Morality of Mortality in Still Life

Photo by David Lassman

This morning was bright and sunny near Syracuse, New York.  The last workday before a long three-day weekend.  And as people logged on to their computers, and surfed over to Syracuse.com, a local news website, they were greeted with this photo at the top of a story about a fatality accident in the area.

A white sheet, covering what's obviously a corpse, on the pavement, near a crumpled motorcycle, and a damaged Jeep.  Skid marks, a lone shoe, and what appear to be bloodstains on the white sheet.  Crime scene tape, two police cars.  With a small group of what likely are police investigators standing about a block away.

You can almost hear and feel the stillness of the scene.

By now, however, if you visit the website, the photo has been cropped to exclude the white sheet covering the motorcyclist's body.  According to purportedly eyewitness accounts from feedback to this story, the deceased was a worker at a nearby office complex.  It is believed that he ran a red light and hit the Jeep.

The reason Syracuse.com decided to crop out the white sheet covering the victim stems from a rush of criticism from dozens of readers posting feedback to this story, objecting to being subjected to such a garish scene in the original version of the photo.

Bad taste, showing what's obviously a lifeless body, even if it is covered by a sheet.  Disrespectful to the victim's family, should they be venturing onto Syracuse.com without knowing their loved one's body is under that sheet.  Needlessly sensationalistic journalism.

Or is it?

This story quickly became one of the most heavily-debated articles on Syracuse.com, as readers went back and forth, posting complaints about the photo, or complaints about the people complaining about the photo.  Hey, at least the corpse itself wasn't visible.  Blood, death, and tragedy are part of life.  Maybe such a graphic depiction of the results of running red lights, as has been assumed was the cause, will convince other people not to take such foolish risks.

On the one hand, it's simply a photo that's generated quite a bit of buzz in an otherwise sleepy corner of New York State.  We've seen far more disturbing images out of Syria lately, and Iraq.  Does it make a difference when the bloody sheet is covering an American?  Or a local guy that somebody might actually have known?

When I lived in New York City, I particularly remember seeing on the local evening news some coverage of a Mafia hit in either Brooklyn or Queens.  A mob operative had been assassinated while sitting in his car underneath an overpass.  It was a burgundy Lincoln, and the driver's side window had shattered from the close-range gunshots.  The news camera angled right in for a close-up of the victim's blood-splattered face, a middle-aged man with greying hair.  And the whole thing was broadcast unfiltered to New York City, as a reporter droned on in the background about plausible motives.  As I recall, there was no "some of the scenes you are about to see are disturbing" disclaimer.  It was simply ordinary news footage of yet another casualty of the city's time-worn mob wars.  Film at 11.

Granted, I have no idea how much angry feedback the station received after airing that footage, but chances are, it wasn't much.  It's not like mob hits are exceedingly rare in New York City.  What might be rarer are mob hits where news camera crews arrive on-site before police detectives have started covering up the crime scene.  Even in the Syracuse.com photo, it seems a bit odd that the body was left on the street for so long.  The accident happened at 7:54 in the morning, the photos were posted at 8:49, and even past 9:00, according to the story, the body was still there, eventually covered by a yellow tarp.  How long does it take for the coroner to show up at fatality accidents in Central New York?

Maybe it's no big deal.  Maybe it is a bit opportunistic of Syracuse.com to run an attention-grabbing photo like this, knowing that if they really have to crop out its most objectionable component, they can do it and still have a photo that tells a story.  We all know that motorcycles aren't the safest mode of transportation anyway.  And people die in motor vehicle accidents every day.  Plus, it's not like Syracuse.com is in the same league as the New York Times or even FOX News.  Millions of people around the world aren't going to see this story and be horrified at the disturbing depiction of a dead person lying on the pavement with a bloodied sheet covering it.

But looking at this photo, it truly is the finality that it captures that makes it disturbing.  Maybe even horrifying.  A lone shoe, thrown from the foot of its owner by the impact of the collision.  A motorcycle, wrecked, never to be ridden again, at least not by the guy who, mere minutes before this photo was taken, was riding it to work.  A relatively new Jeep, looking like a 2013 model, by the narrow shape of its broken headlight - still so new, it doesn't yet have a permanent license plate on its front bumper, assuming it's registered in New York State.  What about it's driver?  How are they coping with the reality that this wreck involved a fatality?

This story never was headline news on CNN or Drudge Report, and by now, it isn't a headline story on Syracuse.com, either.  It's hardly distinctive enough to be nominated for a Pulitzer.  The road is back open, the vehicles are gone, and the victim's body is in a morgue or funeral parlor somewhere near Syracuse.

All we've got left, those of us who never knew anybody involved in this accident, is this photo.  And the story, however ordinary, that it's telling.  A story about finality.  Endings.  Sudden impacts.  And, frankly, how ordinary they are.

That's why people who found it upsetting were, well, upset.  We don't like being reminded about how common mortality is.

One of those cops in the background of this photo appears to be leaning back casually against a squad car, in a pose suggesting far more ease with this type of situation than many of us have when looking at the photo.  And for the most part, that's to be expected.  Cops deal with this sort of thing all the time.  They need to maintain a certain level of detachment for their own sanity.

For the rest of us, however, I think it does us good to be challenged by photos like these every now and then.  They remind us of our humanity.

Even if it is far more fragile than we're comfortable admitting.

Gospel Truth Despite Doubt

What is truth?

That's the basic question of life, isn't it?  In what can we believe?  To what can we affix our hope?

It's the question Pontius Pilot asked Jesus.  It's the question all of us ask - however subconsciously - as we develop our worldview and make our way through our lives.

It's the question that born-again evangelicals say we've answered by putting our faith in Christ.  And while for some, that sounds like a trite answer, perhaps its triteness comes the consistency of its trueness.  Even if, at least for Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, it's an answer that's been given more in theory than in practice.

For generations, regardless of how strongly anybody believed in Jesus, as Americans living in our Christianized society, acknowledging the historicity of the Bible has sufficed in providing at least a benchmark for religiosity.  One didn't have to be "born-again" to acknowledge that the Bible is more than just another work of literature.  For people who took the Bible seriously, their claims that God's Word is true were met, on the whole, with at least a begrudging acquiescence by the general population.  Public dissent against Christianity and its teachings was extremely rare, and its doctrines seldom challenged in the public square.  And when they were, dissenters were portrayed as outside the mainstream.  .

When we talk about America entering a "post-Christian" phase, we're talking about all of that cultural context flipping backside-to.  Whereas Christians had become accustomed to commanding America's moral dialog, nowadays, we're finding ourselves on the defensive more than ever.  Over the past few decades, our culture become more pluralistic, and suddenly, it seems, more and more people have become comfortable with - and even driven to - openly challenging longstanding assumptions about Christianity.

"How do you know that God exists?  Or that the God of the Bible is the only god?"

"How do you know the Bible is completely true?  What makes it so special?  Plenty of cultures throughout history, around the globe, have created their own analogies, myths, and superstitions about how and why the world works the way it does."

"Isn't it awfully convenient for you to say we shouldn't do something, even when we want to, just because a book of Jewish mythology says so?"

Actually, it's not like any of these are new questions.  Nobody's asking anything today that hasn't been asked since Satan tempted Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.  What's different about today's questions, however, is that cultural tradition doesn't suffice as an answer anymore.  In the minds and souls of many Americans today, the Christianity that has been part-and-parcel of Americana since Pilgrims set foot in New England no longer is sufficient proof for the Bible's validity.

That's not to say that the Gospel has become irrelevant.  Or that Christ isn't as powerful as He used to be.  Or that God really can be Whomever we want to imagine Him as being.  The orthodox truth of God that has existed and been believed by angels since before the world was created is the same truth in which I believe today.

Evangelicals like me simply can't expect anybody else to take that at face value anymore.

Not that I haven't entertained doubts in my own mind.  After all, I'm not unaware of how bizarre much of the Bible sounds to people who don't believe it.  Six days to create the universe?  A flood that covered every inch of the globe?  Shouting until a city's fortifications were obliterated by some unseen force?  An immaculate conception?  Feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and two fish?  Resurrection from the dead?

Come on!

How do I know that I'm not making some massive, foolish mistake by living my life according to some ancient proverbs instead of my own intuition and emotions?  Didn't God make me as a person capable of independent thought?  A lot of those proverbs are found in the literature of other cultures, by the way.  What makes them so special just because they're in the Bible?

And don't tell me that I won't understand about the Bible unless some event like being "saved" through a "working" of some invisible being called the "Holy Spirit" takes place in my soul.  We are an enlightened, educated, and scientific society.  We need proofs, validations, and empirical evidence.  Otherwise, your word is as good as anybody else's.  Merely an opinion.  Which means you're entitled to your opinion, just as I'm entitled to mine.  Everything's relative, and the only absolute is the individual; the self.  Which means I shouldn't have to change my lifestyle to accommodate your beliefs.

Sound like a lot of the push-back evangelicals are receiving by society at large today?

Frankly, to a certain degree, it's all a fair argument.  Little of Christianity makes sense if you take its theology's linchpin out of the picture.  And that Linchpin is Christ.  And even with Jesus, plenty of secular scholars, along with other world religions, acknowledge that He existed, and walked on this planet, and did good stuff for humanity.  It's His divine nature as the Son of God that skeptics can't embrace.  There is no literal, physical proof that Christ is a member of the Trinity.  Even the "Trinity," as God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a concept whose very name is never mentioned in the Bible.

So, how do I know the Bible is true?  That God is Truth?  And that Christ is Truth incarnate?  How do I know that believers through the past two millennia who've been killed for their faith haven't been gravely mistaken?  How do I know that God hears my prayers, and that He answers them?  How do I know that Heaven is where my soul will go when I die?

Again, these are just some of the doubts, questions, fears, and aspersions that have bedeviled almost everybody who has ever heard the Gospel of Christ.  They represent just a smattering of the questions for which society wants concrete proofs, so that when evangelicals advocate for heterosexual marriage, or life in the womb, or even morality in the media, we people of faith have what society at large can accept as a legitimate reason for why it should listen to us anymore.

I could provide a listing of Bible verses to try and explain why I believe that eternal truth resides in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But none of it will mean anything to anybody who doesn't want to accept them as facts.

So I'll just say this.  Truth is that which honors God.  Don't believe it?  Well, even unbelief can honor God, because His Word teaches that without the Holy Spirit revealing His truth to us, none of us will truly believe it.  We might acculturate to it, like generations of Americans did before us, but that's not the same as accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior.  And maybe one of the unconventional truths about the Bible is that it teaches that the Gospel isn't for everybody.  Nobody can be forced into it, nobody can be chided into it, or guilted into it.  God has created belief and truth to exist whether you want it or not.

Not everybody will be saved.  Not everybody will believe in Christ.  Not everybody will tolerate the Gospel.  In fact, the Bible teaches that most people will not want to hear that heterosexual marriage is the only type of marriage that honors God.  Most people won't really care about protecting life in the womb, either, or whether a young female singer gyrates on a TV show watched by youngsters.  People will intentionally fly planes into office buildings.  People will kill other people simply because of the color of their skin.  People will hate, castigate, and fornicate with apparent impunity.  And some of them will claim the name of Christ.

But the Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  The Fruit isn't literally edible, but it is a lifestyle given by the Holy Spirit to everybody who accepts Christ as the Lord of their life.  And to the degree that these Fruit - they're a set - can be seen in my life, and in the lives of everybody else who professes faith in Christ, then you will know that we are His disciples.

You still may not want to believe that what we believe is the truth.

And you'd be in good company.  After all, the powerful Roman prefect, Pilate, didn't, either.

Single Males Parent Newest Surrogacy Market

This isn’t Sleepless in Seattle.

Or Finding Nemo.

Or even Adam Sandler’s forgettable rent-a-kid schtick in Big Daddy.

Did you know that single males searching for paternity has become the newest trend?  Yup.  A growing number of single men today are actively and intentionally pursuing fatherhood without a wife.  They’re paying surrogacy clinics upwards of $165,000 to have a child for themselves.

Granted, the number of men who can afford such prices is small, and the number of single men so determined to be a single dad smaller still.  Last year, the total number of single male clients served by California’s most prominent for-profit surrogacy center was 25.  But that number is trending upwards.

To a certain degree, isn’t it hard to understand why anybody would pursue single parenthood?  Many single parents who have been placed in the situation through divorce or the death of a spouse would welcome another opportunity to restore their parental partnership; not only for the sake of their children, but also for their own sanity!  Perhaps it’s been easier adjusting to the phenomenon of single women, in their rush to beat their biological clocks, taking the plunge into single parenting, even if it still strikes us as a bit unnatural.  But single men?

Okay, in answer to the likely question-in-answer-to-a-question:  Yes, according to the Associated Press, many single men who arrange for having children out of wedlock are gay, with no intention of marrying the mother of their children.  They’re paying gestational surrogates to have children for them, which they then raise with the help of nannies, au pairs, and extended family members.

Make Room For SoloDaddy?

By now, for us evangelicals, a number of red flags are popping up all over the place.  Single?  Gay?  Men?  Deeply desiring offspring?  With surrogates?  For $100,00 or more?  Plus professional childcare givers?

If you’re going to spend that kind of money, regardless of your sexual orientation, what about adoption?  And, yeah, about that sexual orientation:  Aside from the moral considerations, even if you found a partner with whom you could share parental duties, that partner is going to be the same gender as you.  What about having parents of two different genders?  A “dad” and a “mom?”  Single women becoming mothers at least has the element of anatomical biology going for it.  But now, men?

Yes, fatherhood can be a wonderful thing, but at what point has parenting become just another hobby for some people?   Just another pursuit, or trophy, or asset?  Or just another way to try and fill a void in your life?

"I was in an adoption pool for a year and half, didn't get any calls and got bummed about the whole experience," a single male executive in Seattle explained, regarding his decision to create his own child via a surrogate.  "I just wanted to be a dad.  Time was not on my side, and I didn't have the luxury of waiting for an ideal mate."

So now he has twin girls whom he’s raising with the help of a full-time nanny.

We can point to many examples of how the traditional, Biblical model of the family has been changing here in North America.   Divorce, of course, is a big one.  Then there’s cohabitation, and a widespread acceptance of pre-marital sex, both of which are merely alternative forms of adultery.  Increasingly, homosexuality is demanding more attention in our national dialog.  Its prevalence makes it appear to play a greater role in the changing dynamics of the family than perhaps it deserves, since it’s still a relatively small number of people who claim same-sex attraction.  And while over 1,000 babies a year are now born in America via surrogacy, the percentage being born for gay men and women, statistically speaking, represents a tiny fraction.

For now.

As trends go, this one shows no sign of going away, especially as medical technology continues to advance, and North America’s broad social stigmas of single parenting in general and gay parenting in particular continue to recede.  As evangelicals, it might seem easiest to simply ignore the reality of it all.  But how can we do that, especially since the kids created by and raised in such families will soon be matriculating into our voting booths?

Daddy Dearest

It’s not just a question of wealthy homosexuals being able to afford the procedure, and agencies being founded across the country to cater to demand.  And it’s not a question of being able to wallow in a stealthy form of bigotry, where we smile on the outside, and rip apart their living arrangements with our gossip.  Yes, it’s beginning to feel like the sturdiest pillars of society are beginning to crumble all around us, but even in all of this, we're still to model the Fruit of the Spirit.  It may not seem natural to us, but God's wisdom and plans are not ours.

Meanwhile, for many evangelical singles who’ve never been a parent, the joy of holding one's newborn child, or even the weariness of sleepless nights, may seem somewhat abstract.  But wanting children is a human trait.  It is more than biological, or even emotional, or sexual.  Should we really be surprised that homosexuals still want to be parents?  It’s also a bit ironic, considering the likelihood that, as politically liberal as many gays are, they will tolerate abortion, although it denies so many people what a small but growing number of gays so deeply want.

And there’s another thing, for single Christ-followers who so deeply want to be a parent:  We look at the contrivances people like gay men are making for their parenthood, and part of us undoubtedly thinks, “sometimes, we can't get everything we want.”  Yet we can all be selfish. Impatient.  We can rationalize away stuff we really want and our methods for obtaining them.

If you are agonizing over the reality that you are single, that time appears to be running out, and that you may not ever become a real, genuine parent, perhaps even here, you who are in Christ can find some comfort. After all, can’t the same Fruit of the Spirit we’ll need to address the phenomenon of single gay parenting in our society be the same Fruit to provide you with what you need to endure a delay – or even denial – of something you so dearly want that could be so right?

As good a thing as parenthood is, following God is even better.

Adopting Embryos a Fix for IVF Waste?

Stretch marks.

They're what women have after they give birth.

But today, they're like what I feel creasing across my brain.  At least it's all still pregnancy-related.  Last week, I found an Associated Press article about the trend of gay men becoming single fathers through surrogacy, and then I read an article on World magazine today about a Minnesota couple who've adopted two children.  And they were embryos.

Currently, one of the adopted embryos - a girl - is growing inside Dr. Susan Lim, age 41, while the other one, unfortunately, has been lost.  They expect their new daughter to be born around Christmastime.

Some gift, right?

Now, obviously, the story about single gay men hiring surrogacy agencies to provide them with children adds complexity to the moral conundrum of gay couples parenting children.  Goodness - in how many ways does such a scenario compromise God's Biblical standards for families?  At least, when gay couples adopt, it could be argued that taking a child out of foster care may have some merit.  When gay couples use a surrogate to create children, it could be argued that at least having two parents may be better than one.  But when a single gay guy intentionally, deliberately pays upwards of a whopping $160,000 for a child born of a surrogate?  I simply have a hard time seeing any benefit whatsoever to such an arrangement.

Except to the surrogacy agency, of course, which makes out like a bandit.

It's politically unpopular to say, but children are best born and raised in a family comprised of a mommy and a daddy who are married to each other.

Paul and Susan Lim

Which brings me to the happily married heterosexual couple in Minnesota who've adopted two embryos.  Adopted!  Embryos!  Two of them!  Talk about your "frozen chosen."

I'm sorry - but am I the world's most ignorant single male Christian?  Because, initially, I found the concept wholly bizarre.

Perhaps, being a single male, I've never been compelled to contemplate parenthood beyond the realization that having four nephews and one niece is far less work than having four sons and one daughter.  I've never personally experienced what I'm told can be an excruciating longing to be a parent.  That would explain why in vitro fertilization has been a relatively foreign concept to me.  Having said that, however, I will also say that the whole idea of medically implanting eggs, sperm, or eggs and sperm into a uterus strikes me as being a biological contrivance.  Isn't it a form of "playing God?"  If God doesn't provide fertility, isn't that some sort of sovereign message from Him?  It's no sin or crime if a husband and wife cannot conceive.  And there are more than biological reasons for why gays cannot conceive.

Nevertheless, I've had Christian friends pay thousands and thousands of dollars for the in vitro fertilization process, and when their embryos died, they counted them as children who've gone on to Heaven.  They rationalized their pursuit as the benefit of God's providential gifting of the world's medical community and its ability to devise artificial pregnancy solutions.  It's like cancer treatments, or curing blood disorders, or artificial limbs:  medical advances are expressions of God's mercy and grace, they say.  And normally, I agree.

Except when it comes to creating life.  Something about it sounds like trying to override God's sovereign authority over that "secret place" in which we're all made, and only He can see.

Maybe God doesn't want you to achieve a family by conventional conception, but there's usually adoption available, representing not only the ability to become a parent, but also Christ's choosing of His sanctified children.  If adoption isn't something an infertile couple wants to pursue, might it be because biological parenthood has become an idol to them?  People earnestly desire plenty of lesser things than offspring they can call their own.  And considering how much money is involved with in vitro fertilization, how much more expensive can adoption be these days?

But even my embrace of adoption as a highly worthy alternative to procreation couldn't blunt my reaction to the World story.  Adopting embryos?  Really?

Either I've gotta get out more, or this truly represents an overlooked niche in the pro-life agenda.  The way World has framed its story, I feel like like I'm the only person who's never heard of embryo adoption.

According to some quick research, over 1.7 million embryos created for in vitro fertilization, known in the fertility trade as "IVF," have already been thrown away in Britain since the science became widespread there in 1991.  About 800,000 are in storage, like those miniature test tube babies sitting on sterile racks somewhere in some science fiction flick, waiting for incubation like moths in a cocoon.

In the United States, over 400,000 embryos are in storage, about half the number than in more socially-liberal Britain.

That just sounds gross, and borderline pathological.  Illegal, even.  But it is legal, and increasingly, fraught with ethical dilemmas.  Even the normally-liberal Mother Jones magazine has explored the moral anguish of parents with embryonic offspring "sitting on ice" - sometimes, they don't know where.  At least, here in the United States, the estimates are that only two percent of the 400,000 embryos in storage are ever simply thrown out in any given year.

But what comfort is that?  If any embryo is a tiny life, whether it's inside the womb, or in a test tube in a freezer, hasn't our sphere of lives requiring protection just been multiplied?  How many of these "test tube babies" could we call orphans?  One article I read stated that some fertility clinics don't keep accurate databases of their donor parents.  Who's responsible for what some people seem to be treating as procreative collateral damage?  The byproduct of overzealous paternalism - both literally, and figuratively?

And why aren't we spending on embryo advocacy in amounts even remotely similar to the amount of energy, money, prayer, and counseling we expend on crisis pregnancies?  Is it because IVF is so widely accepted in our evangelical community?

In the Lims' case, both Mr. and Mrs. are medical doctors, which gives them both a professional insight on the IVF phenomena, as well as the financial resources to pursue such an unconventional adoption.  For the rest of us, however, who have neither, what is there to do?

Simply wait, like all of those frozen embryos, until there's some sort of thaw in our ability to comprehend the very real reality that, even though science may allow us to do some things, common sense may still tell us they're unwise?

If life is as precious as we pro-lifers claim it to be, might protecting it include recognizing its basic,
God-given limits?

See what I mean by stretch marks?

Absurd Gripes or Valid Beliefs?

They're the "Five Most Absurd, Self-Pitying Gripes Of the Christian Right."

At least, according to Salon.com and Alternet.org, two liberal webzines that take consistent delight in mocking evangelical Americans.  The list represents yet another intentionally confrontational diatribe by left-wing writer Amanda Marcotte.  In fact, such predictability almost makes Marcotte's list insignificant.  Ho-hum.

Except... sometimes, we as a cohort don't advance the most Biblical or factual narratives in the public square, and lists like these can actually be useful to help us get back on-track with being legitimate salt and light in our culture.  At other times, however, the frustration that differently-faithed people direct at evangelicals exists purely because we believe different things that are diametrically opposed to each other.  And yes, everybody has faith in something, whether it's faith in themselves, or in government, or karma, the "greater good," or any deity other than God.

Sometimes, we will need to agree to disagree, despite our differences.  We live in a democratic republic, ostensibly, where we all have the right to voice our opinions.  In this case, determining where we truly differ will depend on how absurd this list of supposed absurdities is.

And what are these "most absurd, self-pitying gripes?"

1. First on the list is the liberal claim that it's absurd for evangelicals to think gay-conversion therapy works, absurd for us to allow it to be conducted upon minors, and absurd that we should be upset that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has banned it in his state.
2. Second, liberals say it's absurd for evangelicals to oppose governmental mandates for insurance coverage of objectionable contraceptive procedures.
3. Third, they say it's absurd for evangelicals to dislike using "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."
4. Fourth, they say it's absurd for evangelicals to pout over the Supreme Court's ban on student-led or teacher-led prayer.
5. And fifth, they say it's absurd for evangelicals to oppose gay marriage.

Which, actually, puts Salon and Alternet in a weird position themselves, for, in effect, equating issues as serious as gay marriage and gay-conversion therapy with something as relatively trivial as whether or not people say "Happy Holidays."  The odd bedfellows in this list cast a serious question regarding its overall legitimacy.  The "absurdity" really swings so far between "Merry Christmas" and gender identity within the span of five bullet points?  Perhaps a better way of looking at this list is that it reveals the true motive in producing such a list in the first place:  yet another way to promote sexual relativism.

It's the same message from the liberal media that we've been getting for years, only with marginally different packaging.

Besides, Christie's ban of gay-conversion therapy by licensed clinicians may be an indictment against Christianity, but it's also anti-Muslim.  How's that for irony?  The big deal about this law, and California's before it, involves what appears to be state encroachment on federally-protected religious rights.  Having said that, however, considering the weak evidence of gay-conversion therapy's success rate, Christie's ban is probably no great loss - or gain - in the debate over nature v. nurture when it comes to homosexuality, or a person's personal desire to be freed from, well, the desire.  The recent disbanding of Exodus International, the former ex-gay ministry, because of the way homosexuality has been improperly addressed in the evangelical community kinda pulled the rug out from under Christie's ban anyway.

If liberals bothered to look beyond the press releases of a few ossified lobbying groups and listened to the conversations Bible-believing Christians are having with how we can better apply Christ's truth to the homosexual debate, they'd see that it's only the people who don't care what we believe who want us to care about what they believe.

Right?

Second, to belittle any American's religious convictions about something as important as procreation - or the prevention of it - betrays a flimsy understanding of the Bill of Rights.  If you own a business, shouldn't you have the right to choose what benefits you're paying to provide your employees, particularly if the purpose of the proposed "benefit" offends your faith?  Cheap shots do not a well-founded argument make, and there are people on both sides of the political aisle, by the way, who oppose abortion - what various forms of contraception can mimic - in any form.

On the third complaint, meanwhile, liberals may have a point.  We Christians need to concede that Christmas isn't the only holiday that falls on or near the end of December.  There's New Year's, for one; both the eve, and the day.  And there's Hanukkah.  Sometimes even Ramadan, although not every year, since the dates for Ramadan shift in accordance with the Islamic calendar, which has fewer days than ours does.  For government offices and retailers, it's easier and cheaper to just throw everybody into the same holiday pot, and what self-respecting right-winger doesn't like saving money?  Plus, it's not like America's cultural Christians really celebrate the true meaning of Christmas anymore, anyway.

So, chalk one up for the liberals.  Just don't get mad when I wish you knew how to have a "Merry Christmas."

The whole thing about prayer in schools is another area where evangelicals probably need to keep their knickers from getting in a twist.  What Christ-follower would want their children exposed to prayers to Mary, or Mohammad, or Allah, or any pope, saint, or religious figure other than the God of the Bible?  Freedom works more than one way - and frankly, I want the freedom to not have to hear a prayer to a deity in which I don't believe.  Besides, most schools don't forbid kids from praying silently before a test, or for a Bible club to meet as an extracurricular group.  Considering how pluralistic post-Christian America is, we evangelicals should tone down the squawking over public prayer in schools.  We might not like it if we get it. 

Mocking the conservative position on gay marriage, however, since the concept represents such a significant cultural shift, virtually betrays an ignorance by liberals about the role of religious faith in a person's life.  Suffice it to say that marriage isn't even a political or governmental institution; it is an institution created by God for His people.  The fact that heathens are even allowed to co-opt it for themselves comes from the grace God's people have displayed in allowing governments to use marriage as the convenient regulator for societies that God knew it would be.  If we evangelicals could pragmatically revoke any government's unwritten franchise on marriage, we should.  But we can't, so we argue for its integrity instead.

Oh - and heterosexual marriage isn't championed just by Republicans and evangelicals.  Catholic Democrats tend to support it, too.

So, two out of five.  And that last one, gay marriage, really doesn't belong with the rest, so take it out, and you've got two out of four.  Fifty percent.

Half of your complaints are valid, left-wingers.  See?  We're not as absurd or self-pitying as you want to think we are.

Learning from Manning's Gender Plea

You know what they say:

"Life is a lifelong learning experience."

Well, of all the things I'm learning - or not, as the case may be, I'm learning why some secular humanists so easily peg us evangelicals as bigots.  I'm realizing it's not just because some secular humanists may have predispositions towards bigotry themselves, which makes them hostile to people who don't share their views.  They could also be pegging us evangelicals as bigots because we may not be very willing to allow the Fruit of the Spirit to glorify God in our lives.  You know:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Instead, isn't it a lot easier for us to just blast sinners with a pronouncement of their guilt, and go about our day?

Some evangelicals think we should live our lives the way Christ lived a couple of hours of His - throwing the merchants out of the temple.  Or when He rebuked the Pharisees with those cool one-liners like "you brood of vipers."  We gloss over the fact that when Christ did both of those things, He was primarily addressing the people we'd consider to be the religious professionals of His day - the guys selling animals for templegoers to use as sacrificial offerings, or the keepers of the Jewish law.

Meanwhile, when Christ interacted with people he didn't expect to know any better, He mostly felt sorry for them.

That's not to say that we should not speak the truth, but we're to speak it in love.  It's not to say that we should never get angry, either.  But in our anger, we should not sin.

Yet how many of us this morning, when news was breaking about Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning and his desire to change genders, initially rolled our eyes and muttered something about his being some sort of weirdo freak?  I know I did.

Not only has he just been found guilty and sentenced to Leavenworth for providing confidential military material to an unauthorized agent, but now his lawyer is on NBC's Today show reading a letter from Manning in which he claims, "I am Chelsea Manning.  I am female."

Can this case get any more bizarre?

The More Things Change

The BBC has already gone over transcripts from Manning's trial and deduced that he likely suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome.  Just look at his upper lip, they say - it's all smooth, just like a fetal alcohol baby's.  Manning himself professed to having suffered doubts about his masculinity throughout his life, and has said that he went into the military so it would make a man out of him.  After all, "be all that you can be" used to be the Army's marketing slogan.

If I was any more of a bigoted Christian than some left-wingers will inevitably peg me as being, I could continue making quite a funny joke out of it all.  But it wouldn't really be funny, would it?

It's all mostly sad.

Sad, because we're learning just how miserable life was in the Manning household.  Sad, because Manning squandered what could have been a promising military career with retirement benefits on a frustrated campaign for relevance.  Sad, because regardless of what he thinks, he's going to be Target Number One behind bars.  Does he think his future fellow prisoners don't watch the news?

And when he gets out, which legal experts say could be in seven years, what kind of life is he going to have?  Granted, the way our society's mores and tolerances are rapidly expanding, in seven years, his desired gender makeover may be hardly worth a raised eyebrow.  But seven years can be a long time.  And no matter what may take place between now and then, we know that at least one thing isn't going to change.

And that's God.

If you don't believe that the Bible is God's holy and inspired Word, then your eyes are fixin' to glaze over.  But I believe that, according to Jeremiah 1:5, God knew us before we were created in the womb.  According to Psalm 139, God had a set design for each of us, and it stands to reason that gender identity represents an integral part of that design.  It's in our DNA.

Of course, some people are born with differences that we consider to be anomalies.  We call them "birth defects," and they range from things like cystic fibrosis to sickle cell anemia to fetal alcohol syndrome.  To explain - and justify - their unusual sexual feelings, people who believe they are transgendered generally rely upon this reality that not everybody is born the same.

Vocabulary Lesson

It is at this point where many of us who doubt the legitimacy of transgenderism draw a line and say, "you're just trying to deny biology."  But it's not that simple.  There's actually a legitimate medical condition called "Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis" (MGD) in which an infant is born with two different gonads, meaning their sexual differentiation is ambiguous.  We commonly call it "hermaphroditism."  Surgery can remove the biological ambiguity, but the infant's parents need to decide, based on medical expediency, whether that surgery will identify their child as a male or female.  It is rare, but it does happen.  And experts say it can play a role in sexual confusion later in life, particularly for patients who've been differentiated as males.

Of course, mine is a flagrant oversimplification of the condition, but I'm not a doctor, and you're probably not a medical student.  Suffice it to say that in some cases, transgenderism may in fact have a basis in biological factors about which we may not be aware.  That alone should be enough caution for us to treat with care those people so exasperated with their sexuality that they're willing to publicly announce their transgender condition.  Undoubtedly, Manning's letter was not penned in a casual, flippant manner.  So, even though he may not want our pity, we can feel sorry for him, but we shouldn't make fun of him.

Having said that, part of me wonders if the whole transgender phenomenon doesn't actually belittle those people who suffered MGD as an infant.  Many of us are working hard to be so politically correct all the time, but might people claiming a transgendered state be encroaching on what may be intrinsic to another person's biological heritage?  In other words, for transgendered people who are making their changes based more on emotion than a surgery, might they be expressing a form of disrespect to those people who needed a medical procure to dictate their sex?

Might it be that various factors other than mis-assigned sex organs are convincing transgendered people of their need to change?  Emotions, perhaps, or a backlash against increasingly dysfunctional family units?  It's Biblically incorrect to say that God "made" you that way, since we all have our sins with which we struggle.  It's politically incorrect to suggest that sexual roles and expectations are anything more than cultural contrivances.  It's who's inside that counts, right?  However, finding who's inside is leaving a lot open to interpretation.  Indeed, being transgendered is itself a contentious condition in the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender community, with all sorts of variant nomenclatures, such as pansexual, polysexual, and intersexual.  There's a whole new vocabulary being invented to accommodate a perceived spectrum of gender identities.

Meanwhile, the Bible explicitly states that God created "male" and "female."  Period.  It's so blunt, it's hard to ignore.  Or, for many, to accept.

Convenient Truths

Again, if you do not believe the Bible teaches God's truth, then you're going to say that the Bible is wrong.  You're going to assert that since God allows babies to be born with MGD, and that since I believe God forms babies in their mother's womb, that I'm mistaken in believing God does everything perfectly.  According to your view, God does make mistakes.  Which would mean that only we humans can fix mistakes, or that it's up to us to do what we want with the reality we discover.

Yours would be the classic narcissistic worldview, and it would fit conveniently into modern culture's narrative of there being no absolutes.  There aren't just men and women.  There are more than two categories.  Which would mean that people like me who obstinately maintain that God made male and female only, that He doesn't make mistakes, and that somehow, a child being born with MGD fits into God's sovereign plan for His glory, are the stupid ones.  Bigoted, even, since we refuse to bow in the face of your humanistic logic.

This is why we believers in Christ need to live in and with the Fruit of the Spirit.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  Isn't it usually true that people who are not convinced of their beliefs generally lash out at people who challenge them on their beliefs?  Doesn't it take something a bit extra - miraculous, even - to restrain yourself when people claim your worldview is ridiculous?  God gives people like me the Holy Spirit to help us model its Fruit - and they come as a set, not piecemeal.  That's why, when Bradley Manning asked us to now call him "Chelsea" this morning, I had to repent of my spontaneous, unkind reaction.

Yes, I believe that God is perfect, right, and just.  I believe that there is some good - a good that we may not see - when He allows somebody to be born with MGD, or any other birth defect.  I believe the Bible teaches that His glory should be our paramount desire, not our own comfort, or our own ability to understand everything that happens to us.  I also believe that all of us are sinners, and that daily, we all sin.  But I believe that there is only one sin that will eternally separate us from God, and that sin is denying what the Holy Spirit teaches us about Jesus:  that He is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing in Him, we have eternal life in His name.

For those of us who trust in Christ, He gives us grace to encourage us in His truth, and comfort us when others don't.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Here in Texas, I have an unsaved, non-religious friend who recently announced that he has a new name and a new gender.  He has started a hormonal treatment and hopes to one day undergo surgery to turn one set of sexual organs into another.

I know this person.  I've had dinner with him many times.  I've been in his home, ridden in cars with him, talked with him about his job and his family, and helped encourage him when his father underwent a sudden heart surgery.  He's clever, warm, witty, caring, industrious, intelligent, and ambitious.  And I'm struggling with changing my referencing pronoun for him from masculine to feminine, like he'd like all of us to do.

I've already told him that while I don't believe God makes mistakes, I also don't believe God puts people in my life for me to simply crush under my heel when they make decisions with which I can't agree.  So, if we can continue to maintain a friendship despite our disagreements, I'm willing to try.

It's not easy, and it's not something many evangelicals would probably do, or with which they'd agree.  Mock him, some would retort, perhaps doing it themselves.  Cut him loose; don't bother trying to be friends with such a sinner.

That's another thing I'm learning about life:  the Fruit of the Spirit can be exercised both when you and your acquaintances are in agreement, and when you aren't.

Letting X Mark Us Gen-X'ers

We're not slackers.

Are we?

My generation, Generation X, was born roughly between 1961 and 1981, depending on who's doing the categorizing.  There are roughly 80 million of us here in the United States, and as Sara Scribner wrote for Salon last week, the oldest of our cohort have hit a milestone, with the rest of us soon to follow, and hardly anybody's noticed.

We've entered what's traditionally considered to be middle age, where we've supposedly given up our younger ambitions and overcome the naivete that told us only our ambitions could contain us.  The Boomers before us cried out in agony when they entered middle age, but I guess we Gen-X'ers have been too busy trying to keep our heads above water to throw ourselves a pity party.

We're the most educated generation the United States has ever produced, but we're earning less than our parents did.  We mask it with our two-income families, and for us whites, our smaller family sizes.  We've been hit with the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, the technology bust around the turn of the millennium, the mortgage meltdown, offshoring, downsizing, and the lingering effects of our Great Recession.

The divorce rate skyrocketed when we were kids, and in return, many of us have become helicopter parents, afraid to let our own kids out of what we think is our protective oversight.  Those of us with cable in our homes witnessed the invention of music videos.  Heavy metal, punk rock, grunge, rap, and hip-hop were all invented while we were growing up.

AIDS?  Yup - we were kids when what we were told was a gay disease exploded onto the scene.  You hardly hear anything about it today, but I remember when people like Rock Hudson died of it, and Elizabeth Taylor set up a foundation to fight it.  Kids today don't even know who those two iconic people were.

In her article, Scribner says that we've been called "slackers" because we haven't been able to build upon the socioeconomic legacy of the celebrated Boomers.  We're also sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennnials, those new twentysomethings who've been raised on the Internet and cell phones, creating the illusion that they're sophisticated enough to be the new trendsetters for our brave new wireless world.  Why haven't we been out there, creating our own mark on the world?  After all, almost everything that's happened during our time on this planet has basically happened to us, not because of us.

Does Gen-X stand for "generation reflex?"

"Downward mobility is a hallmark of this generation," writer and fellow Gen-X'er Neal Pollack tells Scribner.  "I just feel like we’re not going to pull ourselves out of the hole.  But what can you do?  We don’t have that security – the illusion of knowing that everything was going to be all right.  But Gen X always had that feeling that everything wasn’t going to be all right.”

Well, we might have had it, years ago, when we were very young.  When our parents and schoolteachers were telling us that we could do or be anything we wanted.  I often still hear parents and teachers spouting that nonsense - and yes, it is nonsense.  We Gen-X'ers are living proof.  Not everybody is going to be President of the United States.  And hardly anybody with common sense even wants to be.  Not everybody is going to be a glamorous lawyer like we saw on LA Law.  True love only comes true for everybody when you're all sailing on the Love Boat.  Racial harmony is only easy on Diff'rent Strokes.  The cannibalizing of jobs by globalization can only be reversed in the last few minutes of Mr. Mom.  Even flying on a commercial jetliner is only entertaining these days on Airplane!

Reality isn't a sitcom, or the reality shows on which Millennials have had the misfortune of growing up.  But things aren't all bad.  Many conservatives don't like President Obama's politics, and his presidency hardly signals an end to racism in our country, but nobody can deny the breakthrough in race relations we achieved by voting a black man into the Oval Office twice.

Medical technology has advanced significantly since the early 60's, as has automobile safety, and even the state of our ecology here in the United States.

I remember when environmentalism was first championed in our public schools in the early 1970's, and the long gas lines my parents had to sit through in the mid-70's.  Granted, much of my home state, New York, is a Superfund site today, thanks to generations of industrial pollution that contaminated fields and waterways, before our country's manufacturing output shifted to Majority World countries, where people even more desperate for jobs than we are have no position to complain about how their local ecosystems are being ruined for our benefit.

Indeed, our world is much smaller today, with international travel an affordable luxury in which many people around our planet can participate, even if safety concerns have made flying a miserable chore.  9-11 made us Americans more aware of our position in the world, even if it also distorted our own preoccupation on security.  Having Millennials Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, not to mention Gen-X'er Julian Assange, exposing the ways America's government is apparently using our security fears against us helps show that global mobility, just like everything else, has its risks and rewards.

Television journalist Tom Brokaw famously categorized the parents of Boomers as the "Greatest Generation," since they'd survived two catastrophic world wars and turned around to build the most rapid expansion of our economy in America's history.  Of course, the Greatest Generation created some major problems with which we Gen-X'ers are having to grapple today, such as a rapidly-deployed suburban infrastructure that seems to be aging much more poorly than its urban forebears, an unwieldy and costly military industrial complex, an increasingly unaffordable civil service pension system, and a Social Security Administration that has been woefully under-funded since at least 1982.

Are we Gen-X'ers "slackers" for not aggressively solving all of these problems that we've inherited?  Might it be that we're the first generation that is getting stuck with the task of paying the bills of preceding generations whose lifestyles and expectations were not as affordable as they thought they were?  How long have some of these socioeconomic cans been kicked down the road by white flight, the ubiquity of divorce, unrestrained welfare programming, unresolved issues from the first Gulf War, an unwillingness to recognize the negative impacts of new media and pop culture's evolution, and even the Jesus Movement, which led to trends within almost all American churches that split congregations and further splintered the Body of Christ?

Maybe we won't earn as much as our parents did.  Maybe there will be no such thing as Social Security when we get to retirement age - sometime in our late 70's, at the earliest.  Maybe marriage and family and employment and military service and our transportation network - and everything else - will look completely different - and not even as good as they do today - as our generation transitions off of this mortal coil.

But hey - even if we are now entering middle-age, at least it's middle age, and not old age!  As long as we have today, we're to encourage each other.  "We have come to share in Christ," says the author of Hebrews, "if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first."

After all, despite everything else, God is the same today, and at this precise moment, as He was when you were born, when your parents were born, when our country was founded, and when He created the world.  And the more things may change, the more He'll remain the same.

In Greek, the letter Chi is the first letter of Χριστός, which is translated in English as "Christ," Whose symbol is the letter "X."  We can hardly be slackers if He would be the "X" for which our generation's "X" stands.

Copts Role in Egypt's Turmoil

No more doubt.

Violence that has rocked most of Egypt for weeks now reportedly escalated to include attacks on the country's Christian minority several days ago.  But reports were sketchy, anecdotal, and substantiated mostly by social media, which isn't the most authoritative source for anything.

However, now that the press has ventured into neighborhoods and communities where churches have been burned and Christians murdered, the unconfirmed reports are being confirmed.  And they're painting an ugly picture of Islam's extremists.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, at least 47 churches and monasteries have been set afire, looted, or otherwise attacked by Muslims since August 14.  Granted, although by evangelical standards, the Christian Science religion is itself generally considered to be a cult, its media arm, the Christian Science Monitor, boasts a robust journalistic pedigree, particularly for international news.  It tends to be less sensationalistic than some of its tabloid media brethren, so as long as it's not a theological debate, its reporting can be considered reliable.

If not downright sobering.

It's also worth noting that the term "Christian" can be both general and specific when defining Egyptians who are not Muslim.  Egypt's cultural Christians are called "Copts," as in Coptic Christians.  They make up only ten percent of the population, and are understandably proud of their legacy of endurance through centuries of Islamic dominance.  Some Copts appear to be little more than Roman Catholics who, thanks to Christianity's long presence in Egypt, bristle at an association with the comparatively younger, European papacy in Italy.  These Copts even have their own pope.  Other Copts are more Protestant in their theology, even if many of them appear beholden to a more traditional, ritualistic, and "Eastern Orthodox" aesthetic than we American evangelicals would tolerate in our flavor of Christianity.  A few American denominations have a presence in Egypt, such as the Assemblies of God, but they likely total no more than 30,000 adherents combined.

Nevertheless, regardless of Coptic doctrinal stances on things like redemption, salvation, the lordship of Christ, and even icons and praying to saints, the imminent fact remains that freedom of religion is under fire in Egypt, and that is what should sober us all.

So far, the death toll stands at seven Egyptian Christians who've been killed directly because of their faith.  Homes and businesses owned by Copts were marked with paint during the overthrow of Muslim-Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi, making them easier to identify when the rioting Muslims obviously expected to erupt erupted.  Reporters viewing the destruction can still see the red or black graffiti under the soot in some towns.

In at least one town, the community's local mosque broadcast racist propaganda against Christians and Jews from its loudspeakers to incite Muslims into a rage.  Copts told reporters how unreal it was to watch their (former) neighbors, business associates, and friends turn and torch their homes and businesses.

Sounds like a repeat from Nazi Germany, doesn't it?

Conservative webzine The Blaze has compiled a list of Christian buildings that have been burned, along with photos purportedly of the identified sites, that mirrors a listing that is being updated by the Maspero Youth Union on its Facebook page.  The more liberal-leaning NPR is reporting that the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a human rights group, has documented even more attacks than the Christian Science Monitor:  44 churches, eight Christian schools, two Christian charities, and at least one Christian orphanage.  Britain's Daily Mail claims six Franciscan nuns were captured and paraded like prisoners of war after their school was pillaged in suburban Cairo.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the major mainline media outlets have either remained mum about the attacks on Egypt's Coptic minority, or have only referenced the persecution in passing.  It is eerily reminiscent of the mainstream media's self-imposed blackout of the Kermit Gosnell story, the abortionist in Philadelphia on trial for, among other things, murdering infants born alive after botched abortions.  It took a grass-roots uprising within the pro-life community for outlets like the Washington Post to finally admit they were intentionally trying to ignore the story.

However, considering that of the nearly 900 people who've been killed in Egypt's recent violence, only seven so far have been determined to be Copts, it's easy to see why most of the media has been concentrating on the Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed.  Saturday's siege by the military on al-Fath Mosque, a prominent structure near downtown Cairo's Ramses Square, where fighters from the Muslim Brotherhood had holed up behind a barricade of chairs, provides an example.  The drama unfolded at an architecturally-significant landmark in the center of Cairo, instead of a more modest structure in a hard-to-reach area.  Hey - some stories are easier to sell than others!

And, as pundits who follow the Middle East are beginning to suggest, the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadis may actually be goading the military into killing or wounding more of them for the sheer publicity of it all.  The more they can lead the Western media into presenting the violence as an attack on true Muslims, the more sympathy they hope to engender among Westerners who are baffled by it all, and need simplistic scorecards to keep track of the upheaval.  Killing Copts and destroying their churches and private property has just been a bonus for the extremists.

Of course, it's no small thing for dozens of facilities owned by a minority religious group to be burned, looted, and otherwise vandalized.  It's no small thing for seven members of a minority religious group to be killed for their faith.  The fact that in both of these cases, the victims are Coptic Christians may help the Muslim Brotherhood build their swagger, and cultivate a greater degree of interest in Egypt's travails among America's church-going public.  Usually, when it's another minority faith suffering some sort of persecution, especially in the West, we evangelicals don't take so much notice of what's happening.  And considering how bent on blood and destruction Egypt's anarchists appear to be, perhaps we should be glad the brutality towards Copts hasn't been worse.  All things considered, it's hard to criticize the media for its lopsided reporting regarding Egypt's religious minority in favor of the violence apparently being staged by - and curiously, both against and for - the Muslim Brotherhood.

It's also worth noting that in several news accounts of the atrocities against Copts, Christians gratefully acknowledged that it was more moderate Muslims who helped pull them from burning buildings and shelter them from the vicious mobs.  Indeed, the fact that Egypt's political and religious tensions come not from Christianity but warring factions within the same faith - Islam - helps explain the very reason for all of this turmoil in such an ancient country.  It also helps portray the complexities that appear to be inbred in this conflict.

All of it is likely too much for our White House and State Department to effectively address, regardless of who would be in the Oval Office.  It does seem curious that after the billions of dollars we've been dumping into Egypt for all these years, we're now effectively barred from exercising any voice in their contentious sovereignty.

Which all points to the One Who has all of this in the proverbial palm of His hand, doesn't it?  How thankful we should be that none of this confuses Him, or gives Him anxiety.

Let us not doubt that He knows His people, among both the Copts, and even, providentially, perhaps among their current enemies.

Profiling in Context: Crime or Punishment?

Several years ago, around dusk, I was taking my usual walk through my neighborhood.

I'm a tall, overweight, bald, white male, and I was in my early 40's at the time.  I live in an older neighborhood of custom-built, single-family homes inhabited mostly by unpretentious, middle-class whites, who probably represent an even-mix between liberals, conservatives, and moderates.  And although ours is not a particularly affluent district, we were experiencing what was probably our first real crime wave.  A swath of run-down apartments near our neighborhood was rapidly turning into a Section 8 community for residents being displaced as dilapidated public housing projects in Fort Worth and Dallas were being torn down.

As I walked around a yawning curve amongst some larger homes in our neighborhood, I could hear a vehicle driving up slowly behind me, and the closer it got to me, the slower it moved.  Finally, a police car glided up alongside of me, and the officer behind the wheel, a young white male, rolled down his window.

"Everything OK?" he asked nonchalantly, but with enough authority to convey to me that he wanted me to stop walking and interact with him.  So I stopped walking.

He asked me if I lived in the neighborhood.  When I told him yes, and that I tried to walk around it often, he asked me if I had a gun with me.  Living in Texas, I didn't consider that a particularly odd question, but coming from a cop, it wasn't particularly heartwarming, either.  Did he think I was going to shoot him, or would he have simply wanted to see my permit if I was a gun owner?

"No, I don't own a gun," I replied.  "Why?"

"Well," I remember him advising me, "you never know what you'll encounter on the streets anymore.  Take it from me - times have changed, and being able to protect yourself is a good thing," or something like that.  Whatever it was he said, he was telling me that the danger we in the neighborhood had been feeling as more and more homes and cars were being broken into was real.

With that, he drove off slowly, and I continued on my walk.

Now, for any young black or Hispanic male who's been stopped and questioned by the police in a manner they'd consider to be racial in nature, perhaps my little encounter with the white cop is like comparing apples to oranges.  And that was the only time I've ever been stopped - at least when I hadn't broken any traffic laws.

But still, I was initially a bit frustrated that the cop seemed open to the possibility that I could have been up to no good.  When I reminded myself that he didn't know me from Adam, nor where I lived, and that I had no idea what crime might have just been committed nearby, for which the police were hunting a white, bald male, I realized he was just doing his job.  And actually, by the end of our encounter, I was glad that the young, white officer was willing to stop and question a guy who, like anybody else who'd have driven past me, could have more easily assumed I belonged in the neighborhood simply because I am white.

Profiling: Always A Crime?

I understand that the stop-and-frisk tactics a federal judge has just ruled unconstitutional in New York City looked far different there than what I experienced that evening here in Arlington, Texas, a bustling suburb of over 350,000 in the sun belt.  And I'm glad that the way New York implemented its stop-and-frisk program was ruled unconstitutional.  It had degenerated into a city-hall-sanctioned, racial profiling free-for-all, intentionally badgering hundreds of thousands of young minorities every year.

Yet at some point, don't we have to let the police do their job?  An op-ed in today's New York Times questions whether the ruling against stop-and-frisk will really change anything, since the authors of the piece, law professors Devon Carbado, Cheryl Harris, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, believe the judge in New York's case didn't - or couldn't - go far enough and flatly ban any form of stop-and-frisk.  At what point does a "free" society have to simply trust its police to prevent crime, respond to it, and solve it in the most Constitutionally-responsible way possible?

After all, crime today isn't the nostalgic kind, whereby grizzled old men pick locks at jewelry stores, or rambunctious teenagers grab a jar of candy from the corner store.  Nor is the gangsta culture, embraced by so many minorities for its glorification of a gritty thug aesthetic, as innocent as some of its adherents want prim-and-proper whites to believe.  Between the petty thievery and bursts of lethal ghetto violence lie increasingly robust trades in all sorts of narcotics, sexual crimes, automobile chop shops, and physical abuse.  A lot of people refuse to believe that the preponderance of these crimes are committed by black and Hispanic males, but all you have to do is watch the local news or see the photos of mugshots in crimewatch sections of local newspapers to see that it's true.

And yes, the truth hurts.

What the ruling against stop-and-frisk means is that police officers cannot simply detain and question anybody based mostly on the person's ethnicity, or without reasonable suspicion.  Of course, the term "reasonable" can be open to interpretation, but frankly, the ways we've heard cops berating minority youths they've stopped are indeed 100% unreasonable, since cops taunt them with ethnic slurs, cut them off when they're answering a question, and threaten them with further punitive measures at the precinct house.

One of the components of the stop-and-frisk ruling is that the NYPD is now required to outfit select patrol officers in select precincts with cameras clipped onto their uniforms.  When these officers equipped with these cameras hit the streets, their actions and stops are recorded, just like traffic stops are recorded by dash cams in police cars.  Of course, some police unions are already squawking about that, claiming it will inhibit police work, but the same protestations were made when dash cams were introduced, and they've actually come to be a highly effective tool to protect officers against unwarranted claims from the people they stop.

Bad Apples

Hey - even though I probably give them the benefit of the doubt more often than I should, I'm not the biggest fan of the NYPD.  When I was in college, and visiting my aunt one summer in the Big Apple, she had gone to work in Midtown, and I'd gone into "the City" with her from her apartment in Brooklyn to spend the day exploring on my own.  Towards the time she usually quit for the day, about 6:30, I was making my way through the southern end of Central Park to 59th Street, where I would then walk over to her office between Park and Lexington Avenues.  I sat down on a filthy bench, next to some dank water in a mosquito-covered pond, to take a rest.  I looked around at the huge, tall, gracious trees, listened to the rats rustling around in the underbrush behind my bench, and people-watched as office workers began traipsing along the park's winding walkways on their way home.

Over at another bench, about forty yards away, was a guy sitting by a sack of something, with bulging pockets in his coat - he was wearing a coat on this muggy, sweltering afternoon!  Why was that?  Then I realized:  every few minutes, somebody would walk by his bench, sometimes quickly sitting down, sometimes brushing by his knees, but always exchanging something and receiving something with both hands.

Duh.

"Phooey," I thought to myself, "I don't want to get involved with anything related to this."  So I got up and walked past the guy, while he was making a transaction, and then hiked up a nearby stone stairway to the street.

And behold, there was a police car, sitting right there!  With a middle-aged white officer sitting - slumped - behind the wheel.  Looking completely bored.  I walked up to the patrol car, instantly forgetting that I didn't want to get involved in the scenario I'd just witnessed, and told him about the drug dealing going on right down at the end of those steep stone steps, right over there.  I thought I was doing what an obedient citizen should be doing.

The cop glanced up at me, disdain scrawled across his snarling face.  He hissed a burst of expletives at me, and told me to get lost.

Shocked, I stood stock still, incredulous at his response.  So he raised his voice a notch with another profanity, which was all I needed to be convinced that he didn't want me anywhere around the place.

Up in my aunt's office, I relayed the story to a couple of her co-workers, and wondered if maybe he was the head of a squad of undercover officers who were getting ready to arrest the drug dealer I'd seen.  My aunt's co-workers chuckled at my naivete.

"Nah, he was their protection," they scoffed, acting like they'd seen it a thousand times themselves.  "If you ever see a cop near a drug dealer, you can figure they're both making a ton of money."

I tell this story not to malign all cops, but to illustrate why I don't trust a police force to operate entirely beneficently within a program like stop-and-frisk.  I can see what Mayor Bloomberg and other vociferous critics of the judge's ruling this week are saying, even if I don't agree that stop-and-frisk is the big crime reduction tactic they claim it to be.  But depriving citizens of their Constitutional rights is as much a crime as the crimes the NYPD says it's trying to foil with their version of stop-and-frisk.

Gangsta: A Profile Asking For Punishment?

Which brings us to the question of whether racial profiling can ever be eliminated in crime fighting.  That seems highly unlikely, doesn't it, since all of us do it to varying degrees, and for various reasons - many of which are not immoral.  Observing a person's race, gender, age, and general appearance is part of how we socialize with each other.  Or not.

Indeed, it's the "or not" part of that socialization equation that's causing us the most trouble, isn't it?  The ghetto, gangsta, and thug theme that many people of darker skin tones like to mimic may be perfectly legal, and is not the primary reason why stop-and-frisk blew out of control, but might it also be causing a lot of unnecessary problems?  After all, the gangsta culture isn't about assimilation into a broader, heterogeneous culture, but a repudiation of conventional culture.  In fact, the gangsta culture relies on a defiance towards legal authority for its own sinister credibility.  That's one reason, by the way, why I think the current infatuation some corners of evangelical Christianity have with rap music is too misguided.  And to get back on-topic, it's another reason why the police have to maintain a moral legitimacy for their legal authority, even in the face of the gangsta culture.

That can be extremely tricky.

Let's face it:  you and I pay cops to go out on the streets and be willing to get killed so you and I can still be alive tomorrow to complain about how they protect us.  Police work, whether it's done by rogue cops like the one outside Central Park, or the many unsung heroes we never hear about, is a mortality equation, as well as a moral one.

No, we shouldn't give police officers carte-blanche to treat citizens of any race or color any way they want.  But cops still have to evaluate every situation they encounter on their shifts based on worst-case scenarios.  We don't want them to be prejudiced, but then again, sometimes the way we dress, act, and conduct ourselves can prejudice them against us anyway.  Modeling a gangsta aesthetic may be one way to exacerbate that prejudice.  Shucks, the very reason people choose not to follow conventional norms could be considered a prejudice against those norms.

Some might say that such a notion is forcing social conformity in a country where individual freedom should be celebrated.  I'd counter that by saying that even in non-conformity, we usually end up conforming to some standard, whether it's buttoned-down whitey, or hip-hop black, or biker goth.  There's not really any such thing as genuine, unfettered, anarchal individuality.

We all have the freedom to dress and behave in just about any way we desire, but we all have to suffer the consequences of decisions that could be interpreted negatively.  After all, if I wear a swimsuit to a job interview at a Fortune 100 company, should I expect to get the job?

Hopefully, stop-and-frisk as New Yorkers have come to know it will soon become a thing of the past.  Yet telling cops that a person's intrinsic characteristics can't ever be used as a means of identifying a potential suspect probably won't be sustainable as a crime-fighting paradigm, either.

So what's left?  It's something Dr. Martin Luther King himself said he wanted people of color to be identified by:  the content of their character.

Both of the people stopped by cops, and the cops themselves.

Mercy and Truth and Osteen and Luther

Joel Osteen and Martin Luther.

Wow.  There's a pair.

Osteen has made himself the king of sound bite theology.  His big, white teeth bulging out of an incessant smile may be dazzling, yet the narcissistic platitudes he pontificates from his Houston pulpit make me wonder if his smile isn't half as disingenuous.  Granted, he has a head of hair bald guys like me can only dream about.  Which, actually, fits with the themes of Osteen's teachings, considering how dreamy and ethereal they are.

Despite its obvious appeal, his is an unrealistic theology of the self, whose god is supposed to make people happy and successful.  Meanwhile, if Osteen's congregation was as happy and successful as he tells them they should be, shouldn't they have found bliss by now after listening for years to his pablum?  The fact that everybody who likes Osteen seems hooked on his schtick, instead of fulfilled and content in their god, should be proof enough that the prosperity gospel he's made mainstream doesn't work.

It's hard to tell if Osteen is saved or not.  He knows just enough orthodox theology to make it sound like he is, but his "ministry" leaves gaping room for doubt.  It's hard to match the Gospel that sometimes peeks out from his motivational jargon with the entirety of Scripture, which is replete with people who are blessed with the Fruit of the Spirit despite being financially poor and materially lacking.  Some were slaughtered for their faith in God, others imprisoned, deprived of their civil rights, or forced to wander in the wilderness for 40 years.  But Osteen doesn't like discouraging his congregation with negativity, suffering, or sin.  He doesn't like pointing out that there is a real Heaven and a real Hell.  He doesn't like talking about Christ's substitutionary death on the cross.  He sees himself as an encourager, even though a true encourager doesn't pick and choose from the realities of God's sovereignty to the detriment of the true Gospel's integrity.

So Osteen sells his followers a slickly-edited, carefully-cropped, heavily-teased, dangerously-nuanced, and heretically-laced faith in some deity's ability to make life on Earth wonderful for us.  Maybe that explains why Osteen's dazzling smile seems more used-car-salesman than peace-despite-circumstances.

If I'm wrong, and he's genuinely a follower of Christ who has been getting some really terrible advice about sermon topics, I pray that the Holy Spirit will convict him sooner rather than later.  For his own good, and the good of those who absorb his treacherous teachings.

Pretty harsh words, right?  Pretty cynical and condemning, right?  Just the kind of stuff Osteen tells his followers not to listen to.

But consider this humorous compilation of selected Twitter feeds from Osteen, matched with quotes from Martin Luther, the famous reformer, and see if you can detect a difference between what I've said about Osteen, and what Adam Ford, an evangelical humorist who put together this exercise, says about Osteen:

• Osteen really tweeted:  "Life is too short to hang around cynical people.  Find people who will believe in your dreams and celebrate your victories."
  Ford's quote from Luther (as a reply to Osteen):  "You are a toad eater and a fawner."
   
• Osteen really tweeted:  "God has already lined up the right breaks, the right people, the answers you need."
  Ford's quote from Luther (as a reply to Osteen):  "This new thing you have devised is the vilest cesspool the devil has on Earth."
   
• Osteen really tweeted:  "You have too much in you to stay where you are.  Your destiny is too great to get stuck."
  Ford's quote from Luther (as a reply to Osteen):  "You are a bungling magpie, croaking loudly."

Now, hopefully, you can see the difference between the way I've written about Osteen, the way Ford has poked fun at him, and the way Martin Luther treated people with whom he disagreed.  I've tried to speak the truth in a form of love I'll call "blunt concern."  After all, love doesn't have to be wishy-washy, does it?  Otherwise you can get the overly-diluted stuff with which Osteen thinks he's fortifying his followers.

Christian love does have a place for humor.  However, it's popular within evangelicalism to actually make fun of people with whom we disagree, forgetting that deriving amusement from someone else's perceived faults isn't a very edifying form of humor.  For all I know, the humorist Ford created this modernized back-and-forth between a current Christian figure and a long-deceased without intending for Osteen to ever see it.  But I saw it, and now you have.  Posting anything on the Internet doesn't exactly limit its viewership, does it?

Adding a false legitimacy to Ford's humor is the fact that a lot of Christians like to enshrine Luther for his contributions to Protestantism.  However, when we do so, we forget that Luther was hardly perfect (and would likely be horrified to learn he's been elevated almost to the level of a Roman Catholic saint by his Protestant heirs).  A bigoted anti-Semite, and likely both a glutton and a drunkard, Luther had a lot of faults.  And not surprisingly, a few of them were more typical of his era (the 16th Century) than they are appropriate in the broader context of how God has taught His people to interact with one another and the world around us.  For example, he argued his viewpoints and convictions with deeply crass insults, something scholars say was a widely-used colloquial tactic in his day.  But does that make doing so Biblically appropriate, either then, or today? 

It's one thing to be convinced of the truth, as Luther obviously was, but isn't it another thing to still speak the truth in love?  In Proverbs 3:3-4, King Solomon teaches, "let not mercy and truth forsake you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart, and so find favor and high esteem in the sight of God and man."  Mercy and truth together, right?

Ford got Luther's insults from, of all things, a tongue-in-cheek website, Lutheran Insulter, that has a bunch of them to illustrate how, um, colorful arguments must have been in Luther's time.  But even the Lutheran Insulter doesn't recommend the use of these insults in the course of respectful, God-honoring apologetics or evangelism.

Unfortunately, however, many evangelicals don't understand that just because Luther got away with saying this kind of stuff back in the 16th Century, he also honored God by doing so.  After all, how often does God receive glory despite the things we say and do, not because of them?  Luther was no more perfect than you or I, and just like the things you and I say and do are open to evaluation in comparison to Biblical standards of conduct, so are Luther's.  Does the fact that much of his theology happens to align tightly with Scripture give him a free pass on stuff he did that doesn't?

Of course, evangelicals aren't the only ones slinging mud towards, making fun of, and otherwise being contemptuous towards people with whom we disagree.  Plenty of this is going on in our political landscape, regardless of political party.

Judging by Luther's enthusiastic use of what lawyers today would probably call slander, he'd likely have been right at home in the thick of things, and maybe with a radio program more popular than Limbaugh's.

However, whether it's left-wing liberals or Joel Osteen, the people with whom believers in Christ have differences of opinion need to let God's Word be our guide.  How likely is it that the Holy Spirit is leading any of us to negate either mercy or truth in our conduct?

According to Solomon, they both go together.