By the end of June, I will have been at Houston Baptist University for one year.

What have I learned?

First, I know now how blessed I am to be here. This is the most exciting academic moment in my experience in higher education.

HBU did not need me, but I get to be at HBU.

Second, President Sloan is a leader. He listens, he delegates, he hears from our Board, but he leads. Sloan is not afraid of risk: we are a small school starting both NCAA football and one of the largest apologetics programs in the nation.  

Third, HBU is diverse where it should be and united where it should be. Houston is a diverse city and HBU fully reflects that diversity. We are what most Christian colleges aspire to be, but we have achieved this goal while strengthening our commitment to core values.

Fourth, HBU requires all her students to work through a rigorous, common Western core with an emphasis on Judeo-Christian values. Most schools would not require students to read so much, write so well, or think so clearly and few would allow an emphasis on Western and Christian values.

Find a school as diverse with a stronger common core and you should go there and not here. Otherwise, this is a school that does what most say cannot be done and others will not do.

Fifth, The Honors College is amazing and growing stronger. Under the leadership of Bob Stacey and continuing under Gary Hartenburg, The Honors College is an intense community. Because HBU draws from such a wide range of backgrounds, discussions and student ideas cover every perspective, but are guided by a faculty dedicated to the core values of the school.

The addition of three more full time faculty can only improve a good thing.

Sixth, the school knows her weaknesses, acknowledges them, and has a master plan to fix it. If one hundred million dollars dropped from heaven on many schools, the administration would set up a study team to figure out what to do. We have a vision that decently and in order could digest the funds and then go forward.

We aren’t begging, but we know to do with it if we get it.

Seventh, HBU has a great history. I have studied the history of this young school and it is amazing. There was nothing here fifty years ago, now there is a Van Dyke, four museums, and thousands of alumni.

In many ways, I aspire to equal some of the accomplishments of the 1970’s in my time!

Eighth, I thought having no tenure was a good idea, now I think it critical to success. No tenure encourages faculty growth. We had faculty that have served here forty-five years, but no faculty that have stopped serving. HBU can recognize seasons of a career, but not functional retirement.

We renew the vision every year when we issue contracts.

Ninth, NCAA sports are a very good thing. Why? Playing, watching, or rooting for sports teams makes students want to be here. On-line education lacks the feel of a fall football game.

NCAA sports, in our case the Southland conference, will mean some televised games and scores. It is “big time,” but not so big that it consumes everything else. Big schools may worship sports, but student athletes at schools our size do better than non-student athletes. Vic Shealy, our football coach, “gets it” when it comes to character formation and academics.

Finally, every day I meet some exciting faculty member, administrator, or student. This place is alive with ideas. It might be Dr. Doni Wilson blogging on Great Gatsby. Tomorrow it will be Dr. Boyleston reading his award winning poetry. The next day Kim Gaynor will share insights with me about media: new and old.

And then I go home to a wife named Hope in a town named Sugar Land.

Really.

We are in a mythic moment.

The Wall Street Journal, noting the retirement of Donald Kagan, states the obvious: higher education is broken. Its brokenness begins with the faculty.

College is expensive, dominated by faculty unions, and hostile to moral education. Higher education does research well and is vital to our continued economic growth, but it no longer forms leaders fit for Republican values.

What does it profit our republic if we gain scientific power, but lose any ability to use it morally?

Kagan is right that law and liberty must remain in tension for a republic to thrive. If anything, he understates the degree to which liberty has degenerated to the libertine. But Kagan is wrong that the fight is ended. Parents and students have a choice in higher education: schools with a strong Western core, a commitment to science and research, and traditional moral values still exist.

I work at one of those schools.

Legacy colleges and universities will continue to dominate for a time based on inherited prestige and wealth, but a change is coming.

It is coming because while wealthy, historically excellent schools will continue to dominate in scientific areas, they have abdicated moral leadership. All the scientists in creation cannot get an “ought” from the “is” they study, but a republic requires a basic consensus on what “ought to be.”

Yale and other legacy schools are part of the problem, but this brave Yale professor has not found the cure.

A soft secularism did not provide the thunder from New England pulpits for liberty or send the boys in blue marching to die to “make men free” as Jesus died to “make men holy.” Soft secularism cannot resist the twin evils of theocracy or the bloodthirsty secularism that dominated the twentieth century.

Reason is a tool, not a blueprint for building a republic. Our Founders used the tool of reason and provided a blueprint based on their Western values: a fusion of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ideas.

This middle ground was hard to find and was the work of centuries of Western civilization. Christian apologist and philosopher John Locke understood the need for a moral consensus built on natural law and revealed religion. If a person accepted the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, then the commonwealth would tolerate his or her private beliefs.

At Houston Baptist University, along with other smaller, but growing, schools, the job is still being done. Faculty members are committed to a common Western core serving one of the most diverse, urban groups of students in the nation.  HBU’s administration is ready to defend republican values against extremism on the right and left. We embrace the need for research, but not at the expense of moral education. Our education is classical, not trendy, and we love liberty in markets constrained by moral values.

We know how to set the entrepreneur free while retaining the moral clarity needed to condemn the Scrooge.

More people are discovering this option and opting out of government schools or private schools dominated by government-think.

Christianity can provide that foundation for many citizens, and my university is here to help renew John Locke’s vision.  There is still time for a revival of the old faith, before extremists, either secular or religious, destroy our peace.

I see that revival every day in Houston Baptist University’s students and faculty.

Without it, the treason of the professors may indeed doom the Republic.

Rule Number One: I will not blame mainstream members of a group for the actions in Boston of extremists. I will blame the extremists.

Rule Number Two: I will not try far-fetched linkage of this bombing to my favorite political clause.

Rule Number Three: I will remember that the first news from any act of violence is almost always incorrect.

Rule Number Four: I will not supersaturate in the news. If I must do something I will pray and give money to the Red Cross.

Rule Number Five: I will not overly focus on stupid social media comments by those I don’t agree with. Selection bias is real.

Rule Number Six: I will not respond to social media trolling.

Rule Number Seven: I will remember that this crisis is not about me, but about those suffering, and I will pray accordingly.

Rule Number Eight: I will recall to pray for my enemies. No hate, but justice.

Rule Number Nine: This is the worst possible time to speculate in any area outside of my area of expertise.

Rule Number Ten: I will give my fears to Jesus and rest in His love.

Her alma mater may not be thrilled with her politics, but one American university would be happy to claim her. Margaret Thatcher came to Houston Baptist University and I cherish a picture of one of the university founders walking with her into the event held in her honor.

I know from speaking to him the honor he felt: she was America’s friend and ally.

Even my generation glosses over how marvelous the smashing of the Soviet Union was in the 1980’s. Thatcher, Reagan, and the Blessed John Paul applied external pressure of just the right sort, at exactly the right time, in precisely the right places and one of the bloodiest, most tyrannical regimes in human history died.

Where some lost themselves to jingoism and others to moral equivalence, Thatcher understood there was no comparison between British sins and Soviet crimes against humanity — and helped defeat a monstrous tyranny with minimal loss of British lives.

She was right on the great issue of the time — the evils of godless communism — and her steadfast support when other allies wobbled made all the difference.

Her intellect was first-rate and her political skills remarkable, but the same thing could be said about Bill Clinton. And yet, like Grover Cleveland, Clinton is likely to fade over time and be recalled, when he is recalled at all, twixt Reagan and Obama. Britain has had many peacetime prime ministers, but Thatcher was one of the greatest, greater than Churchill if his wartime tenure were excluded, and will dominate her era.

Thatcher made mistakes, some serious. Her support for some dictators is difficult to square with the big picture and the Cold War did not justify it. But Britain had become weak, overly controlled by unions, and Thatcher broke Britain free.

What made Thatcher great was her deep connection to the British past and her repeated attempts, sometimes failed, to make past wisdom relevant. She was no slave to bad ideas (some old ideas are just old) and her very success challenged class and sexual barriers. She was a grocer’s daughter from the wrong class to be PM, trained in chemistry not typical for a pol, and a woman leading the Tory party. What was almost unique was that Thatcher could reject the bad without going too far and destroying the good.

She conserved what should and could be saved, but she was just one person and the decline of Britain could only be delayed. From Thatcher to Cameron is a loss of intellect, courage, and character, but societies get the leaders they deserve.

Thatcher was often wrong, but she was always principled and her general direction was correct. Major, Blair, and Cameron get some details better, but they cling to unreal assumptions about humanity, Britain, and the world. Her world was that of a green grocer’s daughter open to the best of intellectual class. Their world is driven by assumptions of an academic and entertainment culture increasingly cut off from the Divine order.

One example, and it is a small one, makes the point: Thatcher bravely defended traditional marriage and family, but the limits of politics, limits she accepted, meant her staying action failed. Thatcher reminds Christians that it is better to have the music, television, schools and other cultural institutions than 10 Downing Street.

The British Christian establishment demonstrates beyond possibility of dispute that no compromise with modernity will be enough to stave off decadence. Prime Minister Thatcher’s time as premier shows the limits of political support. The PM may be with you, but if the West-End isn’t, the country eventually becomes like the West End . . . until the unreality cuts down Britain as surely as the fantasies, vice, and injustice described by Dickens caught up with pre-Revolutionary France.

Meanwhile, Christians should follow Lady Thatcher’s example and refuse panic. We must be men and women “not for turning.”  We will need to compromise where we can, but be steady where we cannot. We may even fail in the short term, as she did. My school, HBU, is getting ready for the long haul.

She may be the last we will see for some time, but she will always be HBU’s prime minister.

The Warren family lost a son.

I wish there was something I could do to comfort this family, but cannot form any helpful words. Should I reach out? I wonder if it is appropriate for me to write publicly about their private pain, until I see that this pain has become public.

They have no need for any wisdom from me and I would not insult grief by pretending a parent can be talked out of the pain of losing a child to suicide.

Their pain is their pain and nobody can relate to it whatever our own experiences might be. Pain and difficulty incarnate themselves in a person’s life in unique ways. The sins, problems, and the start of the pain are the same for us all, part of our common humanity, but then suffering works itself into the crevices, folds, and wrinkles we have made in our particular lives.

The hurts are similar, but it is the particular pain that is so difficult. General advice is worse than useless at such times. It helps with the general pain, but not the real ache that no man can touch, because the man suffering it cannot reach that place and the rest of us cannot find it.

Or so I have found it.

To lose a child . . . I cry with David: “my son, my son.” I would die rather than see any of my children die, but that is not a choice most of us ever get. Life is too severe for that simple mercy. My Dad knew. He would have done anything to help me, but in my worst days had to give me to God.

I have been so depressed that I thought about taking my own life in my early twenties and my own family, including my wife, struggles with a depression that has a biological root. Some of my Christian friends cannot understand this fact, because they think all such problems have a spiritual solution. Some such problems do, mine often does, but others do not: my wife’s do not.

Spiritual problems require spiritual cures and depression is not always a spiritual problem.

All human problems are in a deep sense of the result of the break between God and humanity that came because of sin, but sin works on a physical, mental, and spiritual level. We don’t go to the medical doctor to confess our spiritual failings, but this implies we shouldn’t go to our pastor to deal with biological problems.

Some depression has a physical cause, other depression is the result of mental choices, and other sorrows have sinful choices we have made as their cause.

Why doesn’t God just heal? He does heal, but slowly. Why? God loves each person so much He does not root all that is wrong immediately. If He did, then the structure of our being; body, soul, and spirit, would collapse. We would be mere rubble. Instead, he invites us to be transformed by renewal.

Our physical renewal begins in aging, moves through death, into life. We can, justly, put of this process, but not stop it, because the problems in our physical nature run too deep for superficial cures.

The same applies to our minds and souls. We can be saved, and once saved our healing can begin, but only begin. The problem is too deep for quick cures. You can “pray away” the problems, but only over long periods of time and with great suffering. The final cure, the severe mercy to heal our broken state, is death. We are judged by Christ’s merits, die with Him, and then come to new life.

This side of the eternal City of God nobody will be free of physical, spiritual, or mental pain. The good news is that progress is possible, we can become more like ourselves because God helps us become more like Jesus, the only human who is not at all broken.

We tried to break Him, but He endured!

This is why my immediate reaction to this death was so flawed. The Warren family used all the tools God has given us to help their son: medicine, Faith, and psychiatry. Nothing worked . . . or is that a presumption on my part.

The outcome was horrible, but even that broken moment can be healed in Paradise. The crooked will all be made straight. The rough places smooth.

Why didn’t Christianity help this young man? For all I know it did. It prepared him for the City of God. Why didn’t science help this young man? For all I know it did. It helped him to work out his salvation as long as he could. Why didn’t psychology help? For all I know it did.

We work until the night comes and then we cease from our labor. This is so true, that at some points in my life I wondered if I could go on. I did go on, because it was right to do so as long as I could, because however painful the healing had to continue.

The healing process will not end with my death anyway, if Christian teaching is to be believed, but will continue. (See C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce.) If I can choose, then I must leave the healing in the hands of the Great Physician or risk spoiling His sure cure.

Progress, small as it may seem, I do see, but not always. Sometimes it is too small for my nearsightedness.

Some people are so broken that in the end they cannot choose for themselves. They did not kill themselves, their disease, mental, physical, or emotional, kills them.

I don’t know what was true about the Warren son . . . but I know he had good and decent parents who loved him. This young man professed faith in a God that loves all his prodigal children. Nobody dies in sinless perfection, but we can die in having been made right with God . . . and in the process of perfection.

And someday, some Final Day, we will be fully changed, glorified, and begin the eternal process of changing into our full humanity untied with the Divine. Meanwhile, I pray for the Warrens and for their son. May his soul and that the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

Hosanna! Maranatha!

Recently, Reed Galen, deputy campaign manager for the McCain camp gave some political advice. While this might be compared to asking coaches of the Minnesota Vikings how to win a Super Bowl, this particular advice has become conventional wisdom amongst most people with graduate education in the Republican Party.
He opines:

Regardless of party affiliation, young voters view gay marriage as utterly uncontroversial. With all of the other problems the country has to solve, the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they see fit seems a foregone conclusion.

Opinions are unlikely to change over the course of two days this week. The high court will take its time to decide the merits of the cases. Whatever the justices decide, we should look in our collective national mirror and ask ourselves : Are we a country, and a party, of more freedom or less.

We are told that people strongly homosexual are roughly six percent of the population. It is interesting to observe that the young adults who view homosexuality as a sin and support traditional marriage are at least three times their number. Evidently, however, these young adults are to be forced into a political closet and told to pretend to agree or Mr. Galen merely pretends they don’t exist.

Such young adults should start wearing shirts that proclaim they are “one in five,” that they too are children and grandchildren made as invisible in the media as the millions who still pray before their meals.

In fact, even those young Americans who, with great moral difficulty, are able to concede civil marriage rights, though they wish they did not have to do so, do not exist. All the Americans who favor “gay marriage” view the right to vice as utterly uncontroversial!

This is false, but it is the sort of falsehood that a segment of the educated class use to comfort themselves. If they only act now, opposition to their view will vanish just as abortion became merely a medical procedure once old people in the 1970’s died out.

If one points out the opposite happened, then after a painful silence, one is told that these remnants of young people are confused by other old people and corrupted by outside influences. In the world of American higher education, there are always old traditionalists confusing a segment of the young, just as in the Soviet Union for seventy years the rulers comforted themselves that only “grandmothers” went to Church.

After seventy years these were very, very old grandmothers, but still the future was with communism. And once it was. There was a day when all the youth saw the future in what were then new ideas and knew this social experiment would work.

People who questioned this were mocked as being behind the curve of history.

Of course, gay marriage is not nearly so sweeping a social program and is not likely to be as harmful and certainly not harmful in the same way. Unless our assent is demanded by the state, then gay marriage is a move to social decadence not to tyranny. More serious in that regard are easy divorce, adultery, and fornication. Pop culture now often assumes that first comes attraction, then sex (safe of course!), then love, then moving in together, then (maybe) marriage. We face America-become-Vegas more than America-become-North Korea and for that we can be thankful.

If you are a poor person, then good luck to that. The best thing about gay marriage is that at least someone is wanting to get married.

I would rather live in Vanity Faire than Mordor.

Nor should we panic about the future. We are declaring a vice a right, a sin a virtue, but then Americans have often done this. Slavery was after all a “property right” and we survived this morally depraved judgment.

This intellectual fad, despite all dangers, will fade just as other fads labeled “science” or “progress” have done many times in the history of the Christian church. I am not likely to see it, but it will happen.

Still we live in very ethically incoherent times. Where will most people get their morality? On basis should Americans decide what “should be?” The traditional Christian consensus is vanishing for the moment, but it is being replaced by hedonism.

Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, are adverse to any check, public or private, on their pleasure. As long as “it doesn’t hurt anyone” with harm made very individual, measured over the short term, and mostly physical. The degradation of the soul doesn’t show up on a CAT scan and so we can ignore it.

One can see this “consistency” of ethical hedonism in polls. Any question to check or moderate desire is unpopular. When the left attacks gluttony or the right promiscuity, both are mocked. That we are too gluttonous or too promiscuous is not considered . . . or mostly (almost entirely) in terms of the health of the human animal.

Eventually such simple hedonism, still undergirded by remnants of the jolly parts of Christianity, must perish by its sheer incoherence and its destructive havoc on the poor.

Then from the Pope to the Southern Baptists today’s righteous remnant of young people, grown battle tested by time will introduce again the Christian alternative.

Our distant future, if we are to remain free, will look more like our Christian past.

As parents and young adults decide where to put their money and time, some will choose a Christian college. Good idea. I have found that it is easier to discuss the issues that matter there and found a range of opinions closer to reality. College isn’t a church so a wise parent accepts a range of views, but you are paying extra for a Christian worldview, so make sure you are getting access to  it.

Start by deciding what you want from a Christian higher education. Are you anti-Darwinist, but want evolution taught? Do you want Intelligent Design or creation mocked? What do think about Scripture? Is it true when it speaks to history?

Work out what you think and want and then find a school that matches your vision for discipleship. You are paying for mentors: information you can get for free!

Here are five questions that will reveal if you are going to the right Christian college:

1. Would the school be “mere Christian” enough to hire C.S. Lewis or Francis Schaeffer?

Whatever one things of drinking and smoking, our culture is not being lost because of these two lifestyle choices.  Lewis’ pipe or Schaeffer’s view of eschatology (what happens in End TImes) isn’t going to destroy us. If your choice  in a college wouldn’t hire Lewis or Schaeffer, then they are probably still mired in battles worth fighting when we controlled enough of the culture to make details matter.

Lewis did have a lower view of Scripture than I might prefer in a candidate, but he majored in the majors of his time. A great many Christian colleges would pass on Lewis and hire a candidate who could check all the right nineteenth century boxes, but is bad on the issues of our day.

Francis Schaeffer presents another challenge. He was a well read public intellectual. Does such a type have a prayer of geting a job at the school where you apply? Secular schools (correctly) hire public intellectuals to mold the next generation, but Christian colleges shun our own “middle brow” types. Why? Are they about to become a major research university . . . really? Or are they just ashamed of the conservative views?

If your school would not hire Schaeffer merely because he is Reformed or was annoying the secularists or wrote in a comprehensible manner, then it is far too snobbish, narrow and fighting all the wrong battles.

Again, whatever is to be said for a narrower denominational education surely this is not the time for it.

2. Ask to speak to a random, younger member of the psychology or sociology department. Ask them for an email address and then ask for (in writing) their views on the burning social questions of our day. If they waffle, you know what they think. Ask yourself: “Do I want to pay extra for similar views to a state university on the Big Topics?”

3. Find out if Big Questions can be asked. Having a common core and philosophy can be a good thing, but not if it breeds a culture of fear and repression. Can I ask in class for a student to defend the truth of God’s word? Are secular arguments fairly presented? Do the great works get read, included works by Marx and Nietzsche? All people must be treated as we would wish secular schools to treat our ideas: seriously. Of course, taking an idea seriously, does not mean the particular community must agree with it.

You are not paying for Sunday School, that is free, and propaganda without the “other side” is worse than useless.

A voluntary association of traditional Christians who self-select is not the same as a community held together by fear for jobs. Which is your school? One way to know is how often the Big Questions are asked by administration in dialog with faculty. If the President and Provost have traditional views, but are just drifting along with the academic flow, then you know what the working faculty thinks.

For example, if a strongly Reformed school IS important to you, then don’t ask if the President is Reformed. Ask faculty (before they know your opinion) if they think it is fair that all the faculty at the school must be Creedal Reformed. If they waffle and don’t cheerfully defend their mission, then you know that the working members of the school actually dislike the mission and mostly ignore it.

4. Pick up the student newspaper. Read it. Do you like it? Do you hope your student grows up to sound like the writers?

5. Walk through the art gallery. If your school has no art gallery, then don’t go.

What is “coming out” of the student body? Shocking art, and there will be shocking art at a good school, is necessary in our disgusting culture, but is the main target the supine traditional Church or the dominant secular culture? Talk to the artists. What are their concerns? What is their vocation? One faculty member (not at a school at which I have worked) once said to me: “My goal is for my Christian students to know they can say ‘b-d.’” Find out their sense of vocation.

HBU has nothing to fear from such an examination and welcomes it. If your college doesn’t want informed parental choice, then something is very wrong. You have many choices, from very conservative schools where only one perspective is taught to schools called Christian where most professors will discourage your views. Know what you want. You are paying extra for it compared to State U. It it is worth it, by the way, but only if you don’t think you are getting “Conservative U” when you are really getting “Not What We Claim U.”

And if the Provost (the senior academic officer) will not speak to parents openly about any issue, then you know something is wrong. Ask to see the Provost . . . at least in a group setting.

Can’t wait to talk.

I pray for President Obama every day and have done so for four years now, but now I do not know what to do. Evidently, my prayers offend him, even though I have only asked that God grant him long life, wisdom, and protection.

Does Mr. Obama welcome my prayers even though I believe in the sexual morality that’s taught in the Bible on which he’ll take the oath of office?

I am confused, but mostly for one simple reason: President Obama will take the oath of office on Sacred Scriptures. Why keep the Bible, but object to prayers by Bible believers?

From under the Internet bridge where trolls dwell will come the complaint that nobody sane believes in Biblical morality. Obama is using the Bible, because every President of the United States from Washington (who kissed the Book!) has done so.

Obama doesn’t believe the Bible, because nobody in American history in the mainstream has ever believed most of it. President Obama has just done to sexual morality what the rest of us, including mainstream Christians, did long ago. The Troll will rant about eating shell fish or the rape laws in ancient Israel. Apparently, in two thousand years of Church history, intelligent Jews and Christians keep giving up on “impossible” areas of Biblical morality without noticing it.

Now the brave Troll will tell us that Mr. Obama is just like we are: he loves the Bible while ignoring the nasty bits just like the rest of the sane. He uses the Bible, because it is a harmless costume from the Founders. A more skeptical reader than the Troll might worry that the same Troll is usually ranting that the Founding of America was totally secular and that religion and the state must be utterly separate.

But we need not ask secular Trolls to be consistent, we must demand they be literate.

After all, how plausible is this idea that nobody takes all the Bible’s morality seriously? Did literary scholars such as the late C.S. Lewis or philosophers such as Richard Swinburne not notice this self-deception? Did we have to await the twenty-first century atheist to find out our folly?

Probably not, since nineteenth century village atheists made similar complaints, though too many people in the nineteenth century had an education in classics to give the argument much force. Learn to read Greek texts, even in translation, and the village atheist argument about the Bible and morality sounds foolish.

Whatever the merits of our technical education, too few of us get a sound grounding in our roots. We lack classical reading skills so we tend to read old books as if they were new books written on scrolls instead of computers. But ancient authors were not just modern authors with quills, they had a different worldview.

Ancient Biblical law books require some cultural sophistication to read. Weirdly, the same people who would scoff at the Ugly American Tourist who cannot be bothered to learn the subtle linguistic norms of another culture (“adjectives oft come after the noun in our language,” the guide explained wearily) butcher old cultures’ thought patterns.

Some Biblical laws applied only to a nomadic people. Some were meant for a poor and embattled kingdom…and others were universal. Scholars might argue at the margins, but there are sensible ways to differentiate the categories.

Sexual desire, like any physical desire, deceives us easily. It makes demands that humans exiled from God find overwhelming. Most people in most places in most times have discovered that restricting those desires is necessary for civilization. They had a word for cultures that did not: decadent.

We haven’t discovered anything new that would change morality. Our Constitution, signed by the Founders “in the year of our Lord,” remains incomprehensible apart from the classical and Christian tradition.

President Obama is right to take the Oath on the Bible, but he is wrong to reject its morality. He is divisive to reject the morality of many Americans and most of the globe in a fit of parochial, partisan exclusion.

If President Obama doesn’t want the prayers of good men like Lou Giglio, then he doesn’t want my prayers. And yet the Bible, the morality of the Bible, commands I pray for him anyway. I must love him, I must honor him, and I must ask God to give him wisdom. And so I will pray tonight as I have every night:

“God save our Republic and my President Barack Obama.”

The culture war, we are told by clever men, has been lost. It is true that Christians and cultural conservatives, to the extent these groups overlap, have lost a series of battles, but losing battles is not losing. Napoleon won a great many battles, but lost the war. Soviet communism won battle after battle, but the Soviets are no more. The culture war is not over, because Houston Baptist University  has not surrendered. In fact we have just begun to fight.

Now the other side of the culture war might be amused by this  . . . rather like Sauron discovering the Shire is declaring war on Mordor.

The analogy is not quite exact, because it overlooks how many allies Houston Baptist can find in unexpected places such as Rome, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. It also ignores the fact that losing helped us get rid of causes that confused real issues. This is not about restoring the 1950′s, please (!), but about making 2020 better.

Cultural conservatives have lost several battles, but in losing they have also created an infrastructure that is ready to fight back. It is true that much of what has been down has been poor, but quality has been improving in many areas. Today’s Christian music is better than the music of my youth. Musicians are less apt to want to live in the ghetto of Christian music or wish to play by recording industry rules. The same is true of filmmaking. Compare the “Christian” films of my youth with even the cheesiest films made today and the increase in quality is obvious.

A few mainstream films, such as “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” could not have been made decades ago, but the problem remains old definitions. Hollywood was not defined by Edwardian media and the Houston Reclamation will not be defined by old rules.

If we have been in retreat, then technology has given the bold tools to launch a surprise on the cultural left. The old battle lines can be withdrawn by ignoring them and looping around them, the way Americans did in Korea with the Inchon landing. Maturing Christian subcultures are ready to surprise everyone and start renewing the West.

What is HBU’s Inchon plan?

First, we don’t want Hollywood or influence in Hollywood  . . . or any other establishment. We want to make movies and distribute them. We want filmmakers who tell stories and do so with good craftsmanship. This fall we will be starting such a program. Nigeria and India both prove that ignoring Hollywood can pay. We aren’t going to make culturally conservative movies, of course, but be cultural conservatives who make movies.

Cloud Atlas or Atlas Shrugged proved that propaganda films don’t work for humanists whether they are mystics or libertarians. We are not going to make propaganda, but art.

Isn’t it time for a movie program that made movies and didn’t just talk about movies?

We are going around Hollywood and landing in the living rooms of Americans.

HBU is building on creative writing with MFA work. We are producing art through folk like Michael Collins. We are building an art gallery and museums through gifts from collectors who want the gallery to reflect their worldview. Our student paper is moving into media arts of all kinds while Barbara Elliot begins teaching how social justice and Christian values unite. Our faculty are moving ideas from the classroom to public space as part of their jobs.

Speaking of worldview, we are training faculty and freshman through the Francis Schaeffer Center and the work of Nancy Pearcey. On the cultural front, we are reclaiming what can be salvaged through a cultural apologetics program. The work of scholars such as Jerry Walls and Mike Licona in graduate philosophy refuses to play by old rules . . . and our hobbit invasion gets academic support as we set up an endowed chair beachhead in Oxford and in the writings of faculty such as Lou Markos.

We read great books because we love them and not just our honors kids read them: everyone does. All this in a school more diverse than any. Find a school that has a better universally applied core curriculum and we will look at it! If not, send your kid or grandkid to HBU.

Mary Jo Sharp makes sure this is not just your father’s apologetics program. And we don’t want you simply smart, we want virtue even more.

All this is laid out in the “Ten Pillars” by our President Robert Sloan, who knows higher education. This is not your grandfather’s Christian college, unless your grandfather had today’s technology and a robust Christian and conservative worldview. Unlike most Christian colleges, HBU is not sectarian, we have a progressive vision, but aren’t arguing about orthodoxy.

We are Socratic about our traditionalism and traditionally Socratic.

Some smarty-pants in the back of the Internet will point out that the Inchon invasion did not end the war. Things went badly after they went well, but that is the way of culture wars. One reason I am not a “mere” conservative is that I am not just about conserving, as a Christian I have a creation mandate and a desire for a progressive vision. Somethings change, but somethings should not change. Christianity informs me where conserving is good and where conserving is foolish. We are not going back to the future, we are creating a better future with the best of the old and the new.

It is Burke and Disraeli, but mostly it is Jesus: the progressive conservative. God is renewing creation: not recreating it! It is winning what can be won, not “winning.” America is not our home, after all, the New Jerusalem is.

HBU will not “win” the culture war, but we will be part, by God’s good grace, of winning the battles of our time. The war will not end, because (as conservatism knows) Utopia is not going to be found in this life, certainly not in Houston. We might fail, but our failure will be more interesting than Christian colleges who negotiate the terms of their surrender or who learn to lose gracefully. If you can find a school with a clearer Inchon plan than the Ten Pillars, support it, or you could join us here in Houston as we fight.

Perhaps, really, fighting is not the right analogy as we mostly plan jollification: the appropriation of the world God created and the best of what His children make in as inclusive a manner as virtue will allow.

I cannot wait.

A joy of blogging and Facebook are the thoughtful people who respond to what you write. Trolls exist, but they like all trolls they can mostly be ignored and left living in their basements working out their impotence in socially harmless ways. More common is a person with a different perspective who teaches me how I sound to those who do not agree. I never stop learning from such wise folk. One of my best correspondents is a person I shall call Albert. Albert has concerns about my last on “the morning after pill.”  With his permission, I have put his entire response to me below with comments and respond in italics.

Just read your article on the morning after pill and I will begin by stating that I agree with you that it should not become an over-the-counter medicine. My main reason for thinking this is so is that there needs to remain a certain gravity to such medications. Plus, regular birth control is not over-the-counter…etc.

However, your article raises an issue I’ve had with some pro-life rhetoric that has taken hold. I find it in your article and would love to hear your thoughts on this. I bring it up because I think this rhetoric ultimately has the potential to harm the cause (for the reasons I will articulate below) and not help it.

 

Here is the quote I’m thinking of:
“The pill performs its function of killing the unborn child, the fetus if scientists prefer, efficiently and well with no more harm to a mother than a natural miscarriage.”

This is a difficult sentence to sell to a secular public, even a religious public. The type of morning after med used in the U.S. is intended to prevent fertilization, or, in some cases, implantation of a fertilized zygote. Terms like “child” seem dubious here (as child implies for most people sentience, relationality, a nervous system, etc. and a number of other qualities that are not yet present). Child may, however, be a technically correct term according to particular theological perspectives.

Which brings up the next point. “Fetus” is not simply dubious here, it is scientifically incorrect. “Embryo” is even incorrect here. Zygote, or fertilized egg are the correct scientific terms. Confusing these deeply harms the argument in substance and in rhetorical force.

The third point is that the mechanism of action is quite common. As many as half to 2/3 of all fertilized eggs never implant in the mother’s womb. This raises all kinds of theodicy questions if half of all human persons have never even experienced cell division.

The 4th point is that the mechanism of action is also identical to the birth control provided by a breastfeeding mother’s body. What’s my point? Should we think of people who intend to not have “Irish twins” because breastfeeding provides a form of natural birth control as willfully engaging in abortion? Perhaps this is logically true from a certain theological point of view. But it is not a question I hear anyone asking and it ought to be asked if we are going to be consistent in invoking the morning after pill as tantamount to an abortion.

In any case, *here is my main point*:
I feel like the pro-life movement needs to focus not on these murky issues, but on those on which we have solid ground and can easily win rhetorical arguments and appeal to people’s minds and *hearts*. Ultrasound is already helping us win this battle.

So my point is this. We need to push hard for banning all abortions after age of viability (like many European countries at least have). We need to push for heavy restrictions after the point where it can be demonstrated that the fetus has its own blood supply and brainwaves (which no one can dispute are the markers of the cessation of human life–so why not push for them to be the legal markers of the beginning?).

These are battles we can win if we put all our eggs in these baskets.

But if we continue to conflate dismembering babies (that feel pain and think and scream) together with preventing zygote implantation (even if this is our theological conviction), we will lose.

We will lose because we will allow the public to continue to conflate the two themselves and not acknowledge the monstrosity of wanton killing of sentient human life.