Salma Hayek, Jesus Camp, and North Korea

“To secure the blessings of freedom for ourselves and for our posterity”

(From the preamble of the United States Constitution)

Yesterday, after two worship services, a lunch engagement and a television interview, I took a short nap. After that, I read another chapter of F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. I am reading Hayek because I am scheduled to speak at a conference for economists in a few weeks. 

I am feeling a bit unqualified. Actually, I’m feeling very unqualified!  

After reading for a while, I decided to watch a movie with Trish, called Crossing the Line. Then we watched another movie, called Jesus Camp.  

Crossing the Line is about James Dresnok and Charles Robert Jenkins and two other American soldiers who deserted the United States Army and defected to North Korea. Two of these soldiers have since died. After living in North Korea for forty years, Jenkins immigrated to Japan. Dresnok still lives in Pyongyang and is therefore the main focus in the documentary. 

It is a fascinating film. It explores why four Southern American men -- formally guardians of law, order and authority – betrayed their country and then created lives for themselves in that fiercely anti-American nation. It quickly becomes obvious that Dresnok has found comfort in the “teachings of the great leader,” which he incessantly quotes. He has also become secure in the dependable monthly rations he receives from the Korean government.  He is now old.  He has raised his family in a nation grateful for his usefulness. Although he is a man of limited intellect, he has learned how to effectively repeat the clichés of the political system he joined.  As a result, he has become content in a culture in which he is not free.

Jesus Camp is about Christians.

It is a propaganda piece. It is produced from a leftist perspective and aims to discredit the political religious right.  If you are a conservative Christian, it will probably make you angry. You will know that most of us don’t look like what that movie portrays. Nonetheless, the film will may also make you ashamed. It depicts spiritual practices that border on brainwashing. The Christian clichés and emotionalism that fills this work are children: little children. What we witness is not the teaching of the young but the deliberate emotional breakdown of children, followed by fear-based messages that the leaders scream into their mesmerized and captive audience.  

I could not help but compare the two films: North Korea and Jesus Camp.  

People in both shout slogans and praises about their great leader. People in both answer intelligent questions with thoughtless clichés. For the people in each, life is about remaining secure within an unquestioned universe in which intellectual, artistic and emotional growth is viewed as threats. 

F. A. Hayek claims that civilization advances not only – or even principally – through the efforts of our celebrated thinkers and leaders, but through the trial and error of constant innovations made by millions of ordinary citizens because they want to survive and thrive. He says that whenever a society is overly planned, even by brilliant people who want the very best for those they serve – they create a culture in which those ordinary people stop innovating. What that happens, a culture stops developing.

To grow, individuals and nations must have liberty. 

Therefore, receiving “the blessings of liberty” involves tolerating things most of us do not like. By  definition, liberty is the ability to choose. Liberty is the utter absence of coercion, except that kind of coercion that forbids individuals to coerce others. It is toleration for the inevitable unequal outcomes experienced by those with different levels of talent and ability. It is the awareness that some people will chose to be immoral and ungodly. It accepts the fact that some will chose heresies, or worship other gods, or even worship no god at all. It allows people to eat the fruit of their own choices, which, over time, the quality of which becomes apparent to all. 

If the Buddhists thrive scientifically, academically and materially while necromancers descend into squalor and insanity, no one may step in to save the necromancers from their destructive path. We may warn them. We may woo them. We cannot coerce them. We can only observe which group produces the better quality of life.

The idea of liberty is that common people, observing how a particular way of living affects those who embrace it, will chose for themselves which path leads to a healthy and fulfilling life.

The leaders of North Korea and Jesus Camp want to help people achieve a good life, as defined by them, by removing the alternatives. Their assumption is that the people they serve may not make the right choices, if allowed to choose.

And, indeed, they may not.

God discovered this in a garden long ago. We now live with the consequences.  Nonetheless, God has chosen to honor human choice even as He pleads with us to make the right choice. Why? Because he wants us to grow and become fully adult human beings – persons. That is one of the greatest – perhaps the greatest – blessings “for ourselves and our posterity”. 

I've told you about the movies I watched, but you might be wondering about the television interview I did. That was about a new website that helps people find someone with whom to have an affair. The motto of the site is “life is too short not to have an affair.” 

It is making a lot of money.

The interviewer asked me, “What do you think of this site?”

“Evil,” I replied. “It is undermining families and helping people give in to a momentary temptation that might have walked through it and kept his home together.”

“Should it be outlawed” he asked?

“No,” I replied, “In a free country, people have a legal right to do such things.”

After the interview and the movies, I was thinking about how tempting it is sometimes to fantasize about living in a theocracy. We would not tolerate sinful behavior and would not experience painful consequences that come from addictions and heresy.

But which version of my faith would I want to control the state? Would the Baptists allow Charismatics to worship God in their own way? Would the Charismatics allow fundamentalists to teach that the spiritual gifts all ceased with the death of the apostles? Would the Roman Catholics allow Protestants to publish materials claiming that one must not pray to Mary?

We know the answer to these questions.

So, just as I do not desire to live under Sharia law; I do not wish to live under any version of a Christian theocracy.

I follow the teachings of orthodox Protestant Christianity and teach them to everyone who will listen. I try to convince others of the rightness of my path by all peaceful means. But I will not coerce. Furthermore, I will fight anyone who tries to coerce others, even if I agree more with those coercing than with those being coerced. 

Why? Because coercion cannot secure “the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”

The way of North Korea and Jesus Camp creates neither real communists nor real Christians. It creates parodies of each. And morality is not produced by treating adults as though they were children, but by teaching children to become adults.

By the way, as I was searching for articles on Frederick Hayek, Google asked me if I wanted to see images of Fredrick Hayek or of Salma Hayek. And it showed some examples of each. After sweating for a moment, and aided by the advice of my wife, I chose old Frederick. Because I live in America, I had a choice. In North Korea, I would have been arrested for choosing Frederick. So I would have chosen Salma, who, as my wife pointed out, didn’t know a thing about economics! Also in North Korea, no one is watching a film about a North Korean soldier who defected to America.

The message of our faith is this:

“Behold I set before you both life and death, both blessing and cursing. Chose life that you and your children may live.”

The real Great Leader said that. A long, long time ago.

In America, we still have the ability to make that choice. Let’s keep it that way.

Do We REALLY Need A Revival?

I’m not sure we do! I think we need a reformation.

This thought had been emerging in my head for some time. It finally formed itself in a complete sentence this morning, in my journal.

Raised Pentecostal and still deeply appreciative of the Charismatic movement, I realize how ‘heretical” it must sound to say that we don’t need a revival.

Let me tell you why I said it.

Twenty-five years ago, I read Stephen Covey’s self-help masterpiece, 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Last week, I decided to read it again. The book had a fresh forward, in which Covey reflects on the changes that have taken place in the world since his book was first published. He says that when he wrote the book, we were still in the industrial age. In the years that followed though, we entered the information age. This has created geo-political, technological and cultural shifts that have made our lives much more complex than they were twenty-five years ago. He insists however, that the 7 habits remain relevant because (to use his metaphor from First Things First,) principles function more like a compass than like a map. We use maps to navigate known territory; we use a compass to navigate unknown territory. Although we have never navigated an information age before, we have a compass to keep us from getting lost.

The problem is, compasses are hard to find nowadays.

In the first chapter, Covey talks about how American self-help literature changed over the last two hundred years. For the first one hundred and fifty years, self-help literature focused on character formation. Since then, it has focused on technique, image management and marketing. In other words, for the last fifty years or so, we have been focusing on secondary principles instead of primary ones. As Covey puts it, “we have been reaping where we have not sown for so long that we have forgotten that sowing is even necessary.”

Now, what does this have to do with revival?

Revival is the reawakening of a person or a group to known, but neglected principles. Throughout history, religious revivals – awakenings – have led masses of people to recall and recover their forgotten foundation. These revivals were often accompanied by emotional surges and supernatural phenomena but they resulted in roads, hospitals, seminaries and works of art. As Christians recovered their principles, they returned to the kingdom work of creating cultural artifacts, managing resources and making discoveries that would benefit all humanity in God’s name.

But what will we do with another emotional surge, even if it is accompanied by supernatural phenomena, if there is not enough Christian foundation left to recover?

A reformation works on that foundation. And it takes work. A reformation not only revives believers; it transforms culture. It does this by challenging the intellectual principles by which a culture operates. It overturns cultural icons, replaces them with new ones, confronts religious clichés and superstitions, and forces us to confess our true values instead of the ones we profess. It shakes believer and unbeliever alike with the power of the Word and with the implications of that Word to individual and communal life.
An authentic visitation from God usually will cause an emotional surge. And, it often is accompanied by supernatural signs. However, the resulting awakening is meant to lead to something more than “people getting revived.” Revived to what? Revived to do what? Revived to think what? What is a revival reviving? After signs and wonders are we left with the same old poverty, ignorance, and prejudices? What sort of revival is that?

When I look at the level of poverty and ignorance in the areas of our country that most loudly profess Christianity, I am not convinced that a “revival” would do much. No, a genuine move of the Holy Spirit would awaken us to a need for personal and societal transformation. In a truly Christian area, the people would not throw trash out their car windows. In a truly Christian area, school rooms would not be so unmanageable that teachers cannot teach. Crime rates would be low in a truly Christian area. A truly Christian area would demonstrate the quality of life that is produced by a people whose God is the Lord. A mere emotional upsurge will not do this, even if accompanied by supernatural signs.

They call our area the Bible belt. But as one of our pastors, Daniel Bell, recently said to me, “how can we be the Bible belt if we don’t study the bible? Maybe we are just the religion belt!”

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

But shouldn’t the principles of the Bible – the Word of Life -- be doing more for our area than has been
occurring?

Pentecost is coming in a few weeks. I hope the Holy Spirit comes into our city so powerfully that day that Christians all glow in the dark afterward for forty days and forty nights. Then I hope they will start tithing. And keeping their word. And studying the Bible. And living moral lives. And treating immigrants hospitably. And finding ways to educate children who can’t afford private schools. And converting gang members. And reading. And thinking. And challenging our secularized forms of worship that do not introduce people to the presence of the transcendent and holy God. And working to create a society that will cause unbelievers to marvel at what occurs when a city and a region experience a real reformation.

Real revivals of course, become reformations.  Whether that is what people have in mind when they talk about revival though, I cannot say. Some, I fear, merely hunger for a sort of spiritual orgasm that feels really good for a while but leaves us essentially unchanged. They are hungering for an escape from the challenges of the information age we entered some time ago; longing for a recovery not of Christian faith really but for the culture we enjoyed before our world changed.

We need something much deeper.

We don’t need to escape the information age; we need to recover the principles that transcend all ages.

We need a reformation.

Should we Celebrate Bin Laden's Death?

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

After hiding from soldiers, spies and drones for nearly a decade, the mastermind of Islamic terror died in a fashionable suburb of Islamabad.

Last night, thousands of Americans gathered at the White House to cheer as President Obama made the announcement. Today, thousands more are cheering in the workplace, on television and on the various social media sites.

But what are we cheering about?

Perhaps we believe his death brings some sort of closure to a decade that has been extraordinarily bloody and disruptive. Perhaps we think that justice has been done, since the architect of the 9/11 infamy has now paid the ultimate price. Perhaps we feel that a national shame has been erased.

I feel all those things.

As a Christian however, I cannot rejoice in any one’s death, however wicked. Even if I believe, as I do, that some offenses are so unspeakably evil that it becomes the responsibility of human government to end the life of the one who perpetrates them; the scripture forbids me to rejoice or gloat that such an action was necessary.

History teaches us to temper our glee when the enemy suffers. It teaches us that we tend to become like that which we most hate.

After eight hundred years of fighting Islam, Spanish Catholics went to South American and converted the Inca Empire with a sword. Christians had never used brute force before to convert people. So where had Spanish Catholics learned such a thing if not from their enemies? After hundreds of years fighting Islam, the Spaniards had become Islamic in the way they practiced their own faith. Even the Spanish nun’s clothing was a manifestation of that Islamic influence.

It is not popular to say but must be said nonetheless: Islam is not utterly alien to Christianity, as for example Hinduism is. Unlike most of the world’s religions, Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism a common ideological and cultural foundation. In a real sense, Islam is no more theologically distinct from orthodox Christianity than is Mormonism.

If we don’t realize this, we may fail to recognize how easily Christianity can morph into the same kinds of behavior that we abhor in Islam.

Christ came to show us was that only a relationship with God can transform a person. In his life and death, Jesus showed that any attempt to mold Holy Scripture into a code of rigid rules and regulations will make our own religion into something demonic and oppressive. The Spanish launched the “Holy Inquisition” as a way to rid their Christian society of all Islamic and Jewish influences. The Serbs devised “ethnic cleansing” as a way to separate their Orthodox Christian culture of all Islamic elements. But the way of Christ is not always compatible with all of our cultural, ethnic, or nationalistic passions. A Christian may be a loyal Spaniard, Serb or American. He may be moved by all the things that moves his fellow citizens. However, he will always be moved in the same way, or at the same level, because his passion is tempered by his other (and higher) loyalty to Christ.

Like most Americans, I believe justice has been done in this killing of Bin Laden. I believe the president who gave the order and the soldiers, who accomplished the mission, did what had to be done. They were not the only ones responsible – indeed they cannot be personally responsible because no human being has the right to take the life of another. Only legitimate government, acting by due process of law, and only because of extremely reprehensible actions, is allowed by God to take a human life. So the president and the soldiers were acting on our behalf, and not merely from their own sense of morality and justice. That means we were all responsible for Bin Laden’s death.

I accept that responsibility.

Nonetheless, this was not the highest or most noble outcome possible. The highest and most noble outcome would have been Osama’s repentance for having done wrong, followed by our forgiveness of him for having done wrong. Of course, he did not ask for our forgiveness. He followed a savage, bloodthirsty religion that will only be satisfied by the utter defeat and humiliation, and, if possible, the elimination, of our culture and our way of life. He lived by the sword and now he has died by the sword.

His death was hardly the end of the matter though. There are millions of human beings believe what he believed and practice what he practiced. We can hardly kill them all. And, if we did, In what way would we be different than them?

My greatest fear is we will repeat the mistake the Spanish made in their reconquista. After fighting Muslims for centuries, after finally driving them completely out of the Iberian Peninsula, the Spaniards had become so bloodthirsty and fanatic that they had come to believe they needed to slaughter Jews, Muslims, Protestants and Incas to appease their god. That the Spaniards called that god “Jesus” is no comfort to me.

Speaking of the slippery nature of words, the word “ALLAH” is the Arabic word for God. Linguistically, it is closer to the Hebrew word for God than our own. And yet, the god that the Islamic terrorists worship is not our God. Unless, in hating them too fiercely, we gradually convert to worshiping the same bloodthirsty deity as they. In that case, God becomes a god and not the Biblical Lord God of all the earth. Christians can do that as effectively as Muslims.

Here is how our God feels when justice is done:
“Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die; saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” (Ezekiel 18:33)

This bloodshed will end, not when we kill more Islamic terrorists than they can kill of us, but when the ways of freedom and truth become more compelling than the ways of revenge, pillage and control. We have a right to protect ourselves, and to require justice from those who commit atrocities. We don’t have a reason to rejoice that this is still necessary, even if we are relieved that there is finally some sort of closure.