A List of Bureaucratic Assaults on Religious Liberty

April 28, 2023 By Gene Veith

What does the federal bureaucracy have against religious liberty?

An article in the Wall Street Journal by Nicole Stelle Garnett, a Notre Dame law professor, and Meredith Holland Kessler, an attorney with the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic, lists a series of proposed regulations at various stages of approval that would seriously curtail religious freedom.

The article, behind a paywall, is entitled Biden Boils the Religious-Liberty Frog, with the deck, “A series of innocuous-sounding regulations conceal an affront to the American faithful.” Here are the proposed new rules, with links to their documentation:

(1) “Partnerships With Faith-Based and Neighborhood Organizations.” From the departments of Education, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and the Agency for International Development.

The new regulations for these nine agencies, according to the article, “would scale back and in some instances rescind rules ensuring that religious organizations may participate in federally funded programs while keeping their faith commitments. The proposal would also constrain participating organizations’ right to hire employees who embrace and advance their religious mission.”

(2) Rescinding the Religious Liberty and Free Inquiry rule. From the Department of Education.

You may recall how a few years ago university administrations were harassing student religious organizations, including shutting them down unless they allowed non-believers to hold office. The Trump administration put a stop to that with this rule, which would deny federal funding to universities that deny benefits to religious groups that are available to non-religious groups. Rescinding that rule would restore the earlier harassment. See this discussion.

(3) Revising Title IX to define disapproval of homosexuality and transgenderism as sex discrimination. From the Department of Education.

Says the article, “Much of the attention on these proposed changes has focused on university procedures for sexual-assault cases and on a separate regulatory proposal governing transgender athletes. But the proposed rules also extend the definition of ‘sex discrimination’ to include speech and conduct that subjectively—not objectively, as is currently required—could be interpreted as discriminating on the basis of sex, which it would redefine to include sexual orientation and identity. . . .A student or faculty member could be expelled or fired simply for espousing traditional beliefs about sex and marriage if a disciplinary body finds it is more likely than not that some will find these views subjectively objectionable.”

(4) Rescinding “Protecting Statutory Conscience Rights in Health Care; Delegations of Authority” from Health and Human Services Department; and Rescinding the Moral Exemption Rule. from the Internal Revenue Service, the Employee Benefits Security Administration, and the Health and Human Services Department.

Both of these proposals would scale back conscience protections, requiring religious hospitals and doctors to perform abortions, gender transition surgeries, and other procedures for which they have moral or religious objections.

“Many of these regulations will be challenged in court, and some of them eventually will be invalidated,” comments the Notre Dame legal experts. “But religious believers shouldn’t have to turn to courts to remind the executive branch that it is bound by the Constitution.”

Illustration: The Struggle of the Slav by John S. Pughe (1870-1909). Original from Library of Congress via Rawpixel, Public Domain, CC0

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“The Science of Reading”

April 27, 2023 By Gene Veith

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As reading scores keep declining, parents have long been complaining that their children aren’t being taught effectively how to read. Now civil rights activists have taken up the cause, claiming that the failure of public school systems to teach basic literacy to black and hispanic children is a social justice issue.

It turns out, there has been a great deal of high-quality scientific research into the best way to teach children how to read. We now know what works and what does not.

And yet, as both conservatives and progressives join in demanding that schools follow “the science of reading,” many teachers, school systems, curriculum publishers, and (crucially) university teacher training programs are resisting.

The New York Times has published an article entitled ‘Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking on the Education Establishment. Here is the gist:

A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.

The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read. . . .

The movement has drawn support across economic, racial and political lines. Its champions include parents of children with dyslexia; civil rights activists with the N.A.A.C.P.; lawmakers from both sides of the aisle; and everyday teachers and principals.

Together, they are getting results.

And do you know what “the science of reading” has proven, what educators need to do in order to “follow the science” in teaching reading? Teach PHONICS.

Says the Times story, “Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.”

Science confirms that children pick up how to read by learning the letters and the sounds they make, putting them together according to consistent patterns, and “sounding out” words they don’t yet know. This approach– known as “phonics,” referring to learning to read by attending to “sounds”–is the way reading has been taught and learned for centuries. This is the “classic” way to teach reading.

So why do so many contemporary educators reject it? Critics of phonics say that “this is not how people actually read.” True, fluent readers don’t have to sound out every word they encounter. Once they know the words, they can recognize them and process them mentally quickly and even silently. But phonics is how nearly all fluent readers learned to read. Making that connection between the oral word and the written word is critical. You cannot leave out that step and jump straight to fluency.

Other critics of phonics say that English writing is not truly phonetic. They say that under English spelling, “ghoti” can be sounded out to mean “fish” (“gh” as in enough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in nation). But, though English spelling is complicated and often captures how words used to sound when they first came into written form, it is still rules-based. As the Wikipedia entry for Ghoti explains,

The pronunciations of the constructed word’s three parts are inconsistent with how they would ordinarily be pronounced in those placements. To illustrate: gh can only resemble f when following the letters ou or au at the end of certain morphemes (“tough”, “cough”, “laugh”), while ti would only resemble sh when followed by a vowel sound (“martian”, “patient”, “spatial”). The expected pronunciation in English would sound like “goaty” /ˈɡoʊti/, not “fish.”

I have also heard educators say that they teach reading–as well as other subjects–by immersion. Children don’t learn to speak their native language by studying paradigms and practicing with flash cards. They learn to talk naturally, by being surrounded by people talking to them. These educators say that reading should be taught the same way: surround children with books, read to them, and devote class time for children to look at books on subjects they like. We don’t need to “teach reading,” these educators claim. With this “natural” approach, children will pick up that skill on their own.

But being able to speak is a completely different skill from being able to read. The latter must be taught. Simply immersing children in books will do little if the children cannot read them.

Such “whole language” approaches are generally accompanied by a visual approach to decoding writing. Students are taught to learn what words look like. They are asked to memorize the shape and appearance of words, rather than how they sound.

Students taught this way, if they pay close attention, might learn a collection of “sight words.” But when they come across a word they do not recognize, they have no way to figure it out. They are kept from learning new words and acquiring a bigger vocabulary. A student with a really good memory might be able to function by memorizing hundreds of words, though they too are likely to be held back from their potential. But students without such a good memory will be permanently held down.

In practice, what many students do in order to become good readers is to figure out the alphabetic system themselves, learning “phonics” on their own, with little help from school. The schools are busy teaching what is, in effect, the system of reading used in the Chinese language.

The Chinese writing system consists of ideographs, stylized drawings that symbolize each word. Every word has its “character” that must be memorized. Reading requires recognizing each of these complex drawings, and writing requires the even more challenging skill of being able to draw them oneself. According to Bruce Upbin, “There are some 10,000 Chinese characters in common use. Basic literacy, according to the Chinese government, starts at two thousand characters. A solid grasp of a daily Beijing newspaper requires knowing around three thousand. An erudite Chinese reader should recognize five to seven thousand characters.”

So to learn to read Chinese, one must learn thousands of separate symbols. In an alphabetic system, by contrast, using phonics, one need only learn 26 symbols, plus some rules of how they work together. Since the student already knows how to speak, the meaning of those symbols is easy to recognize.

In traditional Chinese, the reading and writing system has little to do with the spoken language. It is demonstrably harder to become literate in that system, than it is with a language that breaks up its words into component sounds with an alphabet. Historically in China, the ability to read and write was an elitist skill, to the point that the small educated class constituting the imperial bureaucracy basically ruled the country. Today the literacy rate is much higher, due in part to adding oral and alphabetic elements–particularly representations of spoken syllables–to the writing system.

Meanwhile, western educators have been downplaying the connection of our written alphabet to the sounds of the language in favor of stressing the visual appearance of written words. In doing so, they are turning our alphabetic system into an ideographic system. That is to say, they are adopting the Chinese approach to reading and writing, despite its difficulty and despite the efforts by the Chinese themselves to adopt more of a phonetic system such as the one that made universal literacy so much easier to achieve in the West.

So how can we account for the resistance in the educational establishment to “the science of reading”? There is nothing intrinsically political about phonics. Those who believe in equality and equity should appreciate the approach that makes it easier for all children to learn how to read.

I suspect one reason is that, by the canons of progressivism, anything old, anything “classic” that has stood the test of time, is to be rejected in favor of “new ideas.” Progressivism loves to be experimental. Even though many experiments fail, once they are tried. Genuine progress, like genuine science, builds on past knowledge. But false progress is always starting over from scratch. Thus, tenure-seeking education professors develop “new teaching techniques” and curriculum publishers church out expensive new and ever-changing products for the lucrative educational marketplace.

Also, “the science of reading” implies the reality of human nature and objective truths, both of which violate the dominant academic worldview of constructivism, which teaches that truth is relative and reality is nothing more than a subjective construction, whether the construction of an oppressive power or a personal construction of a liberated consciousness.

After all, if truth is relative, what is there to teach? Instead of teaching facts, such as the sounds that the letters make, this mindset will prefer teaching children to make up their own spelling rules and to spend class time on political indoctrination rather than teaching the truly liberating art of reading.

Illustration by Karen Arnold via PublicDomainPictures.net, CC0 Public Domain

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Lutherans Under Communism

April 26, 2023 By Gene Veith

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I knew about the Lutherans who came out of the woodwork in Siberia after the Soviet Union fell apart, descendants of the church members whom Stalin shipped there on boxcars who kept their faith alive by worshiping in secret and continuing to catechize their children despite brutal persecution.

But I did not know about the even more brutal persecution that led up to that forced removal, including the criminalization of all expressions of faith and the systematic killing of pastors.

That story is told in The Gates of Hell: An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union, another first-rate publication from Lexham Press. The author is Matthew Heise, an LCMS pastor and missionary in Russia who is the director of the Lutheran Heritage Foundation.

I was asked to review the book for Religion & Liberty, a journal of the Acton Institute edited by Anthony Sacramone. Reading the book was an overwhelming experience. I recommend it highly, not only for its inspiring accounts of ordinary pastors and laypeople–ones that will remind you of your own congregation– being martyred for their faith, but also for its account of how these horrors came on gradually, in some ways that parallel what is happening today.

Here is my review, which you can start here and then finish by clicking the link to the Religion & Liberty site:

Lutherans Under Communism

by Gene Edward Veith

Lutherans have been in Russia since the time of the Reformation. Ivan the Terrible, wanting to bring Russia into the 16th century, invited German craftsmen and tradesmen to settle in the country. He allowed the first Lutheran church to be built just outside Moscow in 1576. Four years later, he ordered it to be burned down.

That sums up conditions for Russian Lutherans under the czars. Sometimes they were favored; at other times, repressed. Until the 20th century, it was illegal for any ethnic Russian to have any religion other than Russian Orthodoxy.

And yet the czars had a habit of marrying Lutheran princesses—though a condition of the marriage was that she convert to Orthodoxy—a practice continuing all the way to the final ill-fated holder of that office, who was married to Alexandra of Hesse. Peter the Great was married not to a princess but to a Lutheran serving girl; one of those Lutheran princesses, however, would become Catherine the Great. Both of these “Great” monarchs brought into the country large numbers of Lutheran farmers, merchants, and well-educated professionals.

The Germans were not the only Lutherans in Russia. The Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union included the staunchly Lutheran Ingrians, Estonians, and Latvians, as well as a smattering of Finns, Swedes, and Lutheran Armenians. By the 1917 revolution, there were 3,674,000 Lutherans scattered throughout Russian cities, villages, and the vast countryside.

The Gates of Hell by Matthew Heise, director of the Lutheran Heritage Foundation and a long-time missionary in the region from the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, is a history of the Lutheran church in Russia from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II. The book is a gripping and instructive account of the state’s efforts to use economic, cultural, legal, and violent means to exterminate a church.

Class Struggle vs. the Golden Rule

At first, with the czar’s restrictions lifted, the Lutherans flourished. They managed to organize themselves into one church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia, with two bishops. They opened a seminary in Leningrad. They worked with American government and church-related relief agencies in the famine and food shortage that followed the revolution.

Then the Bolsheviks began to implement their anti-religion policies. They proclaimed freedom of religion but only as a private matter; all religion had to disappear from the public square. They confiscated church property, took over all schools, and censored religious publications.

Priests and pastors were labeled “non-productive elements,” since they engaged in no physical or other productive labor, and so were excluded from the “workers’ paradise.” They were described as “former persons,” along with czarist aristocrats and functionaries of the old regime. As such, they had no rights of citizenship, could not vote, were given no food rations, lost their parsonages, and had to pay higher taxes. In addition, their children were not allowed to attend universities.

In response, church members, many of whom also lost their homes and farms, tithed like never before to support their pastors and their congregations. Lutherans from other countries, especially the Russian Germans who had migrated to the American Midwest, sent contributions.

Then came Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, in 1929, one of whose goals was the complete elimination of Christianity in Russia.

[Keep reading. . .]

Photo: Party celebrating the ordination of Friedel Hörschelmann (June 1918). From Gates of Hell. via excerpt online: War, Revolution, and Reformation:

Within twelve years of this gathering, both elder and younger Hörschelmanns would die in Soviet Gulag labor camps. Three of the other pastors in the photo, Arnold Frischfeld, Arthur Hanson, and Emil Choldetsky, would also walk the path to Golgotha that so many believers in Russia would travel. The young man lying in the foreground, a future organist for Sts. Peter and Paul Lutheran Church in Moscow, was the youngest son of Ferdinand Hörschelmann. He would also serve a stint in the Gulag and eventually be murdered when he was thrown from a train by Soviet criminals.

Predictions of Christianity’s Comeback

April 18, 2023 By Gene Veith

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What with the Nones, declining church membership, declining church attendance, and consistently bad PR, Christianity seems to be fading from American culture.

But as John Blake writes for CNN (no less), in a story with this headline, Predictions about the decline of Christianity in America may be premature.

He brings up various factors, but here is his main point:

For years, church leaders and commentators have warned that Christianity is dying in America. They say the American church is poised to follow the path of churches in Western Europe: soaring Gothic cathedrals with empty pews, shuttered church buildings converted into skate parts and nightclubs, and a secularized society where one theologian said Christianity as a norm is “probably gone for good — or at least for the next 100 years.”

Yet when CNN asked some of the nation’s top religion scholars and historians recently about the future of Christianity in the US, they had a different message.

They said the American church is poised to find new life for one major reason: Waves of Christians are migrating to the US.

And they said the biggest challenge to Christianity’s future in America is not declining numbers, but the church’s ability to adapt to this migration.

More immigrants come to the United States than any other country and lots of them are Christians. This is starting to allow the U.S. to become a part of what Blake calls “the booming of Christianity in what is called the ‘Global South,’ the regions encompassing Latin America, Africa and Asia.”

According to Blake, “Latino evangelicals are now the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the US.” He quotes New York Times religion columnist Tish Harrison Warren:

“The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism,” Warren wrote. “The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants [or] the children of immigrants.”

I know what some of you are thinking. . . .But we have so much immigration because we don’t have control of our borders! That’s not sustainable or desirable! Are they going to take over our churches too?

Well, not all immigrants are here illegally. You can oppose illegal immigration without opposing legal immigration. And you can appreciate fellow Christians wherever you find them.

The article says that the effects of “the booming of Christianity” from the Global South might be muted if white Christians do not accept these new believers. But this will not just be a problem from the conservative side. Blake asks, “What if progressive Christians prove unwilling to align with non-White immigrants who tend to be more conservative on issues of sexuality and gender?”

I daresay that American “progressive Christians” will have more problem welcoming these immigrant Christians than conservative Christians will, due to their commitment to Biblical morality. Already the United Methodists are willing to tear their church apart rather than accommodate the beliefs of the Methodists from the developing world who were voting with the white evangelical Methodists in rejecting same-sex marriage and homosexual pastors. These immigrant Christians, few of whom are “liberal” theologically, should prove extremely helpful in keeping the American church on the right course.

I’ve been attending some urban Lutheran churches lately–confessional, conservative, Missouri Synod Lutheran churches–and I’ve been impressed with how those particular congregations include worshippers from Africa, India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, and other of the new Lutheran centers around the world. Some of these are first generation immigrants, but others are second or third generation, being quite assimilated to American culture, except that they are committed church goers. Everybody seems to welcome everybody else and be glad to see each other. I know some churches have intentional ministeries to some of these groups. Others just let it happen naturally, as Lutherans from Ethiopia or Brazil simply seek out a good orthodox congregation for them to attend.

Do any of you have any experience with this sort of thing in your congregations? Do the immigrant Christians have any problems fitting in with the rest of your community of faith? Is there any resistance to them from other members? Do you think this phenomenon has the potential to revitalize Christianity in the United States?

Photo: “Worshipers from the India Evangelical Lutheran Church receive the Lord’s Supper during a service on the campus of Concordia Theological Seminary, Nagercoil, India, in June” by Jonathan Shaw, Lutheran Reporter

HT: Tom Herring

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Racism and the White Working Class

April 13, 2023 By Gene Veith

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The white working class is often assumed to be a hotbed of racism. And yet it’s primarily the working class where the different races work together, play together, mingle socially, intermarry, and have children together.

So observes Juli Burchill, referring specifically to racial relations in the UK, in her article The British working class is what real anti-racism looks like. Conversely, as the deck to the article says, “It is the elites who are obsessed with race and division.”

She cites a report that found that in the UK not only racial minorities but members of the white working class are subject to police violence. Here are some quotations from Burchill’s article that sum up her argument:

Culturally, black Britons have much more in common with their white neighbours than is ever acknowledged. It’s hard to swallow the bourgeois belief that the further one goes down the social scale, the more racist people are. How to explain, then, that at the end of every single reality or talent show, multihued families embrace; usually, a young man of colour will be surrounded by a crying, congratulatory mob of little white ladies, generally his mother and aunties.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Michael Collins’ brilliant book about the demonisation of the white working class, The Likes Of Us, was published. He wrote:

‘The modern-day white working class had a more varied, more honest, more intimate experience, having known non-whites as lovers, muggers, husbands, killers, wives, victims, neighbours, rapists, friends, foes, attackers, carers. For decades, the urban, white working class had largely been educated in multiracial schools, worked in multiracial environments and lived in multiracial neighbourhoods.’

This remains truer than ever. Growing up in the English cities of the 1970s, most of us had black friends. Everyone loved the West Indian kids at school. Literally, as it transpired. . . .[The rise in interracial marriages] happened because of the proletariat – the young women of which can often be seen pushing beautiful biracial babies in prams.

It is the privileged left-wing media types, having not been around their black compatriots in the normal way from their youth, who commit the worst racial gaffes. . . . You would almost think that the ruling class – despite its exhaustive virtue-signalling where race is concerned – doesn’t actually see black citizens for who they are as individuals. Rather, they are units to be corralled.

Does this apply also in the U.S.? Certainly, the racial picture in the UK is different than it is here. America has the legacy of slavery. The UK has the legacy of colonialism. A side effect of the globe-spanning British Empire, which morphed into the more independent Commonwealth of Nations, was immigration rights.

As a result, Great Britain has a large number of not just immigrants but citizens originating in Africa, the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, and other former outposts of the British Empire. The UK, like Europe in general, also has a significant number of more recent immigrants from Muslim countries.

What these populations have in common is that they wanted to come to England. The Asians often came with significant wealth and merged directly into the middle or even upper classes of Great Britain’s relatively stratified society.

As for the United States, we have always been a nation of immigrants and still are. That we don’t control our borders is a major problem, but legal immigrants still come here from all over the world. Our distinctly racial divisions have mainly to do with the descendants of African slaves who were brought here against their will, freed with the Civil War, and subjugated by Jim Crow laws. Their legal rights were restored, though, with the Civil Rights movement, but discrimination sometimes continues.

Back during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which I am old enough to remember, it did seem that poor whites–the “rednecks” of popular culture–were in the vanguard of the opposition, displaying their racism proudly. And yet, the poor whites of the South never owned slaves. They didn’t have enough money, let alone property or businesses that demanded labor. I heard it said that the ruling class encouraged racism among poor whites so that they would think there was someone lower than they were on the social pecking order. Black people, it was said, had a place in Southern society, first as slaves and then as subservient workers. But poor whites had an even lower status, as expressed by the horrible epithet “poor white trash.” If the mistreated blacks and the mistreated whites would unite around their common interests, it was said, they could make changes, but racism was a means of preserving the status quo in favor of the ruling wealthy elite.

And yet, at least some of what Burchill says of British race relations rings true for the United States today. Members of the white working class–not to be confused with “rednecks” or “poor white trash”–are typically the product of integrated public schools, were on the same sports teams as their black schoolmates, work side-by-side with black co-workers, and often socialize together.

Yes, much of the white working class listens to country music, but so do lots of black people. Much of the black working class listens to rap music, but 70% of rap sales are to whites, many of whom are from the working class. And now, we are seeing a fusion of country music with rap.

As for interracial marriages, the evidence is mixed. Intermarriage rates are somewhat higher as education goes up, though studies also show that people in mixed-race marriages tend to live in “poorer” neighborhoods.

The point is, the working class (defined as those without a college degree, with lower incomes, who work in the industrial or service sector) is racially diverse. Whatever their race, members of the working class interact with each other, have much in common, and, more often than not, get along with each other.

“But racism is systemic!” the affluent college-educated elite progressive will respond. “Racism is not just about individuals of different races getting along with each other! Racism is built into our educational, legal, economic, and cultural systems!”

Well, if so, who is responsible for and in control of all of these systems? Not the working class. . . .More like the affluent college-educated elites.

Photo by Mat McDermott via Cambridge University Press, Creative Commons 3.0

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Should Churches Hide Their Controversial Beliefs?

April 12, 2023 By Gene Veith

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The He Gets Us campaign, with its billboards and Super Bowl ads, presents Jesus in a very positive and relatable way, as someone who was born to a teen mother, was a refugee, was fed up with politics too, hated injustice, and promoted love instead of hate, etc.

Now some people are complaining that at least some of the people who paid for those ads don’t believe in transgenderism! or same-sex marriage! They are evangelicals! And other horrors.

And the problem goes beyond that. CNN political analysis Kirsten Powers has written an essay entitled The “He Gets Us” Super Bowl Ads Brought Back Bad Memories: How the Christian “seeker” movement can cause serious harm. She tells about how she started going to a church in New York City that was intellectual, friendly, stimulating, and that really helped her. It wasn’t “fundamentalist” or “political,” and she got involved in its work. (She is pretty obviously referring to Redeemer Presbyterian Church, an evangelical congregation whose pastor, Tim Keller, has been a pioneer in successful ministry to young urban professionals.)

Then she learned that the church held to conservative theology and Biblical moral positions.

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in their anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.

Mark Tooley, an evangelical Methodist who heads the Institute on Religion and Democracy, discusses her article and her call for “transparency” in what churches believe. He sums up her argument:

Powers calls this “secretiveness” a “red flag” and complains that “seeker movements hide what they really are.” Instead, they “focus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny” role in the church’s overall ministry. Powers claims that the controversial views are only revealed “casually” after new believers are already embedded in the community, and feeling at that point that it’s “almost impossible to leave.”

Tooley responds,

Perhaps Powers has a least a partial point. Churches and Christian ministries should be transparent. But such transparency does not automatically necessitate heavy emphasis on potential controversial points. Powers, when she became active in Redeemer Church, could easily have researched the Presbyterian Church in America and its official stances.

Churches, modeled on Jesus Himself, if they are evangelistic, mainly focus on the simple message of Jesus as Savior who came to save sinners. They don’t, especially with new believers or visitors, focus on the intricacies of the Trinity, the detailed forensics of justification and sanctification, or the wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church’s ethical teachings. Jesus says: “Come, whosoever will.” So does His church.

Learning the details of the Christian faith, including the church’s ethical teachings that are often at odds with the world’s, typically comes later as new believers grow in faith and are catechized by the church. Powers seems to have found this process deceptive and manipulative. But St Paul distinguished between the milk and the meat of the faith, with the former reserved for new believers, and the later for more mature believers.

I suppose Tooley too has at least a partial point. But I am uneasy with what he says too. I suppose this is an intrinsic issue with the “seeker sensitive” approach, as opposed to the traditional congregations that I favor. The church should not orient its teaching and its services to non-believers, but to the baptized and catechized community of faith. Of course it should emphasize the Trinity, justification, and “the wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church’s ethical teachings.”

I think campaigns like “He Gets Us” can be helpful in challenging stereotypes about Christianity and bringing attention to the person of Jesus Christ. They can get people to come through the door of the church. But once inside, they should find Biblical substance and a sense of transcendence. Specifically, they should hear God’s Word, both the Law–which indeed should make them “uncomfortable,” to say the least–and the Gospel of how Christ has redeemed them and offers free forgiveness.

In evangelism I have argued that we Lutherans should lead with our most mind-blowing doctrines–with our conviction that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present in the Bread and Wine of the Lord’s Supper, that Baptism saves us, that God is actively present in our vocations, that God actually speaks to us in His Word, that we are all sinners as well as saints, etc.

Also the other mind-blowing doctrines that all Christians believe but do not always express: That Jesus took all of the evils and griefs of the world into Himself on the Cross. That Jesus is God in the flesh. (Why didn’t the “He Gets Us” campaign bring up that fact?)

As for the “controversial” moral teachings of the Bible, I have found that it’s helpful to make clear that Christianity is not, contrary to common opinion, about moralism. That it is about forgiveness when we sin. Many people in bondage to sexual sin feel more guilty than they will admit, which is why they are so defensive. They may be broken by the law already and be primed to hear the good news.

Unbelievers, hearing those kinds of things will see that Christianity is “other” than themselves, as well as different from the boring moralism that they probably expected. And the full-strength Word may be used by the Holy Spirit to capture their attention and bring them to faith.

Here is the irony: Tooley brings up a fact that Powers does not mention in this particular essay. She has quit Redeemer Presbyterian, as she says, and evangelicalism as a whole. She has become a Roman Catholic! Hasn’t she noticed that Catholics too disapprove of abortion, homosexuality, and all of the other things that bothered her about Redeemer Presbyterian? Does she think Catholicism is not “transparent”? Didn’t she look into what Catholics believe–indeed, wasn’t she catechized–before she became a Catholic?

Perhaps she has fallen in with “progressive” Catholics who do resist the teachings of their own magisterium. But I daresay that the reason she found Catholicism attractive is that it did hold out to her a sense of substance and transcendence. She must have perceived that in the liturgy–so different from the seeker-sensitive worship she was used to–and was so taken with it that she became willing to put up with the other stuff, perhaps someday to the point of believing it.

Image from Pxfuel, royalty free photos

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