Islam’s Way to Freedom

Thomas Farr says radical Islam poses a threar to America. Well...this is not really news, at least to me. He further says that military power with good intelligence, efficient laws, and sound diplomacy will not be enough to adequately curb the threat of Islam. This idea is not completely new either, though it is spoken less often.


What he does say that is less often spoken is...our foreign diplomacy needs a "new religious realism."


He adds the George Bush's foreign diplomacy was devoid of this realism and treated the religion like it is a peripheral to the activity of governming. Farr admits that the U.S. policy may well find and remove radical Islamist leaders and their communication cadres. Yet, it will not be sufficient because radical Islam is driven by a deeply rooted and practiced theology which believes Allah wants to violently overthrow the inidels.


Then he insightfully adds...


Unfortunately, policymakers in the United States remain tempted by the argument that radical ideas and movements can be suppressed by our authoritarian allies in the region. But when despots like Egypt’s Mubarak or Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah crack down on extremists, usually by arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution, they are in fact encouraging extremism, ensuring its survival and its export. Decades of American support for tyrants in the Middle East have helped retard the growth of moderate political Islam. History strongly suggests that political and religious repression, while not the root cause of Islamist extremism, blocks its most effective remedy—the development of liberal democratic political theologies.


He points out that to President Bush's credit he has understood how democratic policies pave the way to a more moderate understanding of religion. But what the President has failed to understand is that democratic structures alone will not bring this moderation about unless it is accompanied with economic progress is economic progress and the embrace of law and culture in human right and civil liberties.


Then Farr gets to the central point...


And here’s what the Bush strategists never fully understood: In highly religious societies—which is to say, in most countries in the world—the linchpin of liberties is religious liberty. Without it, democracy withers or implodes.


What we must then do is encourage Muslim groups toward a theology of religion freedom. But this is a tall, in fact daunting, order. For this reason some political thinkers believe the way out of the problem is to encourage Islamic regimes to take on secularist's governments. But this is unrealistic to think that of the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world that they will simply allow their beliefs to be marginalized. It is vital, according to Farr, that we engage the religion of Islam in this struggle for freedom.


How do we do this??? Farr answers...


First, by adopting an overarching principle: Religion is normative, not epiphenomenal, in human affairs. Policymakers should approach it much as they do economics and politics—as something that drives the behavior of people and governments in important ways. Like political and economic motives, religion can act as a multiplier of both destructive and constructive behaviors, often with more-intense results.



He goes on to give a practical suggestion...



American diplomacy, accordingly, should work to empower such religious leaders as the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his Sunni counterparts.



He further suggests that Iran has strong elements of democracy that can be encouraged with Iranian jurists. Pakistan has strong religious elements that tend toward moderation, and Egypt has the strongest elements. Also, "the Catholic University of America’s Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion has held substantive exchanges with Iranian jurists on topics from family law to weapons of mass destruction. By judicious support for such efforts, the United States can encourage internal reform that rejects both theocracy and terrorism as inimical to Shiism."

Farr lays out a number of possibilities and options for American diplomacy. Yet, he drives back to the thesis of his article that the heart of radical Islam comes from the voice of its religious belief system, and it is there that its influence must be greatly curbed if there is to be any long lasting change.

Then he adds...

Training at the Foreign Service Institute should be revamped. The self-defeating instruction to U.S. diplomats in the 2007 Public Diplomacy strategy—“avoid using religious language”—should be reversed. Washington should support the development of Islamist feminism, a potentially fruitful skirmish in the Muslim war of ideas. A privately funded Islamic Institute of American Studies on U.S. soil could bring the best jurists and religious leaders from across the Muslim world to study United States history, society, politics, and—most important—religion.


Then he tellingly quotes the Economist...

“The strange thing is that when America has tried to tackle religious politics abroad—especially jihadist violence—it has drawn no lessons from its domestic success. Why has a country so rooted in pluralism made so little of religious freedom?”

In my own modest assessment, this seems like a long range goal that is worth pursuing, if we hope to drive a stake into the heart of this great evil. Yet, I'm sure there are many forceful arguments as to why Farr's suggestions would not work. Here are some questions:

1) Is religious theology the heart of Islamic radicalism?
2) How do we change the heart of Islamic theology?

Babies Perfect and Imperfect

Still in view of Proposition 2 in Michigan, I'd like to write about Amy Julia Becker's article, Babies Perfect and Imperfect, in the November 2008 edition of First Things.

She writes that she gave birth to a Down syndrome baby--Penny. She reports that on the day of the birth the emotionally troubling experience upon finding out that she had a Down syndrome child...

As this news began to make its way into my consciousness, we heard shouts from the room next door. Another child had been born. “She’s perfect!” someone exclaimed about that other baby. “She’s perfect!” Once we found out that Penny had Down syndrome, we had a hard time celebrating her birth. We didn’t open the bottle of champagne perched by my bedside. We were afraid to call our friends and family. We didn’t shout, “She’s perfect.”

She describes with transparency that she felt her child was a "defective piece of machinery" that had been turned off--"subhuman," "abnormal," "retarded," "stupid" were all of the connotations that had swirled through her mind. Theologically she said the only way she could frame the extra chromosome that ran through every cell of Penny's body was that this happened because she was the victim of the results of sin in the world. She could not help but think of Penny as "defective" and a "mistake."

But she began to wonder what it meant for Penny to be created in the image of God. She asks some interesting questions on the nature of Adam and Eve's dependence in the Garden of Eden. But then she relates the disability of Down Syndrome to Christology. Quoting two theological authors who address this topic...

Jesus experienced bodily disfigurement on the cross, “this Christologically defined imago Dei would thus be inclusive rather than exclusive of the human experience of disability.”
Reynolds makes a similar point: “His resurrected body continues to bear his scars as a sign of God’s solidarity with humanity. . . . It suggests that disability indicates not a flawed humanity but a full humanity.”

She then began to conceive of her child's disability as a gift...

to that enable each of us to admit our creatureliness, our need for one another, our need for God’s grace.

She then adds this story...

Early on, I had asked my mother whether she thought Down syndrome happened because of sin in the world. She responded gently, “The only evidence of sin I see is in how the world reacts to Penny.”

Then she ends the article recording the realizations she has come to two and a half years after her daughters birth...

Two and a half years after Penny was born, I don’t think of her as defective, or retarded, or abnormal. I think back to that first evening of her life, when I cringed at the words about the baby next door: “She’s perfect!” I still wouldn’t call Penny perfect. I wouldn’t call any human being, besides Jesus, perfect. I am well aware that Penny needs healing and redemption through Christ, as do I. And Penny’s nature, I hope and pray, will be redeemed through Christ as she becomes the whole person she was created to be. I suspect Penny’s whole person will include three twenty-first chromosomes, but only because any aspect of that extra chromosome causing separation—physical, emotional, relational—will be overcome.
Just recently, we started reading a book about Jesus together. We read the story of Jesus blessing the little children. Penny was fascinated. At the end, I told her that Jesus loves her just like he loves the little children in the story. And I asked her if she knows that she can talk to Jesus. Without hesitation, she nodded her head, folded her hands, and said, “Pray.” Now that I know what to look for, I glimpse perfection in Penny’s life nearly every day.

Rick Joyner is a man who has spoken strategically into my life on more occasions than I can begin to remember. No one person has done more to equip me and shape my understanding of the function of God's kingdom than he. In saying that, I do have certain reservations about some of his teachings. However, those reservations reflect issues in which I'm sure Rick Joyner is maturing, and they do not touch on essential or orthodox issues of the faith. Nonetheless, that he has spoken decisively into my life on a multitude of times is undeniable.

This morning I was reading his Word Of The Week...I found it to be extremely profound both historically and practically.

Joyner has noted that historically there have been great advances for the gospel. There have been great movements in the working of God's Spirit to spread the advance of God's kingdom.
Then he writes...

Each one also brought about a separation in the church between those who were going forward and those who wanted to remain where they were.

If this is true it is certainly a sobering reality for which spiritual leaders need to be prepared.

He then writes about how he visted Geneva Switzerland where John Calvin and John Knox preached while in exile. He adds...

These two men were of such prophetic authority that they could preach in a small setting yet impact the whole world. They did this without the Internet or television, and their impact continues hundreds of years after their deaths. They were a part of a small group who blew a great spiritual trumpet that not only changed the course of church history but also human history. Their message not only reformed the church but also resulted in the birth of democracy, higher forms of justice and law, and some of the basic principles of science that have released a great increase of knowledge. It is always a marvel to me when I stand in the little chapel where they preached. The chapel was located in what was at the time, an obscure little village far from the mainstreams of civilization, and yet it had held a power to change the whole world. The only way this can be explained is they preached a truth which time had come.

Joyner makes the conclusion that our focus should not be on doing great things, but rather to the Lord's will--then great things will happen. Addressing Calvin's great contribuion he, then, provides...

It is fitting that one of Calvin’s most important contributions to the march of truth throughout the ages was his doctrine of original sources being required to validate a message. Of course, Calvin’s goal of establishing original sources as the basis of truth was to get Christians to see past the dogma and traditions of the church and to hold the Scriptures as the only basis of true doctrine in the church.

He then adds that the Reformers like Calvin and Knox always desired to reform the whole church, but they were resisted and even violently persecuted by the ecclesiastical powers. This addsbrings the dilemma that those who lead in a new move of God's Spirit in the church will typically face opposition by those who were part of previous moves of God's Spirit. Why does this occur??? Jealousy. So what then is a person to do to help preserve unity in the Body of Christ and move forward with a new wave of God's Spirit??? Joyner's answer is very insightful...

The Apostle Paul wrote in his most important Epistle, The Book of Romans, that even though the Jews had become hardened so that they resisted the gospel and persecuted its messengers, they were beloved for the sake of the fathers because they had been custodians of the oracles of God. Paul, therefore, warned the Gentiles who were marching forward with the New Covenant not to become arrogant toward the “natural branches,” or they, too, would be cut off (see Romans 11:21). Becoming arrogant toward those who may not see or hear what we do is a trap, which causes many to be cut off from further advancement.The only commandment with a promise is to “honor our fathers and mothers,” and the promise is “so that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth…” (see Ephesians 6:2). Nowhere does it say we should only honor great fathers and mothers or even good ones, but simply the ones we have been given, good or bad. Almost all will be both good and bad, just as some of the greatest heroes in the Bible also made some of the greatest mistakes.

Then he closes with this insight...

Unity is important and is one of the primary desires of the Lord for His people. However, our “love of the truth” must sometimes trump our desire for unity if we are not going to be deceived and are going to be a part of the present purposes of the Lord. Once we see the truth we are responsible to obey it, and sometimes this means that we will be driven out and persecuted by our predecessors, even by the very ones who gave birth to us in the Lord. Not many of those who have gone forward have done so without reacting to their persecutors with retaliation. However, for those who can maintain David’s attitude toward Saul and the Apostle Paul’s attitude toward his worse persecutors, the Jews, who he loved so much that he said he would even give up his own salvation to see them saved, they will bear fruit that remains like David and Paul, which is continually increasing to this day.

Principled Immigration

This Saturday my son Andrew will be engaged in a debate on illegal immigration. In light of this I am wanting to study and reflect on this issue. Toward this end I would like to turn to Mary Ann Glendon's article on Principled Immigration in the June/July 2006 edition of First Things.

Glendon speaks to the fact that we are in an age of mass migrations and wide movements of population groups all over the world. The United States is not exempt. It is a time of exceptional stress.

In the United States alone, about a million new immigrants have entered every year since 1990, bringing the total immigrant population to more than 35 million, the largest number in the nation’s history.

Glendon then goes on to tell us that there is and will be an increasingly great need for immigration in the United States. She writes...

Despite what population-control advocates had predicted in the 1960s and 1970s, the chief demographic problem facing most countries today is not overpopulation but its opposite. All over the world, even in developing countries, populations are aging. In the wealthier nations, where the process is most advanced, declining birth rates and increased longevity mean that our populations now include a much smaller proportion of children and a much larger proportion of disabled and elderly persons than ever before.

Social-welfare systems were originally constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the basis of a proportion of seven to nine active workers for every pensioner. That is simply not going to be the case if we rely on our current replacement population. As baby boomers retire with increased life spands, over the next 25 years the U.S. as a whole will increasingly look like Florida with one retiree for every five workers. She quotes our President...

President Bush stressed the urgency of the situation in his 2006 State of the Union Address, warning that “the retirement of the baby-boom generation will put unprecedented strains on the federal government. By 2030, spending for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will be almost 60 percent of the entire federal budget. And that will present future Congresses with impossible choices—staggering tax increases, immense deficits, or deep cuts in every category of spending.”

The cause of declining birth rates and consequently inadequate population replacement has been the break down of the family. Glendon then presents the heart of the problem as she decries the lack of clear discussion about this issue among policy leaders....

Consequently, there has been little discussion of what should be obvious: An affluent society that, for whatever reason, does not welcome babies is going to have to learn to welcome immigrants if it hopes to maintain its economic vigor and its commitments to the health and welfare of its population. The issue is not who will do jobs that Americans don’t want. The issue is who will fill the ranks of a labor force that the retiring generation failed to replenish.

So, we come to the important question...Why aren't Americans happy about immigration if immigrants are in fact a key factor to saving our nation from future collapse??? Here are some reasons...
1) Immigration somewhat reduces the wage earned by some existing Americans.
2) Immigration (in the illegal sense) increases the tax burden on American citizens. There are 12 million illegals in our nation.
3) Immigration has raised concerns about terrorists coming into our nation.
4) Immigration forces us to have to open up to more people who are "different" from us.

Herein is where the tension lies. There is a need for population replacement in the United States that can only come from immigration. However, this replacement comes with an immediate financial costs and the fear of fracturing our cultural cohesion.

What is the solution??? Glendon uses principles from the 2003 Joint Pastoral Letter issued by the Mexican and U.S. bishops, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope. She writes...

The letter asserts that (1) persons have the right to find opportunities in their homeland; (2) when opportunities are not available at home, persons have the right to migrate to find work to support themselves and their families; (3) sovereign nations have the right to control their boundaries, but economically stronger nations have a stronger obligation to accommodate migration flows; (4) refugees and asylum seekers fleeing wars and persecutions should be protected; and (5) the human dignity and rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.

What is clear is that we need to be open to aggressive immigration, but it needs to be balanced with the legality and sensitivity to the needs of its current citizen. This requires policy makers who can be guided by "principled immigration."

Stem Cells: A Political History

In view of Proposal 2 in Michigan to lift current restriction on embryonic stem cell research, I want to review Joseph Bottum's excellent article on the political history of stem cells.

Joseph Bottum begins...

It was a season of small demagogueries, a time of the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—it was a political moment, in other words, and hardly anyone is naive enough to forget that partisan politics always has partisan purposes.

Bottum hits the nail on the head of what has happened over the last seven years as politics and science have have been fused together on embryonic stem cell research. He further comments...

Perhaps the recipe looks like this: Take the always-present human hunger for magic—for medicine as a kind of witchcraft, delivering thaumaturgical cures. Add the vague sense, shared by most people, that ever since the discovery of DNA’s double helix in 1953 we have been living in something like a golden age of biology. Include the strong sense, among political liberals, that religious believers must be discredited before they undo the abortion license. Now, wrap the whole thing up in money, the competition for trillions of dollars in research grants and the biotech companies’ stock dividends.

Who could forget this...

Research with embryonic stem cells would lead to “the greatest breakthrough in our or any lifetime,” Ronald Reagan’s son announced at the 2004 Democratic convention. “How’d you like to have your own personal biological repair kit standing by at the hospital? Sound like magic? Welcome to the future of medicine.” On and on, it went: speaker after speaker denouncing the heartless Republicans who were trying to block the path of medical magic, until, at last, the vice-presidential candidate John Edwards stood up in 2004, pointed down at the paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve, and proclaimed that a vote for the Democrats would mean that people like Reeve “are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

Edwards managed to combine the moods of faith healing, tent revivals, and partisan politics.

As late as January 2007, Pennsylvania’s liberal Republican senator Arlen Specter was declaring, “It is scandalous that eight years have passed since we have known about stem-cell research and the potential to conquer all known maladies, and federal funds have not been available for the research.”

Another example from Specter of the lethal mixture of Millennial expectations and partisan manipulation.

Even scientists were allowing political pandering to be injected in the scientific process...
In the summer before the 2004 presidential election, Ron McKay, from the National Institutes of Health, admitted that he and his fellow scientists had generally failed to correct the media’s false reports about the promise of stem cells—but that was all right, he told the Washington Post, since ordinary people “need a fairy tale.” They require, he said, “a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”

For more examples, Bottum writes...

In a 2002 article in Nature, for example, Roger Pielke Jr. pointed to false stories—like one about the disabled rat in Australia that regained the ability to walk via tissues from aborted human fetuses—and declared that scientists’ ventures into the stem-cell debates “have given a black eye to the broader scientific enterprise.”

Or...

That same year, the researcher Alan Trounson added, “There are at least three or four other alternatives [to cloning and destroying embryos for pluripotent stem cells] that are more attractive already. . . . I can’t see why, then, you would argue for therapeutic cloning in the long term because it is so difficult to get eggs and you’ve got this issue of embryos as well.”

Or...

In January 2003, a science writer for the New York Times admitted: “For all the handwringing by scientists, you might think that therapeutic cloning is on the verge of curing a disease or two. . . . Almost all researchers, when questioned, confess that such accomplishments are more dream than reality.” Even Thomas Okarma, president of the Geron Institute, expressed some doubts: “The efficiency of making a stem-cell line from an embryo made by nuclear transfer [the technical name for cloning] is vanishingly small, and you’re going back to the case-by-case, individualized-therapy story again, with enormous costs.

Yet all the while John Kerry exalted...

“At this very moment, some of the most pioneering cures and treatments are right at our fingertips, but because of the stem-cell ban, they remain beyond our reach,” said Kerry. “To those who pray each day for cures that are now beyond our reach—I want you to know that help is on the way. I want you to hold on, and keep faith, because come next January, when John Edwards and I are sworn into office . . . we’re going to lift the ban on stem-cell research.”

Then a real scientific breakthrough....

Even at the time, however, the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka was working with mice to show that fully pluripotent stem cells (cells having the qualities of those produced by destroying embryos) could be created directly from adult cells. Within a year, his study was significantly expanded by research groups. And on November 20, 2007, two independent teams published papers—one in the journal Cell, and the other in the journal Science—about the production of pluripotent human stem cells without using embryos or eggs or cloning. And with a silent thump, the topic suddenly fell off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.

Embryo destruction became not only unnecessary but also less efficient than alternative methods. This breakthrough should have put the issue of embryonic stem cells off the political table. Now that human embryos are not needed the tone has sherply dropped from its utopian enthusiasms. James Thomson a well known stem-cell researcher announced shortly after the breakthrough discovery...

“A decade from now, this will be just a funny historical footnote...”

Bottum adds...

He may be right, but he shouldn’t be. We need to remember the events from 2001 to 2007, for the history of the stem-cell debate forms a classic study of what happens when politics and science find each other useful.

Sadly, in the politics of 2008, Michigan has a ballot to lift the state's current restrictions on embryonic stem cell reserach, and Obama has accused McCain of being against stem cell research. It appears that we are not quite over the strategy of abortion politics denial of real and useful science.