Politics In Church

Ryan Burge is a sociologist who specializes in religious matters. He recently put together some data on how eager preachers are to deliver political sermons and how eager Christians are to hear such messages in Church. The short answer to both is "not very much."

Here are a couple of charts he put together based on his data:

Burge writes:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. In most churches, 40-50% of people think that their clergy should avoid discussions of political division completely.

Then, another 30-40% mostly think that this is a bad idea. You just don’t see a lot of church-going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

This is interesting because the perception among a lot of secular folk is that churches are hotbeds of political indoctrination. Burge mentions this:

Doing a lot of public facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning.

The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis and when they touch on anything that may be in the political realm it’s about topics like racism and income inequality. Both can be discussed in fairly apolitical ways.

I wonder if this is true of African American churches. Many people have the impression that they're more political than churches that are mostly white, but if Burge has any data on this he didn't present it in his article.

He closes with this:

The other side of this is that huge majorities of congregations just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit. They don’t want their pastor or priest to try and discuss the political divides that we are facing. Being around church people my entire life, that’s the clear impression I’ve always gotten.

They see Sunday worship as a respite from all the Culture Wars and the talking heads and the political battles that seem to consume our every waking moment.

Yes, there are pastors who are expressly political. You often see them on social media - but this data makes the point clear: these religious leaders are outliers. They must be understood in that context.

Burge has more on this topic at the link.

A Biologist Confronts Wokeness

Outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he states his reasons (and those of fellow atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) for resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

Coyne explains that the organization has abandoned science by capitulating to those who insist that a woman is "whoever she says she is." Coyne wrote a letter rebutting transgender ideology, which the Foundation published but then removed from their website because, they declared, its publication was "an error of judgment," “does not reflect our values or principles,” and had caused “distress.” The FFRF, they insisted, stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”

Coyne sees this as misguided and the Foundation's censorship as a betrayal of science.

There's an irony in Coyne's complaint, however. As David Klinghoffer relates at Evolution News, Coyne has omitted two relevant points from his WSJ article. Here's Klinghoffer:

First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.

In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.

Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, "Why Evolution Is True" (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”).

Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.

Indeed, Darwinians, so far from being champions of free speech, have been among the most censorious people in our culture, demanding that all university instructors toe the Darwinian line or suffer unhappy professional consequences.

Klinghoffer continues:

And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from?

In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”

Klinghoffer wants to argue that transgender ideology is not at all a denial of evolution but rather is perfectly compatible with it which is true, but I'd go one step further. I'd agree with Coyne that transgenderism is a product of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory, but these are all, in many respects, outgrowths of the atheism Coyne himself embraces.

Atheism leads to skepticism about the possibility of absolute truth, and that epistemic skepticism manifested itself in the 20th century in existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. If Coyne believes that transgender ideology is a betrayal of science, perhaps he should examine how and why the atheism on which he stands has resulted in the ideas that have produced it.

You can read the rest of Klinghoffer's piece at the link.

Why Would Anyone Oppose This?

What reasons does anyone have for opposing any of the following:

• deporting non-citizen supporters of terrorist organizations
• deporting non-citizen rapists, child molesters, and murderers
• exploiting natural gas and nuclear energy to meet our electrical needs
• eliminating waste and fraud in the government
• removing ineligible recipients from social security and medicare rolls
• tightening border security and vetting immigrants
• measures to insure that only citizens vote
• measures to enable minority kids to get out of failing inner city public schools
• protecting girls and women from men who delude themselves and others into thinking that they're really women and should be able to compete against girls in sports and who demand to dress in female locker rooms and be incarcerated in women's prisons.

If you have a friend or family member who thinks any of these should be opposed and who votes accordingly, you might ask them why.

Why Taiwan Matters

There's much in the news about a possible conflict between the U.S. and China over the island of Taiwan, and a lot of us might wonder why we should risk WWIII over an island thousands of miles away from us but only about 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

In his book Seven Things You Can't Say about China (see yestrday's post on VP), Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lays out the importance of Taiwan for our future well-being in a chapter titled China Could Win.

The Taiwanese people are mostly descendants of Chinese refugees fleeing from the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the wake of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. Under their leader Chiang Kai-shek these refugees formed their own government and declared themselves to be independent of China. We guaranteed their safety then and have guaranteed it ever since, despite the fact that China sees Taiwan as part of China and threatens to take it by force.

Cotton writes that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would precipitate a stock-market crash causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs. The severing of ties with China would result in depleted goods on store and pharmacy shelves, and soaring prices. All of this would lead to a worldwide "Great Depression."

Our automobile industry, along with all the supporting industries and businesses - steel, aluminum, dealerships, parts stores, etc. - would be devastated. As would everything, such as agriculture, that depends on transportation to get goods to market.

The tech industry and every industry that relies on electronics would also be ruined since Taiwan is the dominant producer of the world's most sophisticated computer chips. Anything that uses these chips, which is almost everything, would soon be unavailable.

If the U.S. failed to come to Taiwan's aid against China, or even if we did but failed to prevent the invasion, our alliances would weaken as other countries reassessed our willingness or ability to meet our commitments.

Controlling Taiwan would permit China to project power into the Pacific and cut off the sea lanes that run through the South China Sea, virtually isolating Japan and South Korea from their main suppliers of oil. The Philippines and Southeast Asia would be in even greater peril from Chinese military and economic domination.

Once America's military protection from China was no longer seen to be reliable, nations would feel the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.

Totalitarians around the globe would be energized to increase the repression of their people and invade their neighbors knowing that the U.S. was no longer the economic and military threat to them that it once was.

China would be in a position to dictate economic terms to much of the world, including, perhaps, the U.S., and demand that other countries stop trading in dollars, which would wreak havoc upon Americans seeking loans to buy homes and whatever else was still available.

There are numerous other consequences of a Chinese assault on Taiwan that Cotton addresses in his book, but he closes the chapter with this:

China could defeat America in the global struggle for mastery; it all starts and really ends in Taiwan. No one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up, especially without knowing how the United States would respond. But however it turns out, it would set off a catastrophic chain of events. The only winning strategy to preserve American primacy is to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.

Much of the world is focused on Ukraine and the Middle East at the moment, but the bigger threat to world peace is China, and we need to understand why. Buying and reading Senator Cotton's book is a good way to help us do that.

Seven Things You Can't Say About China

Senator Tom Cotton (R. AR) has written an amazingly helpful book titled Seven Things You Can't Say About China. Cotton is an Iraq and Afghanistan combat vet who is currently serving in the Senate as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Regarding China he knows whereof he speaks.

Here are the seven things that many Americans feel they cannot say about China on pain of suffering economic or professional consequences:

1. China Is an Evil Empire: The cruelty of their persecution of Christians and other religions, as well as their own people, is horrifying.
2. China Is Preparing for War: The growth of their military, including their nuclear arsenal, is frightening.
3. China Is Waging Economic World War: They're using every means to make the world economically dependent upon them so they can control the decisions governments around the world make.
4. China Has Infiltrated Our Society: Americans in virtually every niche of our society, from Hollywood to professional sports, the news media, universities, and corporations, are too intimidated by China to do or say anything that displeases them.
5. China Has Infiltrated Our Government: By placing sympathizers in the government and military, their espionage efforts have greatly accelerated over the last decade, costing us billions in intellectual capital.
6. China Is coming for Our Kids: Through social media and other forms of influence, including drugs like fentanyl, China is increasing its grip on the minds of our young.
7. China Could Win

Communist China has gained enormous influence over what can be said about them in our society. Each page of Cotton's book is replete with examples of how attempts to tell the truth about the Chinese government have resulted in people losing their jobs, being canceled or otherwise intimidated into docility.

The book is not long, about 190 pages, but it's full of information of which every American needs to be aware, and I highly recommend it.

You can purchase the book on Amazon, of course, but I want to plug a small independent bookstore called Hearts and Minds that's run by friends of mine. Their order form is here.

A Philosopher Considers Cosmic Fine-Tuning

The physicist Bernard Carr once declared that "if you don't want God you better have a multiverse." What he meant is that the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants that comprise the fabric of our universe have to be calibrated with an astonishing precision or else life could not exist.

That dozens of these values should be so exquisitely fine-tuned as to permit life is such an astronomically improbable state of affairs if our universe is the only one that exists that the only way to avoid the conclusion that it was intentionally designed to be this way is to accept the idea that there are an incomprehensibly vast number of other universes beyond our own that are all different.

If that's so, then the existence of one as fine-tuned for life as is ours becomes almost inevitable, just as the odds of getting a royal flush if one is dealt enough hands of cards becomes inevitable.

Yet the multiverse hypothesis seems to be foundering, and Phillip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, explains why in a recent article at The Conversation. Goff writes:

One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very narrow range.

One of the examples of fine-tuning which has most baffled physicists is the strength of dark energy, the force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. If that force had been just an infinitesimally amount stronger, matter couldn’t clump together. No two particles would have ever combined, meaning no stars, planets, or any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.

If that force had been an infinitesimally amount weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity. This means the universe would have collapsed back on itself within the first split-second – again meaning no stars or planets or life. To allow for the possibility of life, the strength of dark energy had to be, like Goldilocks’s porridge, “just right”.

This is just one example, and there are many others.

The strength of dark energy is said to be fine-tuned to within one part in 10^123. For a point of comparison there are "only" 10^80 atoms in the entire known universe. Goff continues:

The most popular explanation for the fine-tuning of physics is that we live in one universe among a multiverse. If enough people buy lottery tickets, it becomes probable that somebody is going to have the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with different numbers in their physics, it becomes likely that some universe is going to have the right numbers for life.

Goff, though formerly a believer in the multiverse, has been persuaded that the multiverse hypothesis is based on a fallacy. He illustrates the fallcy thus:

Suppose Betty is the only person playing in her local bingo hall one night, and in an incredible run of luck, all of her numbers come up in the first minute.

Betty thinks to herself: “Wow, there must be lots of people playing bingo in other bingo halls tonight!” Her reasoning is: if there are lots of people playing throughout the country, then it’s not so improbable that somebody would get all their numbers called out in the first minute.

But this is an instance of the inverse gambler’s fallacy. No matter how many people are or are not playing in other bingo halls throughout the land, probability theory says it is no more likely that Betty herself would have such a run of luck.

It’s like playing dice. If we get several sixes in a row, we wrongly assume that we are less likely to get sixes in the next few throws. And if we don’t get any sixes for a while, we wrongly assume that there must have been loads of sixes in the past.

But in reality, each throw has an exact and equal probability of one in six of getting a specific number.

Multiverse theorists commit the same fallacy. They think: “Wow, how improbable that our universe has the right numbers for life; there must be many other universes out there with the wrong numbers!” But this is just like Betty thinking she can explain her run of luck in terms of other people playing bingo.

When this particular universe was created, as in a die throw, it still had a specific, low chance of getting the right numbers.

Betty would be wrong to infer that many people are playing bingo. Likewise, multiverse theorists are wrong to infer from fine-tuning to many universes.

Goff then looks at the question whether there is scientific evidence for a multiverse and also examines a hypothesis called the "anthropic principle" which is another attempt to avoid the conclusion that fine-tuning points to an intelligent creator. You can read about that peculiar argument and also why there's only very tenuous scientific evidence for a multiverse at the link.

So, does Goff accept Bernard Carr's other option, that the universe we live in was created by God. Well, no. Instead he embraces the pantheistic idea that the cosmos is itself the intelligent, purposeful agent of its own creation:

[We] face a choice. Either it’s an incredible fluke that our universe happened to have the right numbers. Or the numbers are as they are because nature is somehow driven or directed to develop complexity and life by some invisible, inbuilt principle.

In my opinion, the first option is too improbable to take seriously. My book presents a theory of the second option – cosmic purpose – and discusses its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Evidently, any theory, no matter how bizarre or lacking in evidential support, is preferable to having to accept that the universe is the creation of an intelligent, personal and transcendent God. Why?

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated, and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud that conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Not only social atomization and widespread loneliness, but also the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we still find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years, and there are so many entertainment options that one feels it almost unusual to find someone who watches the same tv shows or the same podcasts.

Arendt asserts that when people lack community - a sense of belonging - they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is at bottom an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s.

Could we, too, be slouching toward totalitarianism?

During the covid pandemic our government imposed draconian restrictions on society that almost totally isolated people from each other. They closed schools, limited athletic events, and restricted the size of gatherings to a relatively few people who were required to hide their faces behind masks and maintain "social distance." If and when another deadly virus should strike would those in our government who harbor totalitarian inclinations be even more repressive?

What happened during the pandemic should give us pause. If we think tyranny couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the fragile state of our contemporary culture.