On the Air Today

This afternoon I've been invited to appear on Moody Broadcasting Network's "Chris Fabry Live!" program. We'll be discussing classic books that every Christian should read. The segment airs from 2:30 to 3:00 Central Time. Go to Fabry's website to listen live.

Jobs We Can Believe In?

Barack Obama says he plans to "create" 3 million new jobs with his approximately $675-$775 billion stimulus plan. Mr. Obama, when you get the final price tag, be sure to let us know, won't you? In the meantime:

-- This appears to be a very expensive jobs program. According to my calculator, if the total is $700 billion, each job will cost taxpayers $233,333.33. Where do I sign up for one of these?

-- A few years ago, Chicago Democrats fought hard to keep Wal-mart (one of the few currently profitable companies) out of the city, over the objections of poor job seekers, to protect union payscales. Obama, a frequent critic of the successful retailer, certainly didn't stand up for the folks simply trying to feed their families. Can we expect more of the same from Mr. "Change We Can Believe In"?

-- The number of promised jobs is actually smaller than the number of positions lost this year in the current downturn. So despite the astronomical cost, this plan is only part of any solution. As we should now start saying, "A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

-- Chicago, "the city that works," is legendary for its government waste, cost overruns, patronage, ghost-payrolling, and the like. Just look at Chicago pol Rod Blagojevich. What is to keep Obama's plan from simply being more-a lot more-of the same?

Christianity Today's Top News Stories of 2008

The events, people, and debates of the past year that Christianity Today's editors and writers believe have shaped, or will significantly shape, evangelical life, thought, or mission.

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset.

By Matthew Parris

Mr. Obama Goes to Church-Rarely

Barack Obama has made a point of telling anyone who will listen how important faith is to him. The president-elect speaks the language of faith fluently, for the most part, and he has made a special effort to reach out to evangelicals. But a report in his hometown Chicago Tribune notes that Obama has scarcely appeared at Sunday worship since his famous falling out with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. According to the Trib, "he has not attended a public church service since before being elected, a departure from the actions of his two immediate predecessors."

Noting that he doesn't want to make a commitment to a church before moving to the nation's capital, and worrying about his possibly disruptive presence with other worshipers, Obama says he relies on pastor friends and his own private prayer in the interim.

Yet the president-elect says he will find a church once the move is complete. "We frankly haven't thought about it yet," Obama told the Tribune, "because right now we're just trying to make sure that we don't lose anything in the move, including our children."

Another Obama predecessor cited concerns that he would be a disruption as a factor in his own spotty church attendance as president. His name was Ronald Reagan.

Christmas Humility

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;

And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

--Philippians 2:5-11, KJV

Christmas Joy

Joy to the World

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

He rules the world, with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, and wonders, of His love.

Isaac Watts, 1719

North Korea: Opportunity for Obama?

President Bush's focus on denying nuclear weapons to the megalomaniacal regime in Pyongyang needs to be broadened, according to Jay Lefkowitz, the outgoing administration's special envoy for human rights in North Korea. There is good precedent, according to Lefkowitz:

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the West and the Eastern Bloc began a long dialogue on security, economic and human-rights issues. The key to the negotiations that ensued -- known as the Helsinki Process -- was explicit linkage between these three "baskets," with the West insisting on verifiable progress in each area as a condition of financial aid or international recognition.

...

Today, a Helsinki-style model should be replicated with North Korea, and the U.S. should promote linkage among security, economic and human-rights issues. Significant economic assistance to North Korea should be offered, including development assistance, World Bank loans, trade access and food aid, but it must be given only in return for tangible, verifiable progress on all issues on the agenda. And human-rights progress should not be measured by bureaucrats meeting and reading prepared statements, but by tangible steps that move North Korea closer to the norms of the international community.

Lefkowitz says such a shift presents an opportunity for the Obama administration:

To be sure, the policy I am proposing is diplomacy with our adversaries. But President-elect Obama has made that one of his goals. And if we pursue a comprehensive approach to North Korea, we may find that we'll not only advance our security objectives, but also help some of the world's most abused people.

And the human rights needs are great. According to the Voice of America:

Religious and human rights groups estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people are believed to be held in political prison camps in remote areas of North Korea, some for religious reasons. Prison conditions are harsh, and refugees and defectors who have been in prison said that prisoners held on the basis of their religious beliefs generally are treated worse than other inmates.

For recent Christianity Today coverage of North Korea, click here.

Looking for Moral Capitalism

Let there be accountability for the financial crisis, and let it begin with me.

A Christianity Today editorial

Bad Timing

The fall of Rod Blagojevich couldn't have come at a worse time for George Ryan-or Barack Obama. Ryan, the previous Illinois governor, was angling, with the help of Sen. Dick Durbin, for President Bush to commute his six-year sentence on a corruption conviction.

After serving barely 13 months and with Bush about ready to leave office, Ryan did something unthinkable, at least for him: He apologized. (One Chicago family saw its children perish in an automobile crash because of Ryan's corruption while in charge of the state department of motor vehicles.) Then Blagojevich, his successor as governor, gummed up the works by getting caught.

Question: How could Bush pardon Ryan with Blagojevich so notoriously in the news and the stench of Illinois corruption still so strongly in the nation's nostrils?

Answer: He can't, and won't.

Hey, if Durbin really wants Ryan to be sprung right now, why not ask another Chicago pol, Barack Obama, to do it once he's inaugurated? And while Obama's at it, he can pardon Blagojevich, too.

What's that, you say? Obama doing these favors would spoil his carefully crafted image as an outsider, as a reformer?

Well, after all the abuse the president has taken from his Democratic opponents, if they want some dirty work to be done, they're going to have to do it themselves.

Culture War? What Culture War?

For all, Christian and otherwise, who fervently hoped that the culture wars were over comes the latest salvo on gay marriage. And please note: It isn't from James Dobson or Tony Perkins. Instead, it is coming from the once-respected Newsweek magazine.

Actually, this is a two-part salvo. The first is Lisa Miller's December 15 cover story, "Our Mutual Joy," which purports to lay out the biblical case for homosexual nuptials. And how, you may ask, does Miller turn "Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman" into a benediction? Miller ignores the Bible's direct commands and turns instead to the lives of its characters (never the wisest hermeneutical course):

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust.

Of course, the Bible is quite clear about the matter. Check out this classic defense of heterosexual-only marriage from Christianity Today.

Mollie Hemingway of GetReligion.org rightly calls Miller's piece "an embarassment":

On a radio show yesterday, the host asked me whether the piece was more offensive to my sensibilities as a journalist or a Christian. I went with “journalist” since the piece wasn’t anywhere legitimate enough, theologically speaking, to be considered seriously. As a journalist, it violated almost every rule in the book. It failed to accurately represent the viewpoint being scrutinized. It was riddled with errors. It was driven by emotion. More than a few journalists — one at a competing weekly news magazine — wrote to me yesterday asking, “Where was her editor?”

Part 2 comes from that editor. Jon Meacham's snide note defending the piece removes all doubt about media bias in this case. Dismissing before the argument starts all who oppose homosexual marriage for scriptural reasons, Meacham says:

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

If believing and following the Bible is "the worst kind of fundamentalism," one wonders what Meacham thinks of the Islamic terrorits of 9/11. Then the editor practically invites a fight, while simultaneously declaring that the forces of history are on his side.

The reaction to this cover is not difficult to predict. Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their "agenda," a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion.

Nice journalism, that. Misrepresent the Scriptures and those who know them better than you do, then impugn their motives in advance.

With activists marching in the streets demanding retribution on the heads of any religious people who supported California's Proposition 8 banning gay marriage, it is clear that the Left-including Newsweek-isn't interested in dialogue. And with the nation's most liberal president set to take office, expect the culture war to get even hotter.

But please don't blame it on conservative Christians.

Is the Honeymoon Over?

The end may finally be in sight for Barack Obama's long honeymoon with the media. It appears that some journalists, now that they have helped elect the inexperienced Illinois senator to the nation's highest office, are actually starting to do their jobs.

And the president-elect seems just a bit miffed at the treatment. After all, why start now?

During the campaign, Obama operative Greg Craig released a detailed memo exploding opponent Hillary Clinton's foreign policy pretensions, saying her credentials were exaggerated and her positions unsupported by the record. The New York senator now, however, is the centerpiece (along with Bush-era appointee Robert Gates) of Obama's concept of foreign-policy "change we can believe in."

While representatives of the Fourth Estate were reluctant before Election Day to ask Obama anything tougher than "How does it feel to be such a symbol of American goodness?," now they see Team Obama starting to enact "four more years" of Bush policies and are beginning, albeit with reluctant throat-clearing, to ask, "What gives?"

On Monday, a reporter asked:

You talked about the importance just now of having different voices and robust debate within your administration, but again going back to the campaign, you were asked and talked about the qualifications of the -- now your nominee for secretary of state and you belittled her travels around the world, equated it to having teas with foreign leaders. And your new White House counsel said her resume was grossly exaggerated when it came to foreign policy. I'm wondering if you can talk about the evolution of your views of her credentials since the spring?

A perfectly fair question, something Obama evidently is unused to, if we go by his ad hominem answer:

I think this is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign. No, I understand, and you're having fun.

Some members of the media are no longer laughing. One is CNN's Campbell Brown, who writes with the icy passion of a jilted lover:

Mr. President-elect, reporters we hope are going to ask you a lot of annoying questions over the next four years. Get used to it.

That is the job of the media, to hold you accountable, but this isn't about the media, it's about the American people, many of whom voted for you because of what you said during the campaign, and they have a right to know which of those things you meant and which you didn't.

Apparently, as you made clear Monday, you didn't mean what you said about Hillary Clinton. So what else didn't you mean?

Obama's condescending comment brings to mind his earlier one calling a Detroit reporter "Sweetie." One hopes Obama learns quickly that the campaign is over, and soon it will be time to govern. We know he's good at the one; time will tell whether he's as adept at the other.

Concerning the Oval Office, Obama may want to bear in mind a relevant comment from Star Trek's Mr. Spock. "You may find that having is not so nearly pleasing a thing as wanting," the Vulcan first officer said. "It is not logical, but it is often true."