Once You Win, Then What?

San Francisco federal judge Vaughn Walker has shot down California’s Proposition 8, the initiative passed by voters in 2008 that banned same-sex marriage.

Judge Walker said Proposition 8 violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice.

“Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge wrote. “Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”

Walker’s ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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To a Dutch observer of American society and politics, it all looked just a little too familiar. The long lines in front of the Massachusetts registry offices, the glare of the media spotlights, gay-marriage proponents crowing about a “historic breakthrough.” The scenes were virtually identical to those in Amsterdam three years ago, when amid much fanfare, the world’s first legal gay-marriage ceremonies were conducted by the city’s mayor. If the U.S. continues to follow the Dutch script, the next few months will see more jubilant headlines about the overwhelming demand for marriage licenses among homosexuals, a few more model gay couples getting married, and then…silence. With its aim achieved and the campaign over, gay-rights activists will simply drop the issue of marriage altogether and move on.

And what, exactly, will they have accomplished? The first legal gay wedding ceremonies in the Netherlands took place on April 1, 2001. By November 2002, however, gay-marriage enthusiasts were forced to admit that interest in this new institution was fading. Since April 2001, each quarter has brought a further decline in the number of gay marriages, falling from 2,500 in 2001 to less than 1,500 last year. As of April 2004, only 5,916 of Holland’s roughly 55,000 gay couples had tied the knot.

On Amnesty And Ethics

Ethics Expert Gives Congress An Earful On Amnesty

Dr. James Edwards confounded supporters of amnesty at a U.S. House hearing on Wednesday by providing scriptural and theological reasons why an amnesty would be unethical.

The hearing was conducted to make the case that there is an “ethical imperative” to reward millions of illegal aliens with permanent work permits and permanent residence in the U.S. But Dr. Edwards noted that showing that kind of mercy to illegal aliens would create a huge injustice against all the poor Americans who are unemployed.

DR. JAMES EDWARDS is a fellow of the Center for Immigration Studies, and co-author of “The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform”  A full treatment of the biblical ethics of immigration can be found at http://cis.org/ImmigrationBible.

Text of Dr. Edwards’ Speech

Madame Chairman, Ranking Member King, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. It is right to consider how Scripture and Judeo-Christian principles should inform such public issues as immigration. I appreciate the opportunity to share my own considered views on this subject.

The critical point to begin from is to differentiate between what the Bible teaches are moral imperatives applicable to individuals and those that are applicable corporately. That is, some precepts might bind one as a Christian that do not apply to the United States government. Indeed, biblical precepts in which Christ requires us personally to show mercy or compassion or forgiveness might not apply to the civil government of the nation-state of which we are citizens. Sometimes, such application would actually be harmful and wrong.

First, I will discuss a key biblical principle that relates to today’s American immigration debate. Second, I will suggest some implications of “comprehensive immigration reform” that ought to inform Congress’s immigration policymaking.

To begin, what are the most relevant principles from Scripture that relate to U.S. immigration policy in 2010? I have written about this at length elsewhere and testified before this subcommittee on the subject.

So, I will focus this morning on one key principle.

Christians as individuals are bound to a high moral imperative, which should be familiar to many of us: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These cornerstone precepts, as elaborated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the Bible, instruct believers to go so far as to “love your enemies,” “bless those who curse you,” and care for “the least of these my brothers.” Considered alongside Micah 6:8 — “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” — it becomes clear that faithfully living up to those standards is tough. In fact, it is impossible even for those indwelt by the Holy Spirit. In other words, exhibiting Christian mercy and compassion is not for sissies.

But do these high standards apply to civil government? To an extent. For instance, U.S. laws reflect such biblical standards as providing for due process, impartial justice, and prohibiting torturous punishment of criminals. But to attempt to require civil authority to display the same manner of mercy or compassion that individual Christians are commanded to display would be ludicrous. Yet that is what certain advocates in the immigration debate unreasonably demand.

We must understand the God-given role of civil government. Romans 13 clearly teaches that civil authorities are God’s agents in their own specific jurisdictions to constrain evil. Civil authority wields the sword of justice to protect the innocent within its jurisdiction and to punish lawbreakers. The mission, described here and in I Peter 2 and Titus 3, is to “carry out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” In the Bible, the “things that are Caesar’s” are concentrated on justice. God deputizes civil authorities as part of His common grace, because we live in a fallen world. Evil exists, and government constrains evil within a body politic.

Do Fathers Matter?

Just in time for Father’s Day, a new study of 485 young adults who were conceived through sperm donation finds that they want to know about their fathers and are more likely to struggle with poor outcomes in life.

by Elizabeth Marquardt

Elizabeth Marquardt is vice president for family studies at the Institute for American Values in New York City, a nonpartisan think tank focused on children, families, and civil society, and author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, 2005). She is editor of FamilyScholars.org and co-investigator of My Daddy’s Name is Donor, just released by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, reporting on the new study of a large, randomly-drawn sample of adults who were conceived with use of sperm donors. She holds a Master of Divinity and an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history and women’s studies from Wake Forest University, and lives near Chicago with her husband and two children.

My co-investigators—Norval D. Glenn of the University of Texas at Austin and author Karen Clark (who herself was conceived via anonymous sperm donation in 1966)—found that two-thirds of sperm donor offspring agree “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” and as many feel they have a right to know about their sperm donor biological fathers. About half are disturbed that money was involved in their conception. As a group, sperm donor offspring fare worse than their peers raised by biological parents on important outcomes such as depression, delinquency, and substance abuse. More than forty percent of them agree, “It is wrong to deliberately conceive a fatherless child.”

While the Catholic church does have teachings on donor insemination (it forbids it) most other denominations have had little to say, thus far, about reproductive technologies, much less about their possible impact on the young people these technologies aid in creating.

About one percent of children in the U.S. today are conceived through sperm donation. All this is quite interesting, you might respond, but how relevant are these findings, really, for my ministry today? To which I have three responses:

1) One percent equals millions of young people. Every person matters. Every story matters.

2) Sperm donation, in practice since at least 1884, is an old-fashioned technology at this point. Egg donation and embryo transfers, perhaps combined with gestational surrogacy, are making the new kids on the block. Scientists have created children with the DNA of three parents. Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy’s book, Everything Conceivable, reports a study showing that ten percent of U.S. fertility clinic directors welcome reproductive cloning as an option for couples who have exhausted all other options. Sperm donor offspring are the leading edge of the Brave New World. What they tell us about their experience, and what we learn about their outcomes, informs what we know not only about the impact of sperm donation but raises a host of urgent questions about other reproductive technologies currently in practice or on the horizon.

3) Although sperm donor conception is not widely practiced, it has rhetorical power in our public debates about marriage and childbearing. In the U.S. today, about 40 percent of children are now born outside of marriage (and these children are at higher risk for poorer outcomes). Women who find themselves pregnant can say, “Why should I keep this guy around, when doctors and lawyers help women to have babies with sperm donors and everybody says that’s OK?” Women who elect to get pregnant through sperm donation can say, “What’s wrong with having a baby with an anonymous sperm donor? After all, lots of kids are born each year to single moms.” Meanwhile, men can ask, quite reasonably, why they are accountable for eighteen years of child support after a one-night stand, but sperm donors can walk into a clinic, deposit sperm, and sign away their paternal rights (and get paid for it!).

Further, these technologies are having an impact on how the next generation is thinking about reproductive technologies and

Faith of the Fatherless

“The great psychologists of the ages have universally agreed that the root of all unhappiness is selfishness or egotism. Egotism is the rejection of the double command to love God and neighbor, and the affirmation of the self as the standard of all truth and morality” (Fulton Sheen, Way to Happiness).

To discuss religious commitment from a psychological viewpoint is not to imply that faith or moral choices are shaped entirely by external things like environment, body chemistry or sensory stimuli. If we remain true to psychology’s origins, beginning with Aristotle, we approach it as a branch of metaphysics which studies the life of the soul. At the same time, classical psychology (as opposed to idealism), does not dismiss the importance of physical reality. A whole range of factors can influence one’s mental behavior — including social relations, physical health, economic status, etc. — while leaving man’s free will fundamentally intact. Unfortunately, with the changes in epistemology and ethics growing out of the so-called Enlightenment, psychological commentators veered away from the Western tradition.

The American William James, for example, applied Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis to the development of the human consciousness in The Principles of Psychology (1890). A short while later, Sigmund Freud articulated the belief that human behavior was shaped by early life influences and the tendency to repress unconscious desires. Sexual drives were also seen as a key determinant in individual choices. While Freud was understandably reacting to the hyper-rationalism of earlier secularists (who denied the irrational side of fallen humanity), his theories further displaced belief in objective and transcendent morality.

Christian psychology, by contrast, should help one to understand the behavioral characteristics of the individual within an ethical framework. Recalling psychology’s Aristotelian roots, one can make the connection between repeated choices (“ethics” is from the Greek word ethos, meaning “custom” or “habit”) and the patterns of mental activity which emerge from consistent preferences in one direction or another. While the operations of the mind do not determine morality, the two react upon and shape one another. For example, distinct patterns have been observed in homosexuals or people suffering from extremely violent tendencies. As Sheen puts it, a man’s “secret hates, his hidden sins, his flippant treading upon the laws of morality — all of these leave their traces in his mind, his heart and his unconsciousness.”

Helpful to a Christian understanding of the subject is Dr. Paul C. Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. Dr. Vitz, a scholar and convert, states that historically important atheists “are the product of their historical period, family psychology (that is, the defective father), intellectual intelligence and level of ambition, and — last but far from least — their own free choice.” Such findings, based on decades of research as a psychologist, flout materialistic views that the idea of God is simply a “projection theory” based on man’s need for security.

For Freud, and others, religion could be criticized on the basis of believers’ supposedly subjective motives. Vitz boldly reverses this paradigm. Atheism is not so aloof as it pretends to be, and is as susceptible as any other attitude to external factors. Vitz makes his point by considering the lives of dozens of major atheists and seeing what they might have in common. It transpires that, almost without exception, militant skeptics of the last two centuries, from Voltaire to Stalin, have suffered from a “defective father” — one who was either absent through death or through moral failure. As a result, the stance taken by leading atheists may be seen (at least in part) as an emotional reaction against paternal figures, including the divine Father.

They Were All Deists (?)

I’m getting a bit tired of having rosy-cheeked, well-meaning university students hit me with this statement, as though it explains some cataclysmic truth I cannot quite grasp about the founders of our nation and what they had in mind when they pledged their fortunes, their oath and their sacred honor to the task of building the foundation upon which our great nation stands.  The last time I checked we still lived in a more-or-less consistent universe, in which things that exist are actually real and things that don’t exist, but are only imagined to be, are not real.  Yes, yes, I know, everyone thinks the immortal John Lennon began all this preposterous nonsense with lyrics like:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I’m crying.

What John was trying to say, under the influence of his rather militant and controlling wife, was that everything is the same as everything else.  There are no real differences between any “things” because all things are simply imagined to begin with.  According to her, and to him, everything is non-existent and meaningless.  Choices we make now are not remembered later and there is certainly nobody to hold those choices against us.  I’m struck by how much this sounds like the postmodern “truth” that reality exists only in the mind of the one beholding it.  Words have no meaning other than those the hearers assign to them.  Events have no meaning other than those the participants assign to them.  There is no independent, absolutely existent reality.  Only what we believe.  For a culture that decided to depend only upon science to prove what was true and real, we seem to have come a long ways in the other direction.

I’m watching a TV show right now in which the narrator is interviewing astrophysicists and other scientists, with the question; “how many universes exist?”  Really!  I mean, I’m as open-minded as anyone.  And I absolutely love string theory and the whole business of infinite possibility.  But this now sounds a lot like the medieval question; “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

What Difference Do We Make?

At a time when more and more families are experiencing homelessness due to the economic tsunami, houses of worship are stepping up and working more closely with each other to help “the least of these.”  Paradoxically, the movement comes amid increasing secular and statist assaults on charities and a proposal to limit charitable deductions – a move experts say makes little sense because faith communities have the best resources to draw from to sustain the kind of charitable donations necessary to offer real hope to those in need.

During a rare gathering of Jews and evangelical Christians, Fuller Theological Seminary Doctor of Ministry Program Director Kurt Fredrickson said some Christians believe in the Rapture – the notion that God will supernaturally remove them from the earth prior to the end of the world.

Although Fredrickson doesn’t believe “that’s the way it’s going to work out,” the former senior pastor of a Simi Valley, California church used to wonder if the doctrine was true and his congregation vanished if the community would even notice they were gone.

“My sad conclusion was quite negative,” Fredrickson mused. “I really had this sense early on in my ministry at Simi Covenant Church that they wouldn’t notice that we were gone, and if they did notice we were gone, they would probably be happy that those crazy, crotchety Christians weren’t here anymore.”

The penetrating comment came during a recent luncheon sponsored by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California and Fuller Theological Seminary that brought together rabbis, pastors and professors to talk about ways to work more closely together to help the poor and homeless. The meeting is part of a new movement by the faith community nationwide to do more to help the “least of these” amid an economic tsunami that is radically changing the way people think about life.

The luncheon, “Caring in a Caring Community: Doing the Right Thing in Bad Times,” was designed to bring Christians and Jews together because of a mutual sense of call to care for those who are marginalized by society. While the Jewish community engages in many “significant dialogues” with Catholics and mainline Christians, luncheon participants noted Jews and evangelical Christians have traditionally lacked a strong partnership.

“It’s a complex relationship,” says Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis. “This program between Fuller and the Board of Rabbis is an attempt to build bridges and realize that we have much in common. We have a joint mandate as people of faith to partner with God in caring for those in our community who are most at risk – people who are homeless and people who don’t have enough food to put on the table – and this is an effort to address those needs.”

For Just Such A Time As This?

Employees of mask-maker Ogawa Studios posed Friday in Saitama for a photo wearing masks modeled after Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

It would be difficult to overstate the anticipation and yet the trepidation I feel concerning the cataclysmic events that have occurred in Japan in these past few weeks.  A political event approaching the importance of the great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 has happened, sweeping the past into its wake and turning the ship of state in a new, if unknown direction.  Throughout my time in Japan, from 1985 to 1998, we often prayed for a “shakeup.”  In our role as peacemakers, of course, our prayers always stopped short of disaster.  But when disaster would strike we would look at each other and say:  “Maybe this is it?”  What we hoped for was a wake-up call, a single event or a set of occurrences that would bring Japanese people to the brink, at which they could re-evaluate their worldview and re-establish their faith with something other than “fate” as the basis.  In ’95, as we pooled our resources and worked to provide needed food and water for the stricken Kobe area, where the earthquake had devastated the city, we saw many people come to a new realization about the fragility of life and the depth of their need for truth as the basis.  Over 3000 deaths were recorded, society’s resilience surprised even those who worked to rebuild, and our hopes that Japan would not waste her sorrow fell short, as life returned to ‘normal.’  In the ensuing years there was the stock market crash, the ripple effect of the war on terror, North Korea’s sabre-rattling, China’s stridency and many other candidates for this ominous honor as Japan’s wake-up call.  But now, another kind of event, one that encompasses many of the former events and portends to eclipse them all, perhaps the one we have been waiting for all along, has brought a kind of change that affects every area of life.  Beginning down deep in the political landscape, an earthquake that began shaking many years ago has reached the surface.  Dare we, again, pray that this is “the big one?”

Japan’s Prime Minister-to-be, Yukio Hatoyama, spoke by telephone with President  Obama early Thursday morning, and later met with the U.S. and Russian ambassadors, who congratulated him on his election. Mr. Hatoyama was careful to give assurances to the United States that, despite his party’s platform position on seeking greater independence from Washington, Tokyo’s commitment to the alliance would remain the “foundation” of his foreign policy.

Leaders across the world are especially anxious to get to know Hatoyama because his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has never put a cabinet together before, and no one knows quite what to think about the sweeping opposition victory in Japan’s House of Representatives on Sunday. A single party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), has governed Japan almost without interruption since 1955. The change was expected — but now that it has happened, the implications for business, for relationships on a geopolitical scale, and even for the lives of ordinary people seem more momentous.

A Collision of Lives

The Christian faith is good for the world because it provides the fixed standard which atheism cannot provide and because it provides forgiveness for sins, which atheism cannot provide either. We need the direction of the standard because we are confused sinners. We need the forgiveness because we are guilty sinners. Atheism not only keeps the guilt, but it also keeps the confusion.^[1]

Douglas Wilson — Is Christianity Good For The World? — With Christopher Hitchens

One might be hard pressed to find two more completely opposite friends than Doug Wilson and Chris Hitchens.  Hitchens, of course, is the notably self-described “anti-theist” (eschewing the title “athiest”) writer of the NY Times best seller God Is Not Great!, erstwhile writer for Vanity Fair; The Atlantic; The Nation and others.  Wilson, although someone you may not have heard so much about, is equally notable.  Conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and  author of many books such as Mother Kirk: Essays and Forays in Practical Ecclesiology, To a Thousand Generations on infant baptism, and “Reformed” Is Not Enough: Recovering the Objectivity of the Covenant.  Though certainly  poles apart from the brand of theology we normally espouse here at Pax-Rex, Wilson’s defense of the faith is exemplary and rigorous.  (The enemy of my enemy is my friend is a bit harsh I think, but so be it.)  Hitchens and Wilson became friends (or should we say “friendly”) in the spring of 2007 in a correspondence over the question “Is Christianity Good For The World?”  Hitchens, being his naturally pompous self, took the contra position on the argument and away they went.  The heated, but often hilarious, conversations were published in Christianity Today and earned high praises from a large readership.  The edited versions of the conversations were published in a book of the same name, and the two went on the road together for a series of public appearances, book signings, and of course, more arguments.  “All this sounds quite interesting,” you’re probably saying, “but what does it have to do with me?  I didn’t read Hitchins’ book and probably won’t spend time I could use gaining valuable insight into, say, LOST, to read this one either.”  The point is just this:  A movie version of the conversations and other content is about to be released.  Collision! will make its debut on October 27, 2009.  It will be available on DVD and will screen at theaters in New York and Los Angeles.  The DVD is available now for pre-order on Amazon.com.  My recommendation is that everyone who reads this article watch the first 13 minutes of the DVD here, and then click on the pre order link above to get the DVD and show it to as many people as possible.

All books and materials are Available Here.

Click on the VodPod Videos Widget at the right to view a 13 Minute Preview of COLLISION!

Knowing Christ Today

The genius of Dallas Willard's new book, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009), is its explanatory power for many of the ills of contemporary Western society.

Dallas Willard, a longtime philosophy professor at the USC (University of Southern California) and author of such works as The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines, says the moral confusion we see today stems from one uber-problem: “the trivialization of faith apart from knowledge and … the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge.”

Our problem, then, is epistemological: What do we know, and how do we know it? Willard says that to actually claim that you possess real but not exhaustive knowledge on a moral issue (what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth”) is a scandal in the modern world. Relativists see certainty as a trip-wire for arrogance and extremism, and uncertainty as a recipe for tolerance and peace. The post-9/11 fulminations of New Atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who label all religions as potentially dangerous, are evidence for Willard’s thesis. Better to claim ignorance—and more humble, too.

Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and other “pop-atheists” of our day decry religion as the cause of history’s worst catastrophic abuses, citing the Crusades, the Inquisition and the like.  However, they fail to acknowledge that the absolute worst of all such abuses of human rights and pure abrogations of decency have all been perpetrated by those claiming to know that God does not exist, building upon a secular model of equality for all men.  Stalin, Pol Pot, and to at least some degree Hitler, all saw utopian socialist ideals as mankind’s salvation.

Yet knowledge need not provoke violence. Willard says rightly that sin is integral to the human condition and is not a specifically religious malady. Sometimes knowledge even sparks humility. And when do we actually possess knowledge, according to Willard? “We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.“

Once-hallowed religious beliefs, Willard says, have been relegated to the intellectual sidelines as a result of the post-Enlightenment struggle between what he calls “traditional knowledge” and secularism, which claims the mantle of knowledge without warrant and which rules in institutions of higher learning—even Christian ones—as the areas of human life that do not fit the “secularist story” multiply. As a result, knowledge disappears, and the vacuum is filled by others.

“In the context of modern life and thought,” Willard says, Christians “are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment, or behavior traditional for their social group.” When this happens, Willard says, Christians cannot influence society for the good. Only knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, commitment, or formal adherence, conveys the right and authority “to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach.”

A recent news event illustrates the brilliance of Willard’s diagnosis.  This past spring Notre Dame’s decision to award President Obama an honorary doctorate did not sit well with many alumni and friends of the university, who rightly pointed out that Obama’s pro-choice policies contradict clear Catholic teaching (Notre Dame is a Catholic school). While supporters, including the university president and most students, defended the action on the basis of tolerance and diversity, visiting scholar Francis J. Beckwith pointedly noted that the real issue is epistemology:

Unless the university does not believe that the Church’s understanding of the moral law is true and knowable, it can no more in good conscience award an honorary doctorate of laws to a lawyer who rejects the humanity of the proper subjects of law than it could in good conscience award an honorary doctorate in science to a geocentric astronomer who rejects the deliverances of the discipline he claims to practice.

At some point, a Christian university must recognize that the truth it claims to know matters, even if the truth is unpopular, and even if the propagation and celebration of that truth may put one’s community at odds with those persons and centers of influence and power that dispense prestige and authority in our culture.

So what is Willard’s cure? He says, first of all, that Christians cannot hope to return religious knowledge to its rightful place in society unless they believe in it themselves. So the professor—an expert on German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s work, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge—attempts to convince us of what we should already know, namely, that God exists, and that miracles (including Christ’s resurrection) are possible, even likely.

Willard gives a welcome reminder that, while the secular vision of the cosmos presents it as many academes hope it is, Christian truth faces the fact of what we do not yet know, and represents the universe as it really is–in other words, knowledge.

Willard moves on to “Knowledge of Christ in the Spiritual Life.” His key point: “Those who do know Christ in the modern world do so by seeking and entering the kingdom of God.” This is a knowledge based upon commitment. Here Willard distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge, knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. We know Christ when we acquaint ourselves with him and with his people.

Willard ultimately gives the task of repairing the breach in knowledge to pastors, defined by him more broadly than as shepherds of local congregations. Pastors, Willard says, are “those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations.“

Acquiring the knowledge they will need for such an expanded role—as teachers of the nations—will require a growth of duties and horizons that will challenge the abilities and calling of many pastors today. Still, a little knowledge can go a long way.

Prodigal Son

As is often the case, I repost here for your enjoyment and edification by Dr. Benjamin Wiker in “To The Source” of a cause for hope in these dark times.  God is still on the throne and intellectually honest men and women can still find Him.

For all too many years, eminent novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson was a self-satisfied atheist, a proud member of the British unbelieving intelligentsia, along with Richard Dawkins and expatriate Christopher Hitchens. But no more.  Andrew Norman Wilson has come home.

I still remember the taste of ashes in my soul reading A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis. It was filled with the kind of meticulous spite that can only be mustered by someone entirely bent on chipping away at a larger-than-life figure until he is largely unrecognizable, riddled with pock marks and imperfections. I sensed that I was not getting a representation of Lewis, but rather, a glimpse of the atheist Wilson himself and his thinly disguised contempt for so great a Christian apologist.

Looking back on it, I would dare to suggest that what animated Wilson’s spiteful treatment was a deep anger and frustration that Lewis, his intellectual superior, could waste his talents on something so infantile and obviously inferior as Christianity. If he was that evidently smart, why couldn’t Lewis—like Wilson—see that the whole God thing was a sham?

Wilson just couldn’t understand, and so in writing about Lewis, he searched under every psychological rock to find evidence that Lewis’s great intellect had been deformed by some hidden twist in his soul, and bent unnaturally to the defense of Christianity.

This Easter found that same Mr. Wilson in church among the faithful, singing the praises of the Risen Christ, a believer once again, a man who had experienced the heady thrill of casting away all belief in God thereby freeing himself from all ultimate claims, and then gradually, humbly recognized how small-minded and trendy his whole anti-God phase had been. Looking back on it all, Wilson wondered, “Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?”

“Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion.”

What ultimately changed Wilson’s mind? There was no dramatic, sudden conversion experience; just a slow, sure recognition that atheism rang hollow. Life was too deep, too rich for mere materialism.

“My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself. Why did I return to it? Partially, perhaps it is no more than the confidence I have gained with age.

Rather than being cowed by them [the anti-religious smart-set], I relish the notion that, by asserting a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs on the block: cutting-edge novelists such as Martin Amis; foul-mouthed, self-satisfied TV presenters such as Jonathan Ross and Jo Brand; and the smug, tieless architects of so much television output.

But there is more to it than that. My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known—not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of humanity. It changes people’s lives because it helps us understand that we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings.