NPR has an article making the case that racism has deep roots in white Christianity in the United States. The article lays out the long sad history of white supremacy in the U.S. with a special emphasis on how churches and Christians were complicit in it. This history is well-known even among the most conservative American evangelicals. It is a great moral stain that so many Christians failed to see the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation and, even worse, that some even tried to defend these positions from scripture. But the last section of the NPR article sort of lost me. It seems to blame these failures on…
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Confronting Purity Culture or Christian Sexual Ethics?
Katelyn Beaty has penned an Op-Ed for The New York Times with a provocative title and subtitle: HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS HAVE SEX? Purity culture was harmful and dangerous. But its collapse has left a void for those of us looking for guidance in our intimate lives. I won’t rehearse the whole argument of Beaty’s piece. I simply encourage you to go read it for yourself before pressing on with my comments here. I read Beaty’s op-ed with great interest and was genuinely grateful to see her confront the consent-only ethic of the wider culture. Her personal story of disillusionment with this approach to things is actually gut-wrenching to read. It…
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Stop the Presses! Christian teacher goes to teach at Christian school!
The Huffington Post apparently thinks it’s newsworthy that Karen Pence—wife of Vice President Mike Pence—has taken a teaching job at a Christian school. What’s so extraordinary about this? According to the report: It’s not a school where everyone is welcome. In a “parent agreement” posted online, the school says it will refuse admission to students who participate in or condone homosexual activity. The 2018 employment application also makes candidates sign a pledge not to engage in homosexual activity or violate the “unique roles of male and female.” “Moral misconduct which violates the bona fide occupational qualifications for employees includes, but is not limited to, such behaviors as the following: heterosexual…
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Albert Mohler answers questions about social justice
Albert Mohler had an open Q&A session with students at Southern Seminary and Boyce College today in which he answered a question about social justice. At 24:14 in the video above, a student asks, “How do you define social justice, and how do you define our gospel call in how you define social justice.” Dr. Mohler gives an extensive statement in response, and at 38:35 offers a specific explanation of why he didn’t sign the recent Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. Later in the day, Dr. Mohler answered more questions along these lines on his podcast “Ask Anything Live.” In the video below, you can hear the questions…
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Beauty, Order, and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality
Todd Wilson and Gerald Hiestand have put together a stimulating collection of essays on sexuality titled Beauty, Order, and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality (IVP, 2017). Contributors represent a diverse range of views within evangelicalism and include Richard Mouw, Beth Felker Jones, Wesley Hill, and yours truly. My chapter is titled “The Transgender Test” and explores the ways that transgenderism presents a unique challenge to Christian faithfulness and witness. I argue that it is a test of biblical authority, a test of biblical message, and a test of biblical relevance. All of the contributors participated in the 2016 conference hosted by the Center for Pastors Theologians in Oak…
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Standing against a destructive misogyny threatening our children
Sexual perversion is firmly entrenched in our cultural mainstream, so it takes a lot these days to astonish me. But I am astonished today. In the span of twenty-four hours, I have come across not one but two separate unrelated articles about teenage girls who agree to be brutalized during sexual encounters with teenage boys. Both articles indicate that this is a growing trend among adolescent children who becoming sexualized at younger and younger ages. Last week, Teen Vogue published an article instructing teenage girls how to enjoy being sodomized by their boyfriends. The article is so vile that I am not even going to link to it. But among…
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Top Ten Posts of 2016
Some of you may have noticed a big change at DennyBurk.com in 2016. I closed down comments on the blog. I didn’t make a big announcement or anything. I just did it. Why? The short answer is that Tim Challies convinced me. After a trial run of closed comments, I eventually wavered and opened them back up. But then I read this article explaining why NPR shut down comments on its website, and that sealed the deal for me. No more comments! I want to thank all of you who have read and interacted with this site over the last year. I am grateful for every one of you. For…
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Reaping the whirlwind of sexual idolatry
Yesterday I read an article in Vanity Fair about how social media has transformed the hook-up culture of millennials. The article is titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.'” It is so sexually provocative that I am not going to post a link to it. While Jesse Singal has questioned Vanity Fair‘s reporting and the central claims of the article, Rod Dreher and Carl Trueman have both written some helpful reflections taking the article at face value. I have to confess that I did not know how Tinder and similar apps have amplified the possibilities for promiscuity. This technology has put the hook-up culture on steroids. If the…
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If everyone consents, why not “50 Shades” or incest?
At this point in our culture’s sexual devolution, the only recognized boundary on sexual expression is consent. If two or more persons are of age and if all parties agree to a given sexual activity, then that activity is deemed acceptable—no matter what it is. Any attempt to suggest moral obligation beyond consent is treated as repressive and as a throwback to puritanical austerity. That’s simply where we are right now as a people. Certainly Christians would agree with our secular counterparts that consent is a necessary moral condition for sexual expression. No one disagrees with that. The problem we have is with the suggestion that consent is the only…
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50 Shades of Strange
I have not read 50 Shades of Grey, nor do I plan to. The book is a bona fide publishing phenom, but every description I have read is that the story amounts to literary pornography. For that reason, I can’t imagine anything helpful coming from the film version set to be released later this year. I’ll be sitting that one out too. So I have great sympathy for the concerns Aimee Byrd expresses about the reception of the forthcoming movie. She writes: