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Dan Savage, the Bible, & Homosexuality

May 19th, 2012 by

Here at The Bayview Review we aim to champion conservative values and ideas, that’s no secret. We do this for two reasons. First, we think that, in general, conservatives get most things right. That is, our aim is to advance true beliefs and conservatism is what allows for that in the most straightforward way. The second reason is that there are a lot of people that think conservatives are wrong because they don’t understand what conservatives actually believe about important issues. Nothing could serve as a better illustration of this than the issue of homosexuality and same-sex ‘marriage’. Within this arena, not much could better illustrate a misunderstanding of conservatism than Dan Savage’s three-minute diatribe against the “anti-gay bigotry” that he claims is justified by conservatives’ appeal to the Bible.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics & Law, Theology

Global Christianity Will Outlive Western Liberalism

May 16th, 2012 by

Mark Tooley has an excellent analysis of the situation in the United Methodist Church in this article entitled: “United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global.”

The global 12 million member United Methodist Church, now likely the world’s 9th largest communion, is no longer a predominantly liberal U.S. denomination. Its quadrennial governing General Conference, which met for 10 days in Tampa ending May 4, refused to alter the church’s official disapproval of homosexual practice.

Some news stories huffed disapproval and surprise. After all, the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and United Church of Christ have all surrendered to American culture on sexual ethics. Their membership spirals subsequently accelerated into formal schisms. But United Methodism, unlike these other historic denominations that once dominated American religion and liberalized in the early 20th century, is now a growing church and has a record number of members. Continue Reading »

Posted in Theology

Blue America

May 12th, 2012 by

On May 8, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, thus joining the majority of American states defining marriage as between a man and woman. The following day President Obama surprised many when he publicly stated his support for same-sex marriage. To begin to make some sense of Obama’s gamble one must consider the charms of blue America. Hollywood, Manhattan, and San Francisco are among the richest centers for Obama’s fundraising. Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Politics & Law

The Irrelevancy of Evidence

May 5th, 2012 by

Today, Christian parents have good reason to be concerned about what their children are taught in sex education classes in the public school system.  There are countless stories of students receiving information very much in conflict with a biblical perspective.  So what can we learn from American history?  In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995), Thomas Sowell reveals interesting data concerning sex education in the second half of the twentieth century. Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Education

Wheaton College Opposes the Obama Administration’s Infringement of Religious Freedom

May 3rd, 2012 by

Wheaton College has come out against the Obama administration healthcare mandate the infringes the freedom of religious institutions.  The Daily Herald reports:

Wheaton College and other distinctively Christian institutions are faced with a near and present threat to religious liberty.

Last August, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a mandate that the insurance plans for religious institutions (except churches) must provide coverage for all government-approved contraceptives. The list of required contraceptives includes abortifacient drugs — “morning after” and “week after” pills that claim the life of a fertilized egg.

During the period for public debate, the HHS received more than 200,000 comments objecting that the contraceptive mandate would violate the First Amendment rights of anyone who believed — for religious reasons — in the sanctity of human life. Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Education, Theology

United Methodists Decide to Remain Christian

May 3rd, 2012 by

The United Methodist Church is the largest of the old, declining, liberal Protestant denominations in the United States.  Nevertheless, it still claims 8.6 million members and many of them are Evangelical.  In its General Conference, held every four years, delegates come from the mission churches planted overseas in back in the days when liberal Protestants still did missions.  The African and other overseas churches are growing rapidly and are, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly Evangelical.  They now number about 4.4 million members.  The Evangelicals in the US plus the mission church delegates from overseas now constitute a majority of General Conference delegates.

As Evangelical churches continue to grow in the US and especially overseas and the liberals die off, the denomination is expected to become more and more Evangelical.  So, interestingly, the UMC thus constitutes a kind of microcosm of world Protestantism today.  What does the future of world Protestantism look like?  Is is liberal? Ecumenical?  Liberation/Marxist? Feminist?  Or is it conservative, traditional and Evangelical?  General Conference is going on in Tampa this week, so let’s drop in and find out.   Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Theology

Contraception, Evangelicals and Sexual Sin

Apr 30th, 2012 by

I suppose it was just a matter of time until people within Evangelicalism began to call for unmarried people to start using contraception as the “lesser of two evils,” with the other evil being abortion.  This story in Christianity Today by Matthew Lee Anderson, Why Churches Shouldn’t Push Contraceptives to their Singles, is at once shocking and unsurprising.

As Western Evangelicalism continues to become bigger, more worldly and more accommodated to the late modern secular society around it, its resources to resist the depraved immorality of late, modern, Western decadence continue to deteriorate.

Pope John Paul II and a growing host of intelligent Catholic writers such as Mary Eberstadt, Christopher West and Janet Smith have put forward the thesis that contraception and abortion stand or fall together Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Theology

The Question 60 Minutes Forgot to Ask

Apr 28th, 2012 by

A question NOT asked by the champions of gotcha television who put together the item on the situation of Palestinian Christians that aired on the CBS Sixty Minutes programme on Sunday April 22, was this fairly obvious one: Why are Christians fleeing from every corner of the globe INTO Israel?

Israel is the only polity in the entire Middle East in which Christian numbers are growing absolutely. They have in fact increased 400 percent since 1948. Today there are about 163,000 Christians in Israel — about 2.1% of the total population of around 7 million. This number is growing as Christians flee into Israel from all the nearby African states, such as Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia Somalia, Kenya and beyond. They are fleeing also from the states of the former Soviet Empire and from Muslim-majority communities around the world.
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Posted in Politics & Law

A Review of Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

Apr 27th, 2012 by

Charles Murray is one of the most influential and controversial social scientists alive today.  His book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, was very influential in the highly successful welfare reforms undertaken in the mid-90s in the US during a period of divided government while Bill Clinton was president.  His book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, argued that intelligence is a better predictor of future success than socio-economic status and education level.  Much of Murray’s work challenges the conventional wisdom of modern progressives and liberals and defends the truth of traditional, conventional wisdom.  As a rather extreme libertarian, rather than a social conservative, Murray is an interesting writer because he comes to so many conclusions that support the conservative case for traditional family structure as the basis of a healthy society even though that is not a central tenet of his philosophical belief system.  It appears to be a matter of following the logical implications of the data he studies in his case.  He is divorced and re-married and not particularly religious, although he attends Quaker meetings with his second wife.

Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (Random House, 2012), is a fascinating look at the social revolution of the past half-century.  The disastrous effects of the attempts to impose a European-style welfare state on America beginning with the Great Society programs of the 1960s on the black family have been well-documented.  But what has been going on in white America during this period?  Were the effects of welfare statism on black families different from their effects on white families or were those effects merely delayed slightly?   Continue Reading »

Posted in Book Reviews, Culture

Pondering a “Disconnect”

Apr 27th, 2012 by

What follows are some thoughts evoked by reading a report, “In Reaction to Two Incidents, a U.S-Afghan Disconnect,” dispatched to the New York Times, March 14, 2012, by that paper’s exceptionally thoughtful reporter, Rod Nordland.

The “two incidents” of the title are: (1) the discovery in mid-February of charred pages of the Qur’an on a NATO base near Kabul and (2) the apparently random murder of sixteen innocent civilians in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the middle of the night, March 11, by an evidently berserk American soldier.

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Posted in Politics & Law

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