Attitude Adjustments

When George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian, won 31 states and comfortably defeated the “smarter” true-blue liberal John Kerry, America’s cultural elites nearly had a meltdown. “The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote. “… W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq–drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals.” Kind of reminiscent of The Washington Post’s snide comment several years ago that evangelicals are “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

Yet while media bias against Bible-believing Christians may be perennial, it is no longer monolithic. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has called evangelicals “the new internationalists” for our work fighting genocide, slavery, and sex trafficking abroad. Several newspapers have beefed up their coverage of evangelicals–a good idea, since we constitute approximately one-third of the American public. Time magazine’s David Van Biema regularly takes the time not only to write about us, but also first to call, ask questions, and try to understand.

Another journalist who has been converted, so to speak, is Mark Pinsky of The Orlando Sentinel. Pinsky, a Jew and a self-professed “blue-stater” at heart, says in the January/February Columbia Journalism Review that he has experienced something of an epiphany while covering evangelicals for the last two decades. In central Florida, where believing Christians constitute the dominant culture, Pinsky began to see evangelicals as real people and not as caricatures.

“At PTA meetings, at Scouts, in the supermarket checkout line, and in my neighborhood I encountered evangelicals simply as people, rather than as subjects or sources of quotes for my stories,” Pinsky says. “Our children went to the same birthday parties. We sat next to each other in the bleachers while the kids played recreational sports. Our family doctor went on frequent mission trips and kept a New Testament in each examining room.”

Both professionally and privately, Pinsky saw that evangelical Christians don’t bite. Pinsky has observed that evangelicals are not monolithic, nor are they “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Pinsky says we are more likely to be overzealous than hypocritical. He says we don’t “march in lockstep” according to what Jerry Falwell or James Dobson says, and we hold “surprisingly diverse views on many subjects.”

Pinsky agrees with evangelicals’ evaluation of pop culture as, “for the most part, a toxic mix of loveless sexuality and senseless violence.” Pinsky adds that while he rarely agrees with evangelicals politically or theologically, he has “developed a relationship of mutual trust and mutual relationship with the evangelical community.”

Such relationships are developing with other Jewish opinion leaders, too. Despite theological differences and an obviously painful shared history, Jews and evangelical Christians are seeking common ground on issues of mutual concern, drawing from the deep well of Judeo-Christian values. The largely liberal American Jewish Committee, for example, has taken steps to improve relations with evangelicals.

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved regularly endorse and defend evangelicals on the airwaves and in print. From former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s election-year endorsement of Bush to Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute joining forces with evangelical politicians in the cause of religious liberty, attitudes are changing.

“The shift among Jews is to see evangelical faith in a richer way,” Horowitz told Tony Carnes of Christianity Today. “There is an enormous movement in that direction.”

Starting to get a fair shake from the mainstream media and with friendships forming among the Jewish community, evangelicals are poised to begin erasing some of the larger society’s “fault lines” of fear, intolerance, and ignorance. And not a moment too soon.

Teens Can Say No

What’s the best way to keep teenagers free of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)? Abstinence. What’s the best approach to ensure that teens don’t get pregnant? Abstinence. What word is guaranteed to make the Sexual Left go crazy? “Abstinence.”

They’re at it again. Last month Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) released a report blasting the Bush administration’s emphasis on abstinence-only education in the nation’s schools. Staffers for Waxman, ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, said commonly used abstinence curricula present “false and misleading” information about condom use and STDs. The study, produced at taxpayer expense, says these curricula are rife with “outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits, and when life begins.”

The Bush administration begs to differ. Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, is one advocate of abstinence. “One thing is very clear for our children,” she says. “Abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs, and preventing pregnancy.”

In November, Congress appropriated $131 million for abstinence-only programs. This was an increase of $30 million over the previous year (but still $100 million less than the president had requested).

The Waxman report, however, asserts that abstinence is unrealistic and grossly overrated, and that a better way to teach sex is the so-called “comprehensive” approach (also known as “abstinence-plus”). “Comprehensive” sex ed programs tip the cap to abstinence as one item teens may consider, but they also present the full panoply of options for hormone-crazed young people, including birth control and abortion. It’s kind of like saying, “You shouldn’t do illegal drugs, but if you can’t control yourself, go ahead. It’s up to you.” The Waxman report is steeped in this kind of liberal permissiveness.

Not so fast, say the report’s critics. Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council says the Waxman report is partisan propaganda produced by “untrained staff.” He notes that the report ignores a clear link between abortion and later infertility. Perkins adds, “There are numerous sexually transmitted diseases that condoms do not prevent, including the human papilloma virus, the leading cause of cervical cancer.”

Further, according to the Medical Institute for Medical Health, the report “ignores peer-reviewed literature describing community-based abstinence programs that significantly lowered nonmarital pregnancy rates, even claiming such do not exist.”

Of course, abstinence programs are no panacea. Last year, researchers at Columbia and Yale released a study of 12,000 teens involved in some of these programs. Only 12 percent had kept their promise to abstain from sex until marriage. However, that represents something to build on. And even those who broke their pledges at least delayed the start of sexual activity and generally had fewer partners.

Since 1993, millions of young people aged 9 to 18 have gone through abstinence programs. And despite naysayers like Waxman, teen sexual activity appears headed down. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that the incidence of females aged 15 to 17 having premarital sex fell from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. Males this age who ever had engaged in sex dropped from 55 percent in 1995 to 46 percent in 2002. While the numbers are still too high, they represent tangible progress–and proof that young people can say No if given a little help.

While abstinence-only programs are an important part of that help, they are not the whole answer. Such teaching will more than likely fall on deaf ears if not reinforced by parents, clergy, teachers, peers–and members of Congress. As Hillary Clinton said, “It takes a village.”

What’s different about our village? Why have teens been having premarital sex at rates unimaginable to their parents and grandparents? Surely one reason is a lack of parental supervision when kids are not in school. Another, no doubt, is the spread of moral relativism. Parents who experimented sexually during the ‘60s and ‘70s may feel hypocritical if they start checking up on their kids. Further, many people shrink from saying that sex outside of marriage is wrong, even though by many measures–public health, interpersonal, and religious–we know that it is.

A third reason is the media culture that saturates our village. Approximately two-thirds of all television shows contain sexual content. Movies, too, are seemingly getting raunchier all the time. Remember when a PG film was safe to take your kids to? To avoid sounding like an old fogy, I’ll skip the music scene entirely.

Of course, many people will pooh-pooh any link between media consumption and sexual activity. (These are many of the same people who decry the negative influence of ads for cigarettes and alcohol.) One group that does not unthinkingly dismiss the link is the RAND Corp., which conducted a study last fall. The research, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, found that teens who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse as those teens who don’t.

As Rick Schatz of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families says, “By helping their kids think critically about what they see on TV, parents can actually play an important role in helping prevent their kids from making bad choices.”

Teens can so No, if we help them. Someone better tell Henry Waxman.

Author Insight: Denyse O'Leary on Intelligent Design

Today www.stanguthrie.com announces the launch of a new room on the website: the Library, which provides access to some of my current reading and favorite books. See the Library in the menu above, and click on it for details. To celebrate, we’re starting a new feature about books, called “Author Insight.” Periodically, we’ll post in-depth interviews with authors of interesting and insightful books. The interview below is the first in a series. Check back here often for more.

Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary has been writing about science issues for years (see her blog at www.christianity.ca/faith/features/weblog.html). Last year Augsburg Fortress published her book about the origin of life, By Design or by Chance? The Growing Controversy On the Origins of Life in the Universe. Stan Guthrie interviewed her.

There are lots of books attacking evolution or advocating for intelligent design (ID)—such as Darwin on Trial or The Case for a Creator. What’s different about your book?

By Design or by Chance? wasn’t written to attack evolution or to advocate intelligent design. It was written to explain what all the shouting is about. It is aimed at a general audience, not necessarily a Christian one.

In 1996, a political science prof based in Toronto urged me, as a journalist, to address the unseemly and unscholarly attacks on mathematician David Berlinski, for daring to question Darwinism.

I ended up writing a book. In the course of writing, I came to the conclusion that intelligent design is more plausible than Darwinism, as an explanation for the life we see around us.

By Design or by Chance? is not written to advocate Christianity. I am a traditional Christian, but I recognize that most faiths represented on this planet can account for intelligent design. Only atheistic secularism cannot. The question must be decided on evidence.

What biases did you bring to the reporting and writing of this book?

I am an evangelical Anglican, and the position that I have always been taught is Christian evolutionism. That is, Darwinian evolution accounts for the life we see around us, and somehow God planned it that way. It took me a long time to understand why Darwinian evolution might not be the whole answer to the diversity and complexity of life. I now see that God’s plans might be bigger than Darwin’s dangerous idea.

What are your credentials on the subject?

In 1997, an overworked editor asked me to start writing about science issues for the faith community, because no one else in Canada seemed to be doing it. My background was in arts, but my life was very much influenced by my Grade 12 science teacher, Irwin Talesnick, over 30 years earlier. He always encouraged us to be the best we could be, so I decided to just go for it.

After four years, a Canadian publisher collected all my faith and science writings and published them in the book Faith@Science: Why Science Needs Faith in the Twenty-First Century .

Then I totally stripped down my life and went on to write the very much more demanding By Design or by Chance?

What do you now believe about origins, and what convinced you?

I call myself a post-Darwinist. I do not think that the evidence supports the idea that Darwinian evolution is an adequate explanation of the development of of life. Intelligent design seems like a much more reasonable explanation. I was convinced by listening to the arguments on both sides. But I am a journalist, not a scientist. I don’t do scientific studies. I relate nonfiction stories. The ID stories sounded more plausible, in relation to life.

You say there is “growing controversy” on the origins of life in the universe? How so?

The number of news stories about ID-related controversies has grown so much that part of me wishes my publisher had delayed the publication of By Design or by Chance? Then I could have addressed some of them.

For example, I would love to have covered the furor that surrounded the publication of an ID-friendly paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Or the decision of world-famous atheistic philosopher Antony Flew that there must a God, on account of intelligent design.

The ACLU lawyers can try to ban this stuff from the classroom, but they have absolutely no hold on the world of ideas.

Already, I could write a 25-page postscript, but a second edition in a couple of years would make more sense.

What are the two or three key theses of your book?

1. Twentieth-century society was dominated by Marx, Freud, and Darwin. Marx is totally discredited, Freud mostly so, and now Darwin is coming under fire. Why?

2. Traditionally, scientists assumed that there were three basic forces in the universe: law, chance, and design. Darwin proposed an explanation for the development of life forms that eliminated design, leaving only law and chance. But Darwin’s explanation may not be correct.

3. Eliminating design was a great boon for atheism because it meant eliminating God, among other things. Atheists and secularists have a major stake in maintaining such a system, whether or not it accords with the facts. By Design or by Chance? unpacks the controversy that results.

Does it really matter what people believe about origins? Can’t people believe in evolution and still be good Christians?

But what do Christians mean when they say they believe in “evolution”? If they mean that they believe in Darwinism, they need to know that Darwinism is the creation story of atheism.

I don’t have a problem with evolution in principle, but we need to be clear that Darwinism’s purpose is to eliminate intelligent design. I do not find the evidence persuasive.

The question, for me, is not whether evolution occurs, but what drives it? Blind material forces? Self-organization of life? Divine oversight? Platonic forms?

Isn’t it true that Christian opinions on the subject run the gamut, from young earth creationism (YEC) to evolution?

Absolutely! The young earth creationists have simply decided to assume that evolution has never occurred, and that the evidence for Earth’s traumas can be blamed on Noah’s flood. I don’t agree, but in the book I give examples of YECs who are doing serious science. I address Christian evolutionism as well, noting that the big problem is to avoid acting as cheerleaders for atheistic Darwinism.

Unfortunately, here in Canada, I have seen an example of a Christian evolutionist who is prepared to unite with atheists to attack his ID-friendly Christian brothers. So I must ask, what is going on here?

What do you think of the work of astronomer Hugh Ross? He rejects both young earth creationism and classical evolution, in favor of an old earth system of progressive creation.

I find Hugh Ross’s ideas very interesting. I cover him in By Design or by Chance? He refuses to identify with the intelligent design community, yet he has taken on the big young earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis. As a result, AiG has attacked him quite strongly, but by comparison has merely damned the ID types with faint praise. The difficulty is that, as one Christian historian told me, most old earth/progressive creationists are moving over into the ID camp. So Ross is in a very isolated position.

Here is what he told me in an interview: “The intelligent design theorists are doing good work, and in a sense I consider myself as a partner with them. But they are hampered by their ‘big tent’ approach (an unwillingness to offend YEC or reject their model). They are also hampered by the lack of a testable alternative to naturalism. They are doing some excellent work in communications, also in developing methods to test for design.”

Do you think ID should be taught alongside evolution in public schools?

I write materials for the Ontario education system, including materials on sensitive issues. My view is that teachers must always be prepared to address topics that students know and care about. So, yes, teachers should be prepared to talk about intelligent design if it comes up, and should be given resources to do so. However, so many students struggle with basic literacy that I think the teacher is quite lucky if it does come up.

You suggest in the book that Darwinism is on the way out. Why?

As far as I am concerned, evolution happened. After all, there were trilobites in the Cambrian era but not now. There are horses now but not trilobites. For me, the question is, How did it happen? Darwinian evolution does not give a very good picture of how it happened, for a number of reasons. The Cambrian era itself is an example. All the phyla of life forms appeared at that time, and none since. A few have gone extinct. The rest simply diversified. (By contrast, Darwin had thought that diversification would lead to new phyla.) More important, the enormous complexity of life forms (unknown to Darwin) creates many problems for the simple mechanisms that Darwinian evolution proposes.

Darwinian evolution works well as the creation story of atheism, but not otherwise.

What’s ahead for ID?

A lot of trouble, I expect. Many public institutions are heavily invested in atheism, expressed as secularism. Any science, no matter how soundly based, that challenges that consensus in any way is sure to raise the ire of Top People. Top People don’t care what superstitions the horrid, vulgar mob believe, but they certainly do care if some new discovery or question disturbs their continued control. Truth or falsehood is irrelevant at that point. They just have to get rid of it.

Are Americans Stingy?

Within days of South Asia’s earthquake and tsunami calamity, United States officials pledged an initial $15 million in aid (which has since been increased to $35 million, then $350 million). Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland accused the United States and other Western nations of being “stingy” with relief funds. The New York Times and other liberal outlets quickly picked up the mantra.

Is the accusation true? Let’s look. Last year, approximately 40 percent of all government aid to help victims of natural disasters worldwide came from the United States. Such aid must be put in perspective. The U.S. has the world’s largest economy, with a Gross Domestic Product of nearly $11 trillion last year, growing at a healthy 3.1 percent annual rate.

Secretary of State Colin Powell says he expects the official U.S. contribution for the current crisis eventually to hit $1 billion. Of course, that money only accounts for a fraction of the total Americans will give. For example, the government is sending desperately needed military personnel and equipment (including aircraft carriers) to affected regions to assist with rescues and cleanup.

The private sector is also mobilizing, although these efforts will not be on the official ledgers of American generosity. World Vision, the largest Christian relief and development agency, reports that Americans have responded with “unprecedented and overwhelming generosity.” World Vision President Richard Stearns, who himself left a lucrative career in the private sector to lead the agency, says World Vision has already received $12 million in donations as part of its new $50 million worldwide fundraising goal for the disaster.

Seattle-based World Vision points out other encouraging signs of generosity: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $3 million to World Vision and other groups; Seattle-based Tully’s Coffee has pledged to raise $1 million by donating the profit it makes on its house-blend coffees over the next three months; a suburban Seattle boy, 11, and his friends earned $255 for tsunami relief through a hot-chocolate stand. No doubt such stories could be repeated throughout the fruited plain.

“America’s response to this crisis has shown our true character,” Stearns says. “In the midst of tragedy, we care about our neighbors—even those living half a world away.”

Could we do more? Unquestionably. Are we doing a lot already? Yes.

Just Wondering 3

My wife says women have escaped foot-binding and corsets only to wear shoes that look like medieval torture devices and clothes that are so tight they can’t move. That’s progress.

She also says people are always looking for someone who can think outside the box. She’s still trying to find someone who can think inside the box.

Ever notice how in commercials and sitcoms 99 percent of the men are dolts and 99 percent of the women are brilliant?

Who else is tired of Jim Carrey movies?

I’d say Jim Carrey is a foul-mouthed version of Robin Williams, but I’ve heard Robin Williams in concert.

Show me a comedian who depends on a potty mouth to get a laugh and I’ll show you a comic who isn’t funny.

So the newspaper editor who dropped Michelle Malkin’s conservative column called her an “Asian Ann Coulter”? I guess that makes him a Caucasian “Dumb and Dumberer.”

Remember when it was easy to turn stuff on and off? We had things called switches. Now we have computers that lock up and must be rebooted, stereos that need a remote, and televisions that have to communicate with the VCR and DVD player. Even the lights have dimmers.

Guthrie’s law of complexity: Things will become more and more complex until they don’t work at all.

Back when I was a kid, I thought the 21st century would be a lot like “The Jetsons,” with people flying around using jetpacks. Chicago’s perpetual road construction seems more like something out of the 19th century.

My wife remembers when teens used to spend hours talking on the phone. Now they send text messages.

Cell phones and pagers used to be for real estate agents and doctors. Now fifth-graders have them.

Do kids really need cell phones? What are they talking about?

I don’t want to be reachable 24/7, and I don’t need unlimited anytime minutes.

When I think about how utterly clueless I was before I got married, it’s frightening. What did she see in me?

Signposts on the way to maturity: high school diploma; college degree; paying rent; working for a living; getting married; graduate degree; buying a home; cleaning the bathrooms without being asked; having children; accepting yourself; helping others; worrying about your parents; keeping your kids intact through high school.

Parents who obsess about their children getting into the right preschool need to chill out.

Kids usually don’t break.

For the most part, kid videos are the last refuge of the untalented and unimaginative.

When kids lose their cool, don’t lose yours.

Being a parent means always having to say you’re sorry.

Who says theology is impractical? The doctrine of original sin has been empirically verified every day of human existence.

Pain and pleasure are brothers who travel together.

If “thou shalt not covet” is the Tenth Commandment, why do we Christians always “covet your prayers”?

Speaking of Christian clichés, will someone please take that poor frog out of the kettle?