The New York Times article on the front page of our local newspaper had the subtitle, “Evangelical pastor preaches sermons free of political views.” Of course, the subtitle is absolutely wrong, but I will get to that later. The story, you see, is about a Greg Boyd, pastor of a megachurch in the Minneapolis suburb of Maplewood, Minn. In fact, Greg is an acquaintance of mine and we are pastors in the same denomination. I owe to Greg a debt of gratitude. Because of him, I have become an amateur expert on Thomas Aquinas. In 1998-99 Greg Boyd was teaching at our denominational college/seminary in Minneapolis and caused a firestorm of controversy by taking the position that God cannot know certain things about the future. This theological position goes under the name of “Open Theology.” The “Openness” controversy threatened to tear our denomination apart. Ultimately, Greg was not expelled from his position and the denomination, while rejecting openness, did not take the hardliner’s position of re-writing our statement of faith to explicitly disenfranchise those who believed like Boyd. The upshot of this is that I dedicated my self to fully understanding God’s foreknowledge which led me to Thomas Aquinas. Long past the controversy, I am still hooked on medieval theology.

Boyd, never one to eschew controversy, is now the poster-boy for those who are uncomfortable with the so-called “religious right.” As I mentioned above, the subtitle of the New York Times article wrongly portrays Boyd as preaching sermons free of political views. This, in my opinion, is manifestly not true. Here is why. Contemporary politics, at least since the late 60s, are loaded with moral and religious issues. Being old enough to actually remember politics before 1968; I can say from personal awareness that there has been a huge fault-line that has developed pre and post the 1960s. Therefore, when Boyd excoriates Evangelical Christians for taking stands against public and politically codified immorality; he, himself is taking a political stance. Allow me to quote Boyd; the New York Times states:

“Boyd lambasted the ‘hypocrisy and pettiness’ of Christians who focus on ‘sexual issues’ like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public… ‘Those are two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,’ he said. ‘And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.’”

Actually, if you bother to read the New Testament you’ll probably find it pretty hard to avoid coming across Jesus saying some very tough things against sin, sexual immorality (even mental lust) and expressing His strong demand that his disciples openly and publicly declare their belief in Him and His message.

Boyd and others like Brian D. McLaren who is the guru of the “emerging church” movement, typically trot out the statement that “America wasn’t founded as a theocracy” as a way of pigeonholing conservative Christians as the equivalent of Islamic Jihadists. Personally, I find this sort of thinking childish, unsophisticated and disingenuous. I have never met a conservative Christian that wants to establish a Christian theocracy in America. In fact, because I run in Baptist circles, almost all of my friends are adamantly in favor of the separation of church and state as outlined in our Constitution. By the way, the First Amendment is in our Constitution largely because of the influence of Baptists. Additionally, I cannot understand how one can take Christian pride in the work of the great Evangelical abolitionists of the 19th century who helped bring an end to slavery (which both Boyd and McLaren do) and then disparage modern Evangelicals and Catholics who wage a public battle against the monstrous evil of abortion.

Like it or not, Christianity is a public religion. As opposed to New Age beliefs and classic religions such as Buddhism; Christianity is not just a private affair. Both Jesus and the Apostles demanded that Christians live in such a way that they gave witness to Christ’s lordship over every aspect of life. If Christianity had been strictly a private religion relegated to personal ritual and faith, that just did nice things for people, Christians would likely never or rarely have faced persecution. If Boyd finds contemporary Christians too dicey for his comfort level, he should read Polycarp’s testimony at his martyrdom. When was the last time you heard a Christian leader tell a public official that “Jesus is preparing your coffin.” That will scare you or put some Christian hair on your chest.

Pat Moynihan wrote in 1965: “From the wild Irish slums of the nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring a stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos… [In such a society] crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out the whole social structure — these are not only to be expected, they are virtually inevitable.” Unfortunately, Senator Moynihan was scoffed at in 1965; however, he turned out to be a prophet. Now the chicken has come home to roost.

Nationally, seventy percent of youths incarcerated in state reform institutions come from single-parent or no-parent homes. A survey of juvenile delinquents in state custody in Wisconsin found that fewer than 1/6 came from intact families; over two-fifths were illegitimate. Additionally, if a single-parent family is in a neighborhood with a large number of other single-parent families, the odds of a fatherless boy becoming involved in crime are tripled. These findings are based on a study conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Now read Thomas Aquinas from the 13th century:

“It is clear that to bring up a child requires both the care of the mother who nourishes him and even more the care of the father to train and defend him and develop him in internal and external endowments.”

Shockingly, Aquinas is saying that in human parenting, fathers are more important than mothers. Okay, everyone take a deep breath and try to stay calm—I am not mommy bashing. Please understand that Aquinas means this from the perspective of the good of mankind and not necessarily in each particular situation. Certainly, there are fathers that are a danger to children and need to be removed from homes. However, this does not change the truth (based in the nature of things) that fathers are more important in childrearing than are mothers--for the good of the species. Here is a quick way to validate this idea. At night drive into any large urban center in America (say Camden, NJ or Detroit, MI) where there is a high percentage of out-of-wedlock births. Unlock your car, and begin to walk around. You will quickly understand what I am suggesting.

The point is, fathers “develop” the “internal and external endowments” of children, particularly male children. If, for instance, a boy is raised without a father and he lives in a neighborhood without fathers, he will very likely grow up lacking internal restraints on his sexual and violent passions. He will also lack a father to prepare him for the job market and provide an entrée into the world of work--ergo, gangs and crime. In short, I am not the first person to suggest that fatherlessness leads to crime. A society with a high percentage of promiscuity and out-of-wedlock births is asking for its own destruction. Or as Pat Moynihan said, “that community asks for and gets chaos.” Promiscuity is against the nature of mankind.

Post-modern culture is addicted to semantic senility. We love bureaucratese, obfuscation, indecision, and carefully padded prevarication. We babble on in the hope that by saying enough we will say something right. On the other hand, medieval culture was obsessed with dense intellectualization. Medieval culture gave us natural law whereas postmodernism has given us relativism. The natural law, to put it bluntly, is the description of the way things are. Let’s explore an example.

We note that human children are the most vulnerable of all mammals at birth. It takes years for a human child to be able to sustain itself independent of its parents. Meanwhile, a fox-trotting foal (young horse) begins its training a week to 10 days after birth! Imagine trying to train a 10-day old baby to run. From the nature of things we see that it takes humans 15-25 years to be prepared to survive independently. From this we extrapolate that parenting is extremely important for the survival of humans. We also see from nature that skills such as language, food gathering, cooperation and a huge host of other things are necessarily passed on from human parents to their children. Consequently, we reason that it is natural for parents to educate their children.

We observe that some animals such as cats do not need both male and female to care and train their young. Consequently, there is a very weak bond—if any—between “fluffy” the cat and her male suitors. Cats by nature are sexually promiscuous. We recognize this in a backhanded way by calling promiscuous people “alley cats.” However, because of the long and intense period of care that is necessary for a human child, we see that both male and female are normally needed in order to secure a safe passage of a child into adulthood. Therefore it is normal for the human male and female to have a very strong and intense bond between them. We call this marriage. This is natural because it is derived from the necessities of human survival.

In postmodern culture we are used to people babbling on about how unimportant the “traditional” family or marriage or fathers are. This is semantic senility. Read this from Thomas Aquinas who lived in an era that was much closer to nature:

“It is clear that to bring up a child requires both the care of the mother who nourishes him and even more the care of the father to train and defend him and to develop him in internal and external endowments. Therefore promiscuity is contrary to the nature of man.” (Summa II, Q. 154, A. 2)

Amazing, huh? Thomas makes the case, based on way things are, that sexual promiscuity violates the nature of mankind, male and female parents are normally necessary, and that the father is even more important in the care of the young than the mother. Whatever you do, do not let the Massachusetts Supreme Court, NOW or the ACLU read this—they may all have a stroke on the spot.

My morning paper carried the headline story from the Associate Press subtitled: “Hezbollah rocket kills eight in Haifa; Israel strikes back, killing 15.” Accompanying the article next to the headline was the usual picture of a “sole survivor of an Israeli airstrike that killed 11 children.” The only other picture, found later in the “A” section of my paper, was one of an Israeli soldier writing a message to Hezbollah on a bomb to be dropped. The article itself spent the whole first half describing how “Hezbollah and Israel traded fierce barrages for a sixth day.” Completely lacking in the article was what is known as “context.” The context tells us why, for example, an animal control agent killed a dog in someone’s front yard. If I am given a story that only tells me that some animal control agent seemingly wantonly shot and killed poor “fluffy” in the owner’s front yard, I will be outraged and demand the agent’s resignation. However, if I am given the context of the story and informed that the dog had attacked and killed a child and was running unrestrained in a neighborhood, I will want the animal control agent commended. Likewise, if I am shown an image of a suffering Arab child and than a picture of an Israeli soldier preparing a bomb, I lack the context to make a reasoned decision as to what is actually happening. Why does it seem that we are very often not given the context of the Middle Eastern strife? The reason is “moral equivalence.”

Many influential philosophers, educators and leaders in the West deny the existence of objective truth concerning good and evil. In other words, they deny the existence of rational standards by which to determine whether the beliefs and goals of one individual, group, or nation are more valid or intrinsically superior to those of another. It is amazing how many academics have made a livelihood teaching this sophisticated madness. It is madness because, if forms of objective truth change from place to place, or differ from one country to another, it follows that what humans--hence academics--deem normal or abnormal, sane or insane, has no objective validity. In other words, don’t pay any attention to what they say. The man behind the curtain has no idea what he is talking about.

Moral equivalence is a form of moral relativism. Those who engage in the use of moral equivalence are those who describe acts of Palestinian or Hezbollah terrorism, such as suicide bombing against civilians and the firing of 1,000’s of rockets into Israeli communities, on one hand, and the retaliatory acts of the Israeli Defense Forces, on the other, as equally reprehensible. Because the Associated Press seems to be populated with journalists that believe in moral relativism and moral equivalence, you and I get to read stories about the “cycle of violence” or “the continued destruction of life on both sides” in the Middle East. Again, what is missing is the context. Islamic fundamentalists have no other goal than the utter destruction of Israel and the killing of all Jews. They specifically target civilian populations with impunity knowing that the Western media is unlikely to expose their obvious plans. When Israelis finally cannot take it any longer and strike against the terrorists; guess where the terrorists embed themselves—in civilian neighborhoods. Just a side note, Islamic fundamentalists do not share the Western code of male honor which deems it reprehensible to use innocent women and children as “shields” for one’s mayhem. From a Western male perspective, they are “lily livers.” Though many Western journalists view the nineteen 9/11 terrorists as men of courage, the average male in the U.S. views them as wretched cowards. This says a lot about journalists.

Despite what your typical Associated Press journalist may believe, there is moral objective truth which means that some individuals, groups and nations are more just than others. A democratic country defending is citizens and maniacal Jihad terrorist are not morally equivalent. It would be wise to figure this out before Islamic terrorists get an atomic bomb. It would be heartbreaking to grasp this insight just after the “flash.”

My wife is a marriage counselor. She says that she is noticing the trend in her field of married women going through mid-life crises willing to leave husbands and children to have a fling at single life. Her non-scientific analysis of this phenomenon is that more women than ever are buying into the media-myth of the glamorous “Sex and the City” slutty-girl lifestyle fueled by marriage ennui engendered by “Desperate Housewives.” Of course, these women are not thinking straight and are embarking on the envious imitation of a very dangerous and statistically non-existent lifestyle. What I mean is that the having sex-like-a-man hobby presented by “Sex and the City” characters—picking up strangers for sex and then plotting to get them out of their homes the next morning--is not the way women actually live—even in New York. It is just another fool’s gold, Devil’s lie.

Yes, certainly, some women may talk endlessly about sex, boy toys, aberrant sexual practices, and how unfulfilling marriage is; but, this is not the way most women talk. An amazing fact that seems beyond the grasp of the media is that men and women are different. One of the big differences is that women do not relentlessly pursue casual sex. In a very embarrassing study conducted at the University of Hawaii that continues to drive secularists nuts, male and female “researchers” approached single college students of the opposite sex in bars to propose three options. Option one was a date, option two was to go back to the questioner’s apartment, and option three was to have immediate sex. Not surprisingly, 50% of the men accepted the date; 69% agreed to go back to the apartment; and 75% agreed to immediate sex. However, of the women 50% agreed to a date; 6% consented to go to the apartment, and 0 (that is none, zilch, notta, goose egg, absolutely none) agreed to have sex immediately.* I am not a researcher but even I can figure out there is a difference between men and women on this issue. It’s fascinating that Ivy League educated journalists and Hollywood media producers cannot seem to figure this out. Well, maybe is more saddening than fascinating.

The truly sad thing is that so many normal women outside of Manhattan have come to think that “Sex and the City” is real. For the record it should be noted that “Sex and the City” is the brainchild of gay wunderkind Darren Star who created “Melrose Place” and “Central Park West.” As Star noted of “Sex and the City”, “I guess I just have a strong feminine side.” This seems to me to be the real point. What one is seeing in “Sex” is a male gay version of single women acting just like gay men. Can you say “Sodom and Gomorra.”

*Sileo, Chi Chi. 1995. “Studies Put Genetic Twist on theories about Sex and Love.” Insight, 3-10 July: 36-37.

Also check out: “The Sexual Revolution” (pp. 96-105), Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads, Encounter Books, 2004.