Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

Well, well, well. Guess what folks? After two long years, the Mueller report is here, annnnnd….we got nothing. Shocker, I know. The President of the United States isn’t a Russian sleeper agent doing the bidding of our secret overlord Vladimir Putin? Who woulda thunk it? But I doubt that’s going to stop the spin at all. Oh well, at least we have the mailbag.

Q: Gary asks: “When we say two men should not be allowed to marry one another because God said so, are we taking away their religious freedom?  Is imposing a specific religious belief as tyrannical as not allowing other religious beliefs?  Does the Bible tell us to compel non-Christians to comply to our religious beliefs?”

A: If I had a list of questions whose answers were guaranteed to make everyone unhappy, this would probably be on that list. But are we afraid of controversy and inquiry, class? “NO!” Very good, class; I’ve trained you well.

I should start out by reminding my Christian brethren in particular that Biblical sexual purity extends to all areas of our lives, not just homosexuality. A few months ago, I actually had one guy, who I knew to be sleeping around, come up to me and say, “You know, when the Obergefell decision came down, it really hurt me as a Christian.” What? Can you even Matthew 7? So, let’s be clear. Fornication and adultery are wrong in any context, and it does us no good to act as if homosexuality deserves a special dispensation of tut-tutting.

So, with that out of the way, is saying two men should not be allowed to marry impinging on their religious freedom? I’m not sure religious freedom is the relevant freedom here, but either way I don’t think it’s wrong to say that people should not do certain things. How that plays out as policy however is another question. I’m not too concerned with abridging certain ‘freedoms’ as a general rule, but I don’t do that on strictly Biblical grounds in the policy sphere. I also don’t think it makes sense to impose a marriage restriction on homosexuals (from a Christian morality perspective) unless you’re also willing to do the same thing with heterosexual fornication and adultery. I rather suspect most Christians will not favor that for one reason or another. Jesus was not giving us a model for here and now government practices; he was bringing the firstfruits of God’s new kingdom and inviting others into it. Living in that kingdom means you act in a certain way; living outside of it means you are ‘free’ (insert tangent about slavery to sin that I won’t go into here) from those rules. Quite frankly, I don’t think Jesus really cared what the Roman policy on gay marriage was because he had his own kingdom with his own citizens and his own standard of living. Paul is pretty clear on this in 1 Corinthians that Christians are to hold one another accountable, but it doesn’t do us much good to try policing the morality of others on Christian grounds because they are not members of the God’s kingdom. It’s equivalent to Saudi Arabia trying to impose its morals on Denmark. Or, to bring back one of my favorite phrases, it’s an attempt to “immanentize the eschaton.”

At the same time, a central theme in the Bible (from the exilic texts to the NT) is the dual citizenship of believers; thus, we still have responsibilities in the here and now to work for the good of the nations we live in. When we formulate policy for the nation, we can have Scripture’s words in our minds and hearts, but we’re ultimately making policy decisions on non-Scriptural grounds, and that’s fine. So, with the gay marriage question, someone could make arguments about public health, could say that maybe it has a corrosive effect on society and the family, etc. What he or she shouldn’t do in the public sphere is just slap down a Bible and say, “Hah, gotcha.” Why? Because their hearts are not in it. Another central theme of the Bible is that people fail to act rightly because their hearts are hardened and cracked; Christ’s offer is to give us new hearts that can truly follow him, but he only gives to those who ask.

So, to wrap this up with a bow, the three condensed answers to the questions are:

1. The main point is that “because God said so” doesn’t work well for the policy sphere.
2. Depends. You could impose good policy for religious reasons and forbid other religious beliefs for good policy reasons. The opposite could also apply, hence why it depends.
3. No, but there could be good policy reasons for laws that Christians would associate primarily with obedience to God (i.e. – a nation adopts a Biblical standard because it’s good policy, not because it’s obedience to God).

Q: Marcus Aurelius asks: “You say that ‘since Jesus was able to beat sin every time, we too through the power of the Holy Spirit have that capacity too’ [reference to last week’s mailbag]. Do you think that Christians are capable of never sinning again after they become Christians?”

A: Hmmm, good question. Theoretically, I suppose you could manufacture a way this works out, but I think theory does us little good on this point. Even reading the gospels, the disciples more than once were like, “Yo, Jesus, I don’t know if you realize this, but there’s no way we can follow your standards,” and Jesus seemed to realize this too as none of us are as in tune with the Father as He was. The simple fact is that none of us in this life are going to attain fully to the standards Jesus set, and I don’t think that’s what God asks of us anyway. He wants us in relationship with him, growing day by day into the image of His Son. As we are want to do here in the mailbag, let’s quote C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters: “He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. I would challenge you, if you have this mental picture of God as a robotic scale oscillating between ‘glad’ and ‘mad,’ to reconsider Him for who He is: a complex, relational, covenantal being whose motives and purposes reach far beyond the binary.

Q: Louis A. Johnson asks: “538 has an interesting article about presidential primary polling, showing that Republicans at this point in the 2016 election cycle valued a candidate with office-holding experience, rather than new ideas, and that Democrats in this cycle value both a candidate under 70 years of age and with several decades of political experience. Do voters actually say what they mean and mean what they say, or do they say what they’re told and mean nothing in particular?”

A: My guess is that voters just want to be left alone and go about their lives with as little interaction with politics as possible. There could be some measure of ‘leading the witness’ so to speak, but I rather suspect most people have thought very briefly about what they truly want from the representatives, so I am hesitant to take poll results like these with much confidence. There’s been a chunk of research in the past that suggests voters are very prone to using shortcuts in their voting tactics (i.e. – he/she is a good speaker, this person suggested I vote for ‘X,’ I don’t like the other person so…, etc.), and that’s what actually translates into the results that we see. As 538 mentioned, if Democrats really held those views, Inslee or maybe John Hickenlooper even would be running away with the nomination right now, but that’s obviously not the case. At the end of the day, I tend to treat most polls as rubbish until we start getting close to the actual elections, and the stress of politics brings out people’s innermost interests.

Q: Louis also asks: “Thoughts on the first round of the NCAA tournament so far? Are you (not) entertained?”

A: Oh, I am very entertained thus far. This is probably the most successful I’ve ever been with my brackets, I’ve called a couple of the really big upsets (UC Irvine, Murray State, etc.), and most of the games have been down-to-the-buzzer spectacles. Plus, the Big Ten has been largely knocking it out of the park on the whole; even my Buckeyes squeaked out a win before getting stomped on by Houston, so I have little to complain about so far….except, that is, for Wisconsin and Villanova. Those hurt as I had them in the Elite Eight and Final Four, but I suppose we all have to face those letdowns eventually. I did see my bracket flash before my eyes during the Duke-UCF game, but we are past that now fortunately.

Q: Louis finally asks: “Trump did well in the Midwest as an outsider in 2016, but had Mike Pence on his ticket. Will Democrats choose/need a Midwesterner to do well in the region, or can a candidate from Texas or the East appeal well on rhetoric and policy alone?”

A: I have long doubted the premise that a VP’s home state carries any real weight in an election, and I recently ran across this study from Politico which confirmed my suspicion, namely: A VP has to be really popular or really unpopular in order to help or hurt the Presidential candidate. Consider Virginia in 2016 where Tim Kaine was supposed to help deliver the state to Clinton. On the surface, it looks like he did; Clinton’s margin of victory was larger than Obama’s in 2012, but a closer look reveals she only got 10,000 more votes than Obama. The real story is that Trump under-performed Romney by about 100,000 votes, a lot of which seem to have gone to Gary Johnson. Translation: Trump didn’t resonate well with Virginians. Tim Kaine didn’t help Clinton in Virginia, but Trump certainly did. I think the real story from the Midwest is that Trump delivered just the right message to just enough people in an election where the opponent was just unpopular enough to hemorrhage away her blue wall. Simply put, Trump saw his needle-thin moment and took it. Kudos to him.

Q: Sergei Efremomovich asks: “What are your thoughts on Protestant churches that have liturgies?”

A: I just so happen to go to a church that has a more liturgical bent to it, and I love it. It better focuses my mind on God and has the feel of a journey that takes you on a retelling on the Gospel without trying to induce an emotional state for emotion’s sake. In short, its primary focus is God, not man. For some reason, we Westerners have an almost hyper-emotionalized and spontaneous bent to our formal worship services; in fact, I rather suspect most people would bristle at the very mention of the word, ‘formal.’ If the audience isn’t overcome with delirium during the music set, if the pastor doesn’t possess the utmost, bordering on ridiculous passion during the sermon, if the feels just aren’t there, if the Spirit can’t move through the fog and laser lights — ‘then, oh then, we must not being doing something right,’ say the masses. C.S. Lewis had a brilliant point on prayer in the Screwtape Letters which I think relevant to this topic as well, and I will simply quote it here. Screwtape speaks:

“…he [the tempted patient] may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees. but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged ‘a sense of supplication.’ That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.

Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.”

For too long now, I think we have made God a vehicle for attaining to spiritual experiences, rather than seeking true friendship and communion with Him. For me, the liturgy is simply a good way to strip away an unmerited reveling in pageantry and poppycock and instead focus my “real concentration of will and intelligence” on my Creator. Some thoughts to close with:

1. May God withhold the benefits of sensory delight from us for a season to direct our attention towards Him and Him alone?
2. When Christ declared His coming kingdom in Matthew 5, to whom did it first come?
3. Based on your knowledge of Scripture, which does God prefer: Words of praise or an act of charity?
4. When we gather to worship, is God our end or our means?