Monday Miscellany, 2/24/25

Last updated on: February 21, 2025 at 5:03 pm By Gene Veith

In UK, the young are more religious than their parents or grandparents. The USA is back in the AI game. And a pro-life victory in Latin America.

In UK, the Young Are More Religious Than Their Parents or Grandparents

The British newspaper Independent has published a story by Tara Cobham whose headline and deck say it all: Gen Z far less likely to be atheists than parents and grandparents, new study reveals. “With many of younger generation found to identify as ‘spiritual’, research counters assumption spirituality is on decline and in fact implies God is ‘making a comeback.’”

Now this is a British study of the British population, so it probably doesn’t apply to the U.S.A. It is probably more reflective of Europe, showing how irreligious the previous generations had become.

The survey found that only 13% of 18 to 24 year olds (a.k.a. Generation Z) are atheists. Of this cohort, 62% said they are “very” or “fairly” spiritual.

Of those 25-44 (a.k.a. Millennials), 20% said they are atheists. But 52% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

Of those aged 45 to 60 (a.k.a. Generation X), about 25% are atheists. Only 36% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

Of those older than that (a.k.a., Baby Boomers), 20% are atheists. Only 35% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

The study was commissioned by atheist Christopher Gasson in support of his book The Devil’s Gospels: Finding God in Four Great Atheist Books. He said that he found the results “gobsmacking.”

He made the point that these findings do not mean that large numbers of the young, or really anybody, are necessarily turning to Christianity, which is true. But they do suggest that “the fields are white for harvest” (John 4:35).

The USA Is Back in the AI Game

In our Monday Miscellany for February 3, we reported that Despite Stargate, China Pulls Ahead in the AI Race. The post was about the half-trillion dollar “Stargate” Artificial Intelligence initiative, which was upstaged by news of China’s DeepSeek AI program, which outperforms OpenAI for a tiny fraction of the cost and energy use.

But now, the USA is back in the game. . .thanks to (who else?) Elon Musk. His artificial intelligence company xAI (what else would it be called?) released Grok-3, which reportedly outperforms all of the other platforms, including DeepSeek.

Musk’s new technology, in the words of the news story about it, “incorporates synthetic datasets, self-correction mechanisms and reinforcement learning to enhance its performance.” (Go to the link for what this means.) The result is supposedly something closer to “reasoning,” with fewer “hallucinations.”

Go here and here for comparisons of Grok-3’s performance with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. A Reddit user, though, made an important point:

Grok 3 used 263 times the computing power of DeepSeek V3, yet only achieved 33% higher test scores—showing that the Scaling Law is slowing down.

Despite using 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs, Grok 3 didn’t improve significantly, while DeepSeek focuses on energy-efficient learning, mimicking human intelligence.

Instead of brute-force scaling, DeepSeek’s Mixture of Experts (MOE) model activates only what’s needed, making it sustainably smarter.

With AI costs skyrocketing, the future probably isn’t about more GPUs.

Grok-3 will be available to X Premium+ subscribers for $50 per month, as opposed to ChatGPT, whose basic version is available online for free.

Bonus question: Without Googling or consulting Artificial Intelligence, who can explain the origin and meaning of the word “Grok”?

A Pro-Life Victory in Latin America

The American Convention on Human Rights (1978) includes the following provision:

Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life. (Article 4.1)

This has been described as “one of the strongest statements of the right to life in international law.”

Twenty-five of the 35 member nations of the Organization of American States (OAS) have committed to the treaty. The United States actually signed it in 1977, before it was to go into effect, but did not proceed to have it ratified by Congress. Canada refused to adopt it because of the abortion article. Mexico adopted it with the explicit exception of Article 4.1.

But most of the Latin American countries are strongly pro-life, though efforts to overturn those laws have been intensifying. One was a court case that pro-abortionists hoped would be the Roe v. Wade of Latin America.

In Beatriz v. El Salvador, a woman who was pregnant with a child who had a rare and inevitably fatal brain disorder had wanted an abortion but was denied one in accord with the laws of El Salvador. The baby died, and the mother died four years later in a motorcycle accident. Abortion advocates filed a suit, hoping to overturn El Salvador’s anti-abortion law. Comments Daniel Philpott, “El Salvador’s laws protecting life are some of the strongest such laws within states and are often the target of abortion rights advocates.”

El Salvador’s Supreme Court supported the existing law, so abortion advocates appealed to the American Court of Human Rights, which enforces the American Convention on Human Rights. The court actually ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but on very narrow grounds, requiring El Salvador to change its medical protocols in high risk pregnancies, which pro-abortion groups are hailing as a victory.

But as Philpott says in his Substack post A Little Noticed Major Victory For Life:

Far more significant is what the court refrained from: declaring that abortion is a right. It did not even require exceptions for abortion or that abortion be decriminalized in any way in the laws of countries. It did not accept the plaintiffs’ argument that “obstetric violence” warrants abortion nor that Beatriz’s pregnancy and birth had contributed to her death. The ruling leaves intact the protection of the right to life in the American Convention and in El Salvador’s laws.

Philpott concludes that while pro-abortionists are aggressively targeting Latin America and Africa, where abortion prohibitions are common, “the Beatriz decision is a major victory for the cause of life.”

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The Four Strands of America’s Christian Revival

Last updated on: February 17, 2025 at 5:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Spencer Klavan is the author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, which shows how quantum physics has shaken the materialist worldview and how contemporary science is making theism credible again. It’s one of the three recent books that we discussed that are being hailed as “game changers” in contemporary apologetics.

He has written an essay on his New Jerusalem Substack entitled American Revival: A nation with the soul of many churches. He believes that a revival of Christianity is brewing in the United States, seeing signs such as the new openness to religion among Generation Z men and Silicon Valley technologists, plus the surge in Bible sales and some prominent converts.

He observes that religion is deeply embedded in American culture. He describes four strains of American Christianity that date from colonial times and that have been historically formative. And he expects a Christian revival to emerge along those same four lines.

(1) The Puritans of New England sought a personal piety, moral lifestyles, and social reform. Klavan sees the heirs of the Puritans today to be the Evangelicals, who continue to win converts and exert a political influence.

(2) The Anglicans of the South valued the rites, the ceremonies, and the traditions of the English church. The equivalent today, Klavan says, are the Catholics, who are attracting people today with their “high liturgy and deep traditions.”

(3) The Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley offered a less doctrinal, highly personal, more mystical Christianity. Klavan sees this spiritual mindset manifesting itself in what he calls the “Nearly-Nones,” the spiritual-but-not-religious folks who are still not going to churches but who have started to read the Bible, pray, and talk about Jesus.

(4) The Frontiersmen of the West, whom Klavan describes as “the hardbitten warriors who tamed the backcountry, defiantly independent in their theology as they were in their rough ways of life.” These pioneers typically held intense but highly individualistic religious beliefs, starting new theologies (e.g., the Pentecostals), new church bodies (e.g., the Restoration movement), and even new religions (e.g., the Mormons).

Their modern equivalent? Here is what Klavan says:

Certainly one group of people is growing more comfortable with the Christian label than anyone might have expected a decade ago. There’s an intellectual vanguard—philosophers, critics, artists, tech entrepreneurs—making the high-minded case for belief. The most recent was Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who can’t yet sign up for any particular denomination but who recently described at length his decision that “I should admit to myself that I now believe in God, and pray to God properly.” Before Sanger came Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Matthew Crawford, Peter Thiel. There are enough of them now to be called a movement.

These are surely our frontiersmen. Like the old frontiersmen, they favor adventurous and dramatic theology for their adventurous and dramatic circumstances. They are prone to grand theories about the end times and the clash of civilizations, all of which figures. Those in tech, especially, work at the edge of humanity’s limits in a perilous new age of exploration. They are among those pressing forward into outer space, into the workings of the body and brain, into machine capabilities. Out in that dark wilderness there are rival and even savage faiths, preached by babel-builders who want to kneel before AI superintelligence or hail a rising one-world government. It’s dangerous to ride the high country without a map, and Christianity is a time-tested one, well-known for keeping its followers from dropping into snake pits.

These four are not completely different, Klavan says. They all hold to some common articles “articles of faith—the triune God, the resurrection, the forgiveness of sins—without which Christianity is not Christian.” (It’s interesting that mainline liberal Protestantism, which tries to have Christianity without such articles, doesn’t even show up on Klavan’s religious radar.)

He concludes with C. S. Lewis’s metaphor of Christianity as a building, with “mere Christianity,” what all Christians have in common, being the hallway, off of which are different rooms, the various Christian traditions. Lewis stresses that Christians, who might start in the hallway, must enter one of the rooms: “It is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in.”

Klavan adds to the metaphor: “The building might need all the rooms—all the passion of the evangelicals, all the ancient solemnity of the Catholics, all the longing of the nearly-nones and wild-eyed mysticism of the pioneers—to stand.”

Sounds like Lutheranism to me! Well, up to a point.

Klavan’s four colonial strands derive from England, of course, as does American culture. Many other peoples with many other religions also became part of America. Such as us Lutherans from northern and eastern Europe. We don’t fit neatly into any of those four categories.

If you bring some of them together, though, we might come closer. Confessional Lutheranism has both the evangelicals’ emphasis on the Gospel and the Bible, plus the “ancient solemnity” associated with the Catholic liturgy and Catholic sacramentalism. Today’s “new theists” attracted to both evangelicalism and Catholicism and trying to decide between them would do well to consider Lutheranism.

Many Christians so torn go the Anglican route, but that’s a via media between the two traditions. Lutherans are very evangelical and very sacramental.

Lutheranism arguably has a higher view of the Gospel (not just as a one-time “decision” but as the continual source of the Christian life) and the Bible (not just as a fact book but as a means of grace). And a higher view of the Sacraments than Catholics (with the “sacramental union” being far more incarnational than transubstantiation, which dismisses the physical elements as mere illusions).

I find Lutheran Christianity very “spiritual,” but not in the open-ended non-doctrinal inwardness of the Quakers and the “nearly-nones.” Lutheran spirituality rests on the objective truths revealed in the Word of God.

I find Lutheran Christianity very emotionally satisfying to me as an individual, but not in the individualistic, go-it-alone, look-for-something-new spirit of the “frontiersmen.” Lutheran Christianity needs a congregation and a pastor, sees itself as continuous with historic Christianity, and has a high view of church.

For me, Lutheranism was what tied the other strands of Christianity–not just these four, but many others–together.

(For more about Lutheranism, see my book Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals and, especially for Lutherans in need of recovering their heritage, my newest book Embracing Your Lutheran Identity.)

Illustration: “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, A. D. 1620“, (1848 CE) by Charles Lucy (1814–1873 CE). White House copy of the painting. (From The White House Historical Association), via World History Encyclopedia, CC BY 4.0.

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Inauguration Day Miscellany, 1/20/25

Last updated on: January 20, 2025 at 8:18 am By Gene Veith

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Giving Trump credit for the ceasefire in Gaza. Sexual discrimination vs. gender identity discrimination. And signs of a cultural shift towards religion.

Giving Trump Credit for the Ceasefire in Gaza

Israel and Hamas finally signed a cease-fire, in which the hostages will be released, Israel will pull out of Gaza, and a plan for a permanent peace will be put into effect.

This is basically the same plan the Biden administration has been pushing, but to no avail. Israeli hard-liners opposed it, since it would stop the war short of the complete annihilation of Hamas and it would free Palestinian prisoners of war to possibly strike again. But now the Netanyahu administration is accepting the terms.

Why? Jamie Dettmer of Politico (no supporter of Republicans) wrote an article entitled Trump was ‘the closer’ on Gaza cease-fire deal.

The catalyst for the deal, he says, was Trump’s re-election followed by Trump’s threat: “All hell will break out. If those hostages aren’t back, I don’t want to hurt your negotiation, if they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East.”

Says Detmer:

At the time, most commentators took the warning to be directed at Hamas and scoffed at the threat. After all, what more could Trump do against Hamas that Netanyahu hadn’t done already? The Palestinian militant group lost its top military commanders, including Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, and its ranks have been devastated.

But it wasn’t really Hamas that Trump was addressing.

“It wasn’t a warning to Hamas. It was a warning to Netanyahu. To Bibi,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, told POLITICO. A senior Israeli official, who asked to remain anonymous as they aren’t authorized to talk with the media, agreed that was how Netanyahu read it as well.

And when asked by POLITICO why the Israeli prime minister now appeared ready to agree to a deal he’d dismissed before, [former Israeli prime minister Ehud] Olmert simply said:“Because he’s afraid of Trump.”

Next up: Stop the war between Russia and Ukraine. If Trump can pull that off too, wouldn’t you say–whatever you think of him–that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

Sexual Discrimination vs. Gender Identity Discrimination

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act forbids “discrimination on the basis of sex” in any school or college that receives federal funding. The Biden administration’s Department of Education had issued a ruling that the word “sex” in the statute also includes “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” That interpretation would make being transgendered or homosexual protected categories, on a par with race and religion.

A federal court, though, has thrown out that interpretation. As reported by Natalie Schwartz,

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Danny Reeves said expanding Title IX’s sex-based protections to include gender identity turns the federal law “on its head.”

“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex — throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless,” wrote Reeves, a George W. Bush-era appointee.

Reeves also asserted that the Title IX rule violated the First Amendment by requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves wrote.

See also this legal analysis of the court’s decision.

Signs of a Cultural Shift Towards Religion

Religious affiliation is way down, as we have been hearing. But some observers are seeing signs of a shift.

In 2021, only a quarter of people aged 18 to 25 say they believe more than doubt the existence of a higher power. In 2023, only two years later, that number had risen to one-third.

That detail was mentioned by Amanda Prestigiacomo in a Daily Wire story entitled The Christian Content Takeover. The occasion is the debut of Rosary in a Year by Father Mark-Mary Ames taking the top spot on Apple Podcasts, displacing The Joe Rogan Experience.

Prestigiacomo notes other Christian podcasts, YouTube channels, and apps that have become big hits online. Many of them are Catholic. Among those she mentions are the Catholic meditation and prayer app “Hallow” and Bishop Robert Barron’s “The Word on Fire.”

She notes that Joe Rogan himself used to mock Christianity, but he now seems to be taking it seriously, often hosting Christian guests who talk about their faith. She also cites the openly Christian, G-rated comedian Nate Bargatze, who, she says, is “arguably the most popular comedian in the mainstream right now.”

Top charts vary by the day, of course, so Joe Rogan is now back to number one, though Rosary in a Year still tops the “Religion and Spirituality” category.

That data about the shift among people aged 18-25 comes from a Springtide Research Institute study that also found Generation Z to be highly interested in “sacred experience” and a “sacred sensibility.” They aren’t looking to church for that, though. Rather, they are “experiencing moments that evoke a sense of wonder, awe, and connection” in nature, relationships, and even online.

To be sure, this experience-seeking lacks content and belief, so it falls short of religion and certainly of Christianity. But this thirst for the “sacred” is something to build on. It’s telling that so much of this online Christian content is Catholic, which does cultivate a sense of the “sacred,” while also leading to doctrinal and moral content.

If there is a “vibe shift” in the direction of religion, I wonder if it will not be towards contemporary evangelical Christianity as we have known it–which often conveys little sense of the sacred–but towards the types of Christianity that are liturgical and sacramental. Of course, pursuing the sacred apart from sacred truth will not accomplish much. But if there is such a shift, it should bode well for us Lutherans.

Towards that end, we should note the Lutheran online content that lifts up both Word and Sacrament, such as Issues, Etc., Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller’s World-Wide Bible Class, the In Prayer app from CPH, which includes the Treasury of Daily Prayer, Flame’s The Study, Hans Fiene’s Lutheran Satire, and. . . .List your favorites.

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Monday Miscellany, 12/9/24

Last updated on: December 6, 2024 at 3:45 pm By Gene Veith

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Our national debt in light years. Google’s woes. And Bible sales are up 22%.

Our National Debt in Light Years

Our national debt is now $37 trillion. That’s one trillion more than it was in July. That comes to $107,494.78 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. The share for every taxpayer is $218,181.82.

David Hebert of the American Institute for Economic Research has more fun facts about how much money we owe. He informs us that each bill of our paper currency is 2.61 inches wide, 6.14 inches long, and 0.0043 inches thick.

So if we were to stack up what we owe in $100 bills, each of which is only 0.0043 inches thick, the stack would be 24,431.8 miles high. The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles. So if we could lay the stack down, it would almost go around the earth. And at the present rate, we will achieve this milestone in April.

If we were to use $1 bills to pay off our debt and lay them end to end, since each of them in 6.14 inches long, 37 trillion of them would go on for 3.5 billion miles.

A beam of light, the fastest entity in the universe, would take 5 hours and 6 minutes to go from one end to the other.

Hey, but according to the AI search engine Perplexity, that’s only 0.0005817933 light years. That doesn’t sound so bad!

HT: Dominic Pino

Google’s Woes

Mighty Google, which stands astride the internet like a colossus, is facing problems, not only from legal attempts to break it up for being a monopoly. But because searching on the internet is changing.

So reports Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal. Google makes most of its money from advertising, but other players are soaking up that revenue. When users search for a product to buy, they are increasingly by-passing the Google search engine to go straight to Amazon, which seemingly stocks everything they might need and whose revenues are soaring. Young people in particular are clicking links on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms.

Google’s integration of AI, which gives a summary of the information searched for before listing specific websites, means that fewer users are scrolling down to the websites themselves. Or to the ads and sponsored links that appear after the long summaries. Google is also facing competition from search engines that are all AI (such as Perplexity, mentioned above, which gave me the answer I needed after I could make no sense of the “Light Year Calculator” Google sent me to). Mims quotes NYU business professor Melissa Schilling: “AI is to search what e-commerce was to Walmart.” Not that AI is all-powerful. AI’s weaknesses are also a problem for Google. AI is generating so many hallucinations, fake sites, and so much content based on other AI content, that the quality of all internet searches has gone down. (I’ve found that Google’s summaries and Perplexity answers are not always reliable.)

Here are some details cited by Mims:

The rate at which people clicked on ads that appear in search results was down 8% compared with a year ago, according to data from advertising platform Skai. It’s not clear why this is happening, but one logical conclusion is that it’s the result of Google’s own AI-based summaries, which eliminate the need to click on sponsored links or scroll down to where the ads are.

One study from January by search-engine-optimization software company Authoritas found that Google’s AI answers in its search results could upend rankings and traffic to existing websites. And ad sales firm Raptive has projected that the full rollout of this change to search could erase $2 billion in revenue for publishers.

Few will shed tears for Google, though its plight shows the weakness of regulators’ claim that it is a monopoly and demonstrates once again that worldly power never lasts.

Bible Sales Are Up 22%

Comparing the first ten months of 2024 to the same time last year, Bible sales have jumped 22%. Regular books were up only 1%.

This follows a rising pattern. In 2020, 8.864 Bibles were sold; in 2021, the number rose to 11.859 million; in 2022, it stayed fairly flat 11.907 million; in 2023, that rose to 14.162 million . This year’s Bible sales have already come close to reaching that number with 13.713 million as of October, with two months–including Christmas–yet to go.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reports on this phenomenon, noting the irony of this Bible surge is taking place at the same time that 28% of the population is unaffiliated with any religion. Some of them, though, may be Bible buyers. Trachtenberg cites book store owners and publishers who say that many of the sales are coming from first-time buyers, college students, and other young adults in Generation Z.

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Friday Miscellany, 10/18/24

Last updated on: October 20, 2024 at 7:48 am By Gene Veith

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We won’t always have a Friday Miscellany, but this week I just have too many items that deserve your attention. Such as. . .

Young men are now more religious than young women. Portlandia is replacing its entire government. And the EPA is reconsidering adding fluoride to the water.

Young Men Are Now More Religious Than Young Women

Women tend to be more religious than men. This has held true for every country, culture, and religion, to the point that it has become almost an axiom of the sociology of religion.

But now, to the experts’ surprise, an anomaly has arisen. Among Americans in Generation Z, those in their teens and twenties, young men are more religious than young women.

According to an article in the New York Times, drawing on research from the American Enterprise Institute, 40% of Gen Z women say that they have no religious affiliation. That compares to 34% of Gen Z men.

Why the discrepancy? Some are saying that women are rising up against sexism in the church. Others are saying that church is one of the few places these days that affirm masculinity.

At any rate, though the percentage difference is not huge, more men in church would bode well for American Christianity. For one thing, other studies have shown that if the father goes to church, even when the mother doesn’t, 44% of his children will become regular churchgoers. So let’s hope these religious young men become fathers.

Portlandia Is Replacing Its Entire Government

Portland, Oregon, has long been a haven for lifestyle progressives, as lampooned in the Portlandia TV show (2011-2018). (For samples, go here. Remember the one about the diners in the restaurant ordering Colin the chicken?)

But now, Portland has become a case study in what happens when progressivism is taken too far. In the wake of the George Floyd riots, the defund the police movement, Antifa violence, the decriminalization of drugs, and the embrace of homelessness, the once beautiful city of Portland is now being described as “Little Beirut.” For 100 straight days, rioters burned, smashed, and looted the downtown. Violent crime, including murder, has skyrocketed. Homeless camps are everywhere. Drug addicts–and often their dead bodies–lie on the sidewalks. According to Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer, parts of downtown look “like Dresden in World War II.”

But now, in the words of the title of a Politico article by Natalie Fertig, This proud liberal city is throwing out its entire government.

Portland residents replaced their de-fund-the-police politicians with those tougher on crime, put limits on public camping, pushed the state to recriminalize drugs, and passed a referendum that completely restructures city government. Virtually all office holders are now up for election and have lots of competition.

The new government will probably still be on the liberal side, but it surely won’t be so far left this time that it falls off the cliff. Hopefully, it will make Portlandia amusing again.

EPA is Reconsidering Fluordation of Water

From my childhood long ago, those who opposed adding fluoride to the drinking water water were ridiculed as being the silliest of conspiracy theorists. “Fluoride helps prevent cavities in our teeth!” the sane people said. “You fluoride deniers are paranoid and delusional!”

But now, the Environmental Protection Agency, no less, is taking a second look at fluoride after numerous studies have suggested that the chemical, which most cities routinely add to their water systems, may indeed be harmful to a child’s developing brain.

So reports Tom Perkins in a story in the UK Guardian entitled End of fluoridation of US water could be in sight after federal court ruling. A federal judge appointed by President Obama ordered the EPA to do a formal risk-assessment in light of the new research.

Today 75% of Americans drink fluoridated water. But almost no other country, including European nations, add fluoride to their drinking water.

This may be another case in which what was condemned as “misinformation” turns out to be truth after all.

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Monday Miscellany, 6/17/24

Last updated on: June 13, 2024 at 1:53 pm By Gene Veith

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Baptists consider adopting the Nicene Creed. Opinions are changing on transgenderism. And taking your parents to a job interview.

Baptists Consider Adopting the Nicene Creed

Southern Baptists have been considering adding the Nicene Creed to their official statement of faith. A proposal to do so was presented at the church body’s annual convention in Indianapolis. Another motion suggested also adding the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Both motions were punted to the Executive Committee.

For Baptists to even consider adopting the historic creeds is remarkable. It reflects a larger trend of evangelicals looking to the early church and historic Christianity–even to St. Thomas Aquinas!–for guidance and to make their theology more robust.

Baptists have traditionally said, “No creed but the Bible!” But the need to be explicit about exactly what they think the Bible teaches has led to the adoption of a statement of faith called the Baptist Faith and Message. But that’s all a creed is, a statement of faith and message! Historic creeds are extremely good statements of faith and message, both because of their profundity and succinctness and because they provide continuity with Christ’s church through the ages.

The Baptist initiative would add to their Faith and Message document an article affirming the Nicene Creed, with perhaps the others. The main purpose would be to strengthen the denomination’s affirmation of the Trinity and the Deity of Christ. The main Baptist objection to these creeds, from what I can gather, is the statement of belief in the “holy catholic church.” Creeds seem “too Catholic” anyway to most Baptists, and even if they know the term means “universal,” it still sounds too much like allegiance to the Church of Rome. (We Lutherans just translate away the problem, following a pre-Reformation practice in the German of rendering the meaning as “Christian”: we believe in the “holy Christian church,” meaning all Christians universally.)

I would think the bigger problem with the Nicene Creed for Baptists would be “I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins.” Despite their names, Baptists have a very low view of baptism, seeing it as just as an act of obedience for church membership. In the words of the Baptist Faith and Message, “it is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith” and “a church ordinance”–they don’t even use the word sacrament–that “is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership.” I don’t see how a Baptist, while still being a Baptist, could acknowledge the connection of baptism to the remission of sins as we Lutherans, as well as Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, do.

Then again, Calvinists also affirm the Nicene Creed, though I am pretty sure they don’t believe that baptism brings the forgiveness of sins either. I’m sure they have a way of interpreting that part of the creed so that it accords with their theology. (Calvinist readers, please say what that is in the comments.) I once visited a Reformed church that included the baptism of an infant, but before the rite the minister explained to the congregation that this child was not really being “saved,” but that this was being done in hope that he would “accept Christ” when he got older. Which put a damper on the proceedings.

Opinions Are Changing on Transgenderism

Contrary to common assumptions, not all change is in a progressive direction. The acceptance of transgenderism, after shooting up from out of nowhere a few years ago, is now going down.

According to a recent Pew report, in 2017 only a scant majority of Americans, 53%, believed that gender is determined at birth. Today nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65%, believe that.

Breaking it down by political affiliation, in 2017, 79% of Republicans believed that “sex assigned at birth determines gender” (Pew researchers still talk that way), which means that one out of five, 21%, did not. But today, 91% believe biology determines gender.

Democrats are much more open to transgender ideology, but some of them have also changed their position. In 2017, only 30% believed in the connection between biological sex and gender. Today 39% do.

In related news, the Biden administration’s Department of Education had issued a ruling stating that when Title IX of the Civil Rights Law forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex,” that includes “gender identity.” But a federal judge has ruled that the administration has no authority to make that addition to the law.

Taking Your Parents to a Job Interview

I have heard of job applicants bringing their parents with them to the interview, but I had no idea that the practice was so wide-spread.

A study has found that 26% of “Zoomers” (members of Generation Z, aged 12 to 27) have brought their parents to a job interview. Of those, 37% of the parents waited in the office, 26% sat in the room where the interview was taking place, and 7% answered questions for their son or daughter.

Though adult children depending on their parents to such an extent may seem pathetic–as does parents hovering over their adult children at the very moment they are launching out on their own–there is a silver lining.

At least these children, unlike other generations, are evidently not embarrassed by their parents, not cringing at their very presence. And, as one expert quoted in an article about this phenomenon said, Generation Z “values the guidance and experience that parents can undoubtedly provide.” That’s something towards the recovery of the Commandment about honoring one’s father and mother.

But the parents would do well to use their wisdom and guidance to teach their children, once they are old enough to apply for jobs, to function as adults.

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