labeled "right-sized government" types.  It just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily. 

Our Constitution enumerates the powers of government, and was written with a particular role of government in mind.  Our Founding Fathers, understanding man’s fallen nature as revealed in the Bible and seeking to restrain the inevitable power grab that all governments throughout history had tended towards, tried to restrain the beast while still providing enough power to do the job it was intended to do.

And so the Tea Partiers seek to restore government to that role and restraint.  It so happens that this proper size of government is quite a bit smaller than what we have now, so "smaller government" is a good enough label for now.  And the health care takeover is just the latest and most blatant attempt to "super-size" this beast.

But comparing opposition to the health care bill with criticism of the federal government’s handling of the Gulf oil spill is like comparing apples with prime numbers.  One is not what our Constitution intended (and some are making the case that it doesn’t allow it at all), especially requiring all citizens to purchase something and penalize them if they don’t.  The other is an interstate crisis that the federal government is specifically for. 

In this case, Obama has been dithering while Louisiana tried to get booms or barrier islands to block the oil.  He didn’t use a well-tested and very effective method to clean things up early on.  He turned down offers of help from 17 countries.  He’s used this disaster to push for ethanol subsidies that have been panned by both Republicans and Democrats alike for, among other things, shrinking the food supply in poor countries.

Are those of us "small government" types hypocritical to suggest we get leadership from our President in a time of crisis?  No, we’re not, and either the President knows this but is willing to use this situation to score political points, or he’s hopelessly ignorant about his critics. 

In the meantime, we’re stuck with a community organizer in the Oval Office who won’t or can’t or doesn’t know how to lead.  BP deserves what it gets (and likely more) as the fallout from this spill continues, but President Obama is likely to be protected by his party and what supporters he still has left.  (Hey, when you’ve lost James Carville, you’ve lost a lot of the Left.)  It’s a teachable moment.  Is the President in class?

Good morning.

Thomas Sowell reviews the book "Out of Work" by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallawa, which, among other things, counters the idea that it was the depression that cause the subsequent unemployment problem.  But as Sowell notes, the historical stats say something completely different.

Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.

Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed– and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.

This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to "do something."

That "something" was government intervention.

What the government decided to do in June 1930– against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it– was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.

Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits– and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.

Oh, and there was another stock market crash, more recently, that did not result in huge unemployment.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

The very fact that we still remember the stock market crash of 1929 is remarkable, since there was a similar stock market crash in 1987 that most people have long since forgotten.

What was the difference between these two stock market crashes? The 1929 stock market crash was followed by the most catastrophic depression in American history, with as many as one-fourth of all American workers being unemployed. The 1987 stock market crash was followed by two decades of economic growth with low unemployment.

But that was only one difference. The other big difference was that the Reagan administration did not intervene in the economy after the 1987 stock market crash– despite many outcries in the media that the government should "do something."

Hat tip to Don Sensing, who has some charts and graphs to help point this out.