Wednesday, December 09, 2015

The Liberalizing Effect of Actually Reading the Bible


Christianity Today has a nifty study of the effects of Bible reading on people's political views.  This finding gives a taste of a range of their fascinating findings:

“Ask an evangelical who is politically conservative, has some college education, has an average level of income, is a biblical literalist, and does not read the Bible, and you’ll have only a 22 percent chance he or she will say reducing consumption is part of ethical living.

Ask the same person, only now they read the Bible, and you’ll have a 44 percent chance they’ll say so.”

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Republican Leadership Rejects Trump's Muslim Ban


Today's good news:  the entire Republican leadership has denounced Donald Trump's proposal to block Muslims from entering the country.

Even former Vice-President Dick Cheney called Trump's proposal un-American.

Perhaps, perhaps, the GOP has turned a corner back, slowly, in the direction of the center.

Sunday, December 06, 2015

Calvinism and the Second Amendment


Calvinism sees the world ordered by the sovereign God, and disordered by human foolishness.

Yet Calvin was a protestant reformer - he protested against a disordered church, and enacted a wide-ranging reform in church and state.

For anyone who believes both in divine order and godly protest, there is a bit of a problem.  Calvinists can't be anarchists.  They cannot countenance resistance to duly constituted authority, in church or state, by mere personal judgment.

Calvin solved this by justifying reform, and even resistance, through the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate". Reform and resistance against the actions of the greater magistrate were only legitimate if conducted on behalf of the fundamental order of society and were supported by some lesser magistrate.

The American Founding Fathers were as influenced by Calvinism as they were by any secular Enlightenment theories.

Therefore I conclude that the Second Amendment could not have been intended to justify arming each citizen against the government.  The Founding Fathers were, indeed, revolutionaries against the duly constituted authority of the day.  But they were also lesser magistrates in their own right.  The well-regulated militia in which citizens have the right to bear arms is itself part of the government - not a justification for armed citizen anarchy.