Category: Rants, Opinions, and General Contrariness

Candy is a good thing. Candy is joy given caloric expression. Candy is, to twist an old saying, proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. 

I do not think my wife believes this in her heart. She is a mom, and there is a lot of pressure on moms to believe that candy is bad. In the land of moms, candy is a controlled substance. One, incidentally, for which medical prescriptions are not forthcoming. 

And so as we were going to bed on Halloween I told her, “There’s something important we need to establish before we go to sleep tonight. The presence of leftover candy in our house is not a problem to be solved, it is a joy to be celebrated. We don’t have to give it away, throw it away, or find some creative use for it. Eating it will be sufficient.” 

I felt like a Mormon knocking on Richard Dawkins’ door, but sometimes a dad has to step up. Edible joy is a rare thing and worth defending.

Technically, NCAA is an initialism rather than an acronym — but you know what I mean. 

I have long been irked at the way the college sports complex abuses students, but I was absolutely floored by some of the details Taylor Branch shared in “The Shame of College Sports” (published in The Atlantic).

Two snippets to whet your appetite:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?” 

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.” 

And later:

But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes. 

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes. 

The whole thing is worth reading, so zip over to The Atlantic and read “The Shame of College Sports” now.

I recently listened to a Research on Religion podcast about house churches in China and learned four things.

First, I’ve known for years that the state-run Protestant church in China is called the Three Self Patriotic Movement in China, but I never realized where the name came from. Here’s a hint: think missiology. That’s right — the three selves in the Three Self Patriotic Movement are “self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating.” I am an idiot for never making that connection. I bet there’s a good story behind it.

Second, one of the unregistered churches in China (commonly called house churches) has grown to around 500,000 members. That is not a typo — this one “house church” has half a million members. Wow. That blows my mind.

Third, the unregistered rural churches are almost entirely Pentecostal/charismatic and the unregistered urban churches are more sedately evangelical. The unregistered urban churches tend to be led by university professors and other intellectuals. Interesting. 

Fourth, China has largely stopped sending pastors of unregistered churches to labor camps because the pastors were too effective at planting churches in prison. Now the state uses indirect pressure to thwart churches, so that the Communist party pressures landlords to cancel leases and employers to hassle employees.

After listening to the podcast and reflecting on it for a while I realized that there’s an interesting contrast between the challenges faced by the church in China and those faced by the church in America. America seeks to seduce the Church into complacency, whereas China seeks to intimidate the Church into compliance.

These challenges correspond to the strategies Satan deploys against the Church in the book of Revelation: Babylon (seduction) and the Beast (intimidation).

No, I did not just say that China is the Beast nor did I say that America is the Great Harlot called Babylon. I merely said that China and America resemble them in certain ways. 

If this intrigues you check out the free online book The Returning King by Vern Poythress. It’s one of the best introductions to the book of Revelation that I know.

All in all that was one of the more stimulating podcasts I’ve heard lately.

A recent convert told me she’s struggling with life in her sorority, so I asked another sorority gal I know to give her some advice. 

Sorority gal emailed the recent convert and, with her permission, I’ve anonymized it and present her email for your consideration. I’ve trimmed off the beginning because it’s impossible to anonymize without making it useless (she identifies a specific Christian in the recipient’s sorority for her to connect with), but the rest of her letter is more broadly applicable:

I think [your sorority and my sorority] may be different in terms of their emphasis on partying and drinking, but I will definitely try to give you my two cents, and if you want to meet up at any point, let me know and I’d love to get together to talk and/or pray with you about it. 

I have always felt very at home in [my sorority] as a Christian. There are 10–15 Christian girls in [my sorority], and many more who aren’t into getting drunk/hooking up. My big is a Christian, as is my twin, and my twin’s little. I try to surround myself with these girls, rather than the partiers. I do still go out to the events where there is drinking, but I only drink moderately (if at all) and still always have a great time. Do you have a group of girls like this in [your sorority]? Are there other Christians in [your sorority] you can team up with?

Another thing that helped me ensure that there are enough events that don’t center around drinking/partying was getting involved on the sisterhood committee. If you guys have a committee like that, I would encourage you to get involved and make sure those kinds of events are happening. 

If you are feeling like [your sorority] is a place where you can’t be yourself or where you are encouraged to make poor decisions, deactivating might be the right choice for you. My biggest advice to you would be to pray about it and go with your gut. I do think there is room to be a Christian in Greek life, but I also think it varies a lot depending on the frat/sorority. Many of my closest friends aren’t Christian, and I think this can definitely make it more difficult to do the right thing at times. But, I think that as long as you have that Christian community somewhere, you can make it work.

I feel like I haven’t done a very good job giving you advice here, so please let me know if you want to talk about it over coffee or something!

I think that, on the whole, it is pretty good advice. What would you have said?

I believe I have identified my least favorite part of parenting: playing Chutes and Ladders. My epiphany came about as I was playing the longest round that I’ve ever seen. It was all chutes and no ladders. Playing was like watching crabs in a styrofoam cooler: as soon as one character was close to escaping it was sent tumbling back down to the bottom.

While that most recent round was particularly tedious, I don’t like the game even when it takes ten minutes because it’s a game with no skill component whatsoever. I will confess to thinking — often — that we could determine victory by flipping a coin instead of through the interminable process of moving the game pieces in accordance with the dictates of the spinner and the requirements of the board. 

That’s bad enough, but there is one more factor that evokes dread in my soul when asked to play. It is this: children young enough to truly enjoy the game are usually unable to move their characters properly, so I have to do it for them. This means I am playing the game against myself. A game I don’t like. A game whose two-player version is logically indistinguishable from a coin toss yet which has the potential to endure until the heat death of the universe. Even if I win, I lose. I lost as soon as I took the box down from the shelf.

And yet I will play today and I know I will play again tomorrow. It’s like a torment from a Greek myth. Aaargh!

My heart goes out to thoroughgoing determinists who necessarily regard all of life as a complicated version of Chutes and Ladders. If that’s you, I suggest you arrange to be fated not to think about it.

In Christians in Academe: A Reply, former evangelical Adam Kotsko minimizes a very real problem (recall that one study shows that 53% of faculty disdain evangelicals), but he nonetheless says things worth listening to.

A few bits stood out to me:

Above all, parents and pastors need to stop giving a blank check to anything that professes to be “Christian.” Conservative evangelicals have long been skilled at sniffing out what they consider to be pseudo-Christian liberals — developing some discernment on the other end of the scale would be a welcome shift.

I think he and I would differ considerably on the application of this point, but I like the fact that he brings it up. The truth is that there is a ditch on both sides of the road, and it matters little whether you wreck in the ditch of being too insistent on irrelevant details (theological conservatism) or whether you wreck in the ditch of being too unconcerned about important details (theological liberalism). Both will mess you up, yet most evangelicals practically ignore the ditch of being too theologically conservative.

He goes on:

For instance, if the professor Larsen describes in his opening paragraphs didn’t realize that he would get a paper like Larsen’s student handed in when he assigned an opinion piece on “traditional marriage,” then he or she was incredibly naïve. Personally, I would never assign a paper on abortion or evolution in an intro-level class, because I know doing so would basically mean condemning conservative evangelical students to do poorly. Many of them would simply parrot the stock arguments they’d heard from their leaders with very little reflection or fresh argumentation of their own — and the inevitable bad grade would only feed the persecution complex, turning me into yet another “secular indoctrinator.”

All I have to say in response to this is that I wish more professors were as wise as he. I’d like to order that paragraph to be read to every professor in America once a year.

But the part I like best is this:

More immediately, though, if conservative evangelicals are not willing to abandon their siege mentality, I would urge them to at least adopt the practices that the New Testament authors recommended to persecuted communities: live quietly, seek to be at peace with all, respect authority, work hard — in short, keep the moral high ground. The sober advice of the Apostles has stood the test of time and will endure long after whatever radical preacher is in the ascendant now is forgotten.

This is Biblical and good advice and should be the baseline for Christians at secular universities. If a university actually prevents you from obeying Christ, then by all means take a stand and deploy every peaceful tool in your arsenal to stymie them (this is to follow the example of the apostles — Acts 5:25–32 and Acts 16:36–39). But if a university is merely teaching you things you consider to be untrue, then suck it up, master the materials, and excel academically (this is to follow the example of Daniel and his friends in Babylon — Daniel 1:17–20). In the long run you will accomplish far more for the faith by getting good grades than by causing lots of disruptions in class.

Kotsko’s essay is worth reading and pondering (and so is the piece he is responding to, No Christianity Please, We’re Academics).

As I said, he minimizes a real problem. Anyone who thinks that some professors do not seek to destroy the faith of students is simply uninformed, and anyone who doesn’t realize that huge swaths of university culture are hostile to evangelical sensibilities has not been paying attention. But Kotsko is right to point out that evangelical students often create their own problems by allowing the evangelical subculture to define their relationship to the university rather than allowing the Bible’s teaching to prevail.