Is the sky falling? Are the nation’s moral foundations so eroded that they are on the verge of collapse?

For two reasons, I will answer no. In the past year, in states across the country, there have been wonderful wins for the cause of life and family. Ultra-sound bills and abortion clinic regulations have been enacted and polls show that Americans are more troubled than ever by abortion-on-demand. There have even been some Supreme Court judicial rulings (e.g., Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC and Spencer v. World Vision) favorable to religious liberty.

These things should inspire us to keep working for faith, family, and freedom in the public square. Although the assaults on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, the very nature of the family, and the religious and economic liberty we cherish are manifold, not to fight them would be to surrender our biblical obligation to work for justice and stand for the oppressed (Proverbs 31:8-9). For the sake of the Just One Himself, this we must never do.

Second, Jesus Christ is Lord of time and eternity. He is Lord when we rejoice and when we weep. He is the sovereign before Whom every knee shall bow (Philippians 2:9-11). Who sustains all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:2). And according to the Psalmist, God is unthreatened by the machinations of political man: “(Though) the kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed … He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord scoffs at them” (2:2-4).

In other words, God is accomplishing His will in ways our limited human understanding might find puzzling but which are fully commensurate with His character and plan for humanity.

“The Most High rules in the realm of mankind,” we read in Daniel’s prophecy (4:2). He has called us to stand for righteousness and human dignity in every sphere of life. Whatever external wins or losses we might experience in the moment, these truths should sustain us in our efforts at all times.

You read that right.  Newsweek – the repository of condescending liberalism, the magazine of record of the self-annointed Center-Left elite – has published a compelling piece by a bona fide “person of the Right.”

Why?  Because even the Left has to acknowledge that Christians are under the gun – quite literally – throughout the developing world.  To read about the latest, and ever-expanding, attacks on Christians in nations where they are a minority (and that would be all of Asia and the Middle East and most of Africa), go to the International Christian Concern’s www.persecution.org and Voice of the Martyrs’ www.persecution.com.  From Nigeria to Pakistan to China, the attacks on those who profess the Name of Christ are numerous and brutal.  As summarized by Dr. John Eibner, president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide,

A student beaten to death for wearing a cross necklace.  A pastor sentenced to death for the “crime” of leaving Islam.  Peaceful Christian protestors run over by tanks.  This is the reality for Christians in North Africa and the Middle East today.  Christians are under attack from radical Islamist groups and, in some cases, their own governments.

Yet as the distinguished scholar and diplomat Dr. Tom Farr, who was the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and who has spoken here at FRC, said recently, “The administration has invested far more energy and resources in the international advancement of LGBT rights than it has the advancement of religious freedom.”

The Obama Administration is willing to abrogate religious liberty here at home for the sake of an extreme political and social agenda (for example, visit our website to learn how President Obama is willing to violate historic conscience rights to bolster his political base and advance abortion-on-demand).  After all, who really needs the First Amendment, right?

It is little wonder federal efforts to defend religious liberty abroad are so tepid.  We cannot defend abroad what we are diminishing here at home.

So far, four Christian organizations on campus have been told by the university that they are in violation of the policy, and they are in danger of losing their registered student group status.  This comes after Vanderbilt University conducted an investigation of a Christian fraternity, Beta Upsilon Chi, and found the organization discriminated against a student based on sexual orientation.  Additionally, another group, the Christian Legal Society, was asked to remove Bible verses and the words, “Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior” from their constitution.

The real issue at stake here is religious liberty.  Denying an organization the right to worship freely or being able to stand up for what their faith teaches them is wrong, and it is persecution.  According to Professor Carol Swain, who advises the Christian Legal Society:

“There are people on campus who are very threatened by the idea of religious freedom and they would like to create an environment where no one hurts anyone else’s feelings – unless it’s Christians.”

What would our founding fathers think of what is happening at Vanderbilt?  They would probably think this is a travesty.  After all, they fled from the religious persecution in England by coming to America, where they could worship freely without being forced to attend the King’s church.

In fact, when our founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they made certain that religious liberty would be protected in our country.  The First Amendment of the United States Constitution states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (Bold, emphasis mine)

Vanderbilt’s decision to ban student religious organizations is a violation of the First Amendment, but it is limiting the group’s ability to worship freely, as our founding fathers envisioned.

Today at FRC, we heard a remarkable and very probing lecture by Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, a profound theologian and himself a former Muslim, about the way the church is responding to the threat of radical Islam both abroad and here in the United States.

Dr. Sookhdeo drew a striking parallel between the church in Germany during the rise of Nazism and the way Christians should be responding to the Islamists who would undermine the very foundations of representative self-government and religious liberty.

Christians are called to love and minister to Muslims and also stand against an agenda which is inherently oppressive and even violent.  Dr. Sookhdeo offered wise counsel about how we can do both.  You can watch his lecture here.

In addition, there are excellent summaries of anti-Christian persecution worldwide in The Catholic Thing and the Voice of the Martyrs “newsroom.”

CMI fellow Erin Brown writes, “Even our ‘tolerant’ Federal government is playing the Grinch card this year. According to FoxNews.com, ‘A group of Christmas carolers was thrown out of a U.S. Post Office in Silver Spring, MD, after the post office manager told them they were not allowed to sing Christmas carols on government property.’”

Brown documents a long series of attacks over the last couple of years, as well as the reactions of numerous liberal media types that ignore or mock the war on Christmas.

“These days, the war on Christmas is fought by the Christian right … [Catholic League President] William Donahue and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, traditional combatants in the war on Christmas, have trained their Yuletide guns on someone, not for railing out put the Christ back in Christmas, but for failing to worship Santa Claus,” Keith Olbermann accused on his old MSNBC show “Countdown” in November of last year.

If you’re not convinced that there’s a war on Christmas, check out the page, and a few of the attacks it documents:

“In upstate New York, one school district has declared that ‘Christmas and Hanukkah will no longer be celebrated in classrooms.’ According to FOX/WROC, The Batavia City School District will no longer allow decorations for either holiday to appear in classrooms as well as teachers are discouraged from writing or saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ In Fairfax County, Va., grade-schoolers are treated to ‘winter celebration.’ In Texas, another school district has declared war on Christmas – this time, classrooms are not allowed to celebrate Santa Claus or exchange gifts.”

Some attacks on Christmas are downright weird. The Huffington Post has the Skeleton Santa story, which Brown also documents in her article.

Thankfully, this hopeful time of year isn’t built on the backs of Christmas displays shimmering on lawns and in storefronts. It’s founded on the birth of hope: Christ Jesus our Lord.

In a new piece in Forbes, Bill Frezza wisely observes that the era of what he calls “both/and” is drawing to a crashing close: “The era of both/and was a magical time when the elected representatives running city, state, and national governments never had to make hard choices. To be sure, partisanship wasn’t eliminated, but political compromise could always be found. This allowed incumbent politicians from both parties to deliver enough goodies to their constituents to assure themselves reelection.”

Whenever a politician suggests that people be allowed to invest some of their “Social Security Trust Fund” money into private accounts, or that private sector solutions to health care might be preferable to federally-directed ones (which solve nothing, ultimately, except the unemployment of eager bureaucrats), or that Washington’s menagerie of departments, programs, agencies, and line items be streamlined into some form of reasonable coherence, he is vilified as heartless, a tool of big business, a mendacious and reactionary primitive.

Re-election is a politician’s stock in trade. To be a statesman, one must have an ample quantity of moral courage and the wisdom to know when to act boldly. Thus, given that few politicians have the strength and insight to behave in a statesmanlike way, we can anticipate that desirable change will be at best incremental. And, despite our protestations, we want it that way.

We want government’s benefits without its costs. We want its protections without its intrusions. We want its presence in our need and its exclusion in our perceived abundance. We are kidding ourselves, which is to say we are human.

As Frezza argues, we are now at the beginning of an era in which refusing to make hard choices is no longer possible:

… in bad economic times tax revenue craters, leaving massive shortfalls as government spending not only fails to decline alongside revenues, but goes up to pay for “safety net” expenses, which more people tap into as they are left out of work. This has happened both in California and at the federal level. Even more threatening than these oscillations is the fact that the underlying trend line in federal revenue has gone flat as federal spending entered an unprecedented period of exponential growth. To top it off, the Baby Boomer generation has started its massive wave of retirements, calling in the chits on those unfunded entitlement liabilities. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, GDP growth hit its deepest and broadest rut since the 1930s, where it remains mired for the foreseeable future.

We resent it when policymakers, speaking to us like adults, offer necessary and painful choices about policy priorities. That’s why we have long lived in an era of self-delusion and rewarded those who have given it to us.

We cannot abort our progeny and anticipate economic growth. We cannot experience liberty, in its fullness, if we disavow a willingness to fail. We cannot corrode the family unit through divorce, cohabitation, promiscuity, and homosexual “unions” and say we care about our children’s future. We cannot secularize our society without destroying the unspoken Judeo-Christian moral consensus that always has been the firm foundation of our republic.

“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to understand that borrowing from the future will increasingly become not just inadvisable but outright impossible. The future has arrived, and it isn’t pretty,” Frezza says. He is right.

Americans have long been a brave people. We like to talk about the heroic conduct of our armed forces, and well we should. But just as our men and women in uniform show courage in their sphere, can we show it in ours? It is now time for us to see if we can still summon the personal virtue and political courage without which no economy, or nation, can long endure.

This will mean hard choices. Let us steel ourselves to them, with the concurrent commitment that through the non-governmental institutions of family, church, synagogue, not-for-profit charities, professional associations and small and large corporate enterprise, we will address the needs our sagging Leviathan cannot.

According to the anti-persecution ministry, Open Doors,

“Of the reported 200,000 North Koreans in prison camps, Open Doors estimates 50,000 to 70,000 are Christians. Both Open Doors and the U.S. State Department report religious adherents are generally treated worse than other prisoners. Extreme forms of torture and execution, as well as forced abortion and infanticide, have been reported in the camps, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.”

North Korea likes to downplay its record of abuse, and even minimize the number of Christians living there (claiming fewer than 13,000 total). Yet a survey released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life argues that of roughly 24 million people living in North Korea, there are more than 490,000 self-identified Christians in “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (that’s Orwell-speak for the dictatorial rule in the North).

From a human standpoint, the outlook in North Korea is not good. According to Christianity Today,

“When Jong-Eun was named Jong-Il’s successor last year, Sam Kim, executive director of the Korean Church Coalition for North Korea Freedom, told CT that Christians in North Korea would likely not see a decrease in persecution. ‘Kim Jong-Eun has not earned the true respect from North Korea’s communist party leaders to effectively govern North Korea. As such, he will be nothing more than a figurehead and his uncle, Chan Sung Taek, will be the person who is really in control,’ Kim said. ‘Unfortunately, Chan Sung Taek is just as ruthless as Kim Jong-Il. As such, Christians can expect to face the same level of persecution’.”

Now is the time for Christians to pray for North Korea: That God would protect and provide for the tens of thousands of believers in the nation’s massive political-prison system; that the new leader, his uncle, and their associates will humble themselves before the Judge of all the earth and transition their country from being a global focal point of oppression into an exemplar of religious and political liberty; and that Christian ministries within North Korea can continue their work and even expand it.

In October, FRC hosted a panel of several distinguished experts in the field of international religious liberty. The event can be viewed here.

He notes that such things as abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and the ordination of practicing homosexuals are the drivers of the Anglican crack-up.  While these are the immediate causes, they are not the only ones.  For example, the theologically notorious John Shelby Spong, former Bishop of Newark, NJ, denies the authority of Scripture and all the essential doctrines of orthodox faith, including the existence of a “theistic” God and the resurrection of Jesus.  He remains an Episcopal priest in good standing.

The presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church, Catherine Jefferts Schori, commenting on Jesus’ claim to the only way to God (“I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father, except through Me,” John 14:6), tells us the following:

I certainly don’t disagree with that statement that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. But the way it’s used is as a truth serum, or a touchstone: If you cannot repeat this statement, then you’re not a faithful Christian or person of faith. I think Jesus as way — that’s certainly what it means to be on a spiritual journey. It means to be in search of relationship with God. We understand Jesus as truth in the sense of being the wholeness of human expression. What does it mean to be wholly and fully and completely a human being? Jesus as life, again, an example of abundant life. We understand him as bringer of abundant life but also as exemplar. What does it mean to be both fully human and fully divine? Here we have the evidence in human form. So I’m impatient with the narrow understanding, but certainly welcoming of the broader understanding … in its narrow construction, it tends to eliminate other possibilities. In its broader construction, yes, human beings come to relationship with God largely through their experience of holiness in other human beings. Through seeing God at work in other people’s lives. In that sense, yes, I will affirm that statement. But not in the narrow sense, that people can only come to relationship with God through consciously believing in Jesus.

Got that?  Jesus didn’t mean what He said, and what He apparently meant is so intrinsically meaningless that He might as well not have said it.

Many in the global Anglican communion have retained an orthodox theology, but the combination of theological heterodoxy and sexual libertinism has doomed its Western branch to ecclesiastical oblivion.

So, if Bottum is correct, one of the world’s great Christian traditions is about to founder on Western insistence that biblical morality be cast off as worn, bigoted and archaic.  And it is those in the non-Western Anglican community who are most stoutly defending both orthodox theology and orthodox practice (e.g., marriage really is between one man and one woman–imagine that).

In his telling conclusion, Bottum writes: “Freed from their African anchor, the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America will move even further in a pro-Muslim, anti-Israel direction, providing yet more cover for fashionable liberal anti-Semitism. Let loose from their allegiance to Canterbury, the African churches will quickly move toward forming pan-African denominations that will feel entirely distanced from Europe and America—and will help build the belief the global South owes nothing to the West.”

What the “global South owes … to the West” is debatable and secondary, even tertiary.  What Christians owe to their professed Lord is allegiance to His Word.  It is the latter debt that Western Anglicanism seems intent on not repaying.

At the outset, it should be stated that the provocative title, “Jesus was a free marketer, not an Occupier” wasn’t chosen by me or my team at FRC. CNN changed the title which was originally “Jesus: Occupy Wall Street.”  CNN’s title doesn’t capture the nature of my argument, which was simply that given the Biblical affirmation of work from Genesis through Revelation, Jesus’ use of a market-based system of remuneration in this parable is instructive. Unlike some of those currently “occupying” around the nation, Jesus did not condemn the distribution of wealth based on initiative and diligence.

During my recent appearance on CNN I reiterated that parables use common activity to express a spiritual message.  In this particular parable, Jesus is telling his followers that the kingdom of God they believed he was going to set up on earth was not going to happen for a while, and he goes on to give instructions on what they should do with their lives until His return.  To do this he draws a parallel to certain positive functions of the business world.  He says, “Occupy until I return.”  In the Greek the term actually means “be engaged in business.”  This positive portrayal suggests that return based on honest effort is a just outcome.

Of course, this is in no way an endorsement of unethical or illegal activity that some on Wall Street and in business have engaged in.  Instead, Jesus’ parable refutes the idea that we will or should all be given the same outcomes regardless of what we do

Friday, Scot McKnight shared via Twitter:

“Read K Snodgrass, Stories with Intent. The parable has nothing to do with free enterprise but with kingdom responsibility.”

I agree with McKnight that the spiritual lesson here is primarily about kingdom responsibility. However, implicit in the parable is the idea that merit justifies greater reward – a principle essential to free-market capitalism.

Where greed, graft, and abuse have distorted the marketplace and exploited the vulnerable, Christians should rightly be brokenhearted and pursue justice. Yet to advocate, however, a government system which redistributes wealth en masse as a response to the abuses of the few, would mean losing the benefits of free moral agency available in a free market. One need look no further than levels of charitable giving prevalent in America as compared to socialized Western Europe.

The way to remedy exploitation and injustice is not by destroying the free market but repairing those elements of it which need restoration.  We cannot change human nature, but we can provide safeguards that restrain the excesses of human evil in the context of economic liberty — a liberty that promotes prosperity, freedom, and the health and well-being of individuals, families, and society.

Now I don’t lean Jon Stewart’s way politically, but I’ve seen enough of his show to catch the appeal. If you like shooting fish in a barrel, and you already believe conservatives are those unfortunate fish, then Jon’s your guy. He’s in the tear-down business, and supplies a lot of Americans (young people in particular) with what passes for news. Not surprisingly, I’m not one of them.

On the other hand, after Saturday cartoons wrap up, my boys and I will often watch This Old House. Or as they like to call it, “The Man Show.” I’ll never forget the day we were watching the program and my oldest son asked me, “Dad, who are the bad guys?” He’s four, so I didn’t tell him, “Jon Stewart.” Only kidding, Jon.

As anecdotal as media choices may be, the contrast between these two shows is stark indeed. It reminds me of Proverbs 14:1: The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.

I think it says something that out of all the programming choices available, conservatives favor a family-centric, home building show hosted by a genial group of working class dudes. It’s reflective of our values: we’re builders of families, homes and businesses. We’d much rather focus on our own hearths than those on K street, Wall street or Pennsylvania Avenue. We’re not looking for a fight except when one lands on our doorstep, and we’re really not that into politics. We tend to believe the family is the primary vehicle through which good culture is communicated, and have much lower expectations when it comes to government. Please don’t ask me to explain “The Bachelor.” Aside from its obvious nod to sexuality, there is no explanation for such a show.

It’s interesting, too, that of all the programming choices available, our liberal neighbors favor a biting political comedy-entary. (I don’t think that’s a word yet, but it probably should be.) What values is this reflecting? Perhaps: government is the center of public life and the highest of man’s achievements, or maybe, it’s good fun to tear down those who disagree. That’s all conjecture, of course, as I don’t really watch the Daily Show. I can think of plenty of counterexamples in my own life to these extrapolations, but it’d be hard to argue that the growth of leviathan doesn’t undermine the family. One needn’t look further than family formation and fertility rates in Western Europe to see how this plays out.

In any case, I’ve got to go fix some electrical issues at our new old house. I’ll see if my boys want to help.