The Phone Book Test [Q & A on the cultural divide in our country]

Christianity Today ^ | 7/5/06 | Interview by Andy Crouch

[dukeman]

Robert P. George explains how a simple experiment reveals the great divide in our culture.

This year, we are exploring a single big question—How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?—with leaders inside and outside of evangelical Christianity. The Catholic legal scholar Robert P. George is a friendly outsider. As McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, he has been a vigorous advocate for the Catholic natural law tradition's relevance to debates about morality in the public square. In an age when even many Christians question the effectiveness of reasoned argument toward truth, George offers a bracing counterpoint. Editorial director Andy Crouch spoke with George at his Princeton office.

[RoadTest]

I looked in vain for God in this article. It's entirely humanistic, though it claims some connection to "religious" values for one side.

[Winston Smith]

I would say this is a lot of fluff. Words for money article.

[Dumb_Ox]

You must not have looked very hard.

Still, you're half-right. One of the weaknesses of Christian natural law theory is its overly-philosophical interpreters who don't follow up sound philosophical reasoning with sound theological insight.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

The article seemed to purposely be a description of two religions, a secular one and a God-based one. It points out that the anti-God crowd themselves have a religion of self, the secular elite. (Which is manifest in Communism where the state is the church and the party leader is God. Of course this is my added comment that is not in the article.)

The article points out the differences in values of two religions, primarily centering on the value of individual human life. The secularist religion values individual autonomy over human life, per se, while the God-based religions make human life uppermost.

If you didn't see that you missed it because you were looking for something else.

Thanks, dukeman, for a good article.

[DeweyCA]

Why do you call it that? It's a clash of two faiths. The folks on the elite side of the divide often try to depict this as a clash between religious believers—people who, they suppose, do not honor reason as having a role in moral decision making—and "reasonable people," that is, people like themselves who allegedly act purely on the basis of reason and do not rely on or appeal to faith. But I think the reality is that in the elite sector of the culture, people hold the views they do as a matter of faith every bit as much, perhaps even more, than do people in the broader culture.

He is saying much the same thing that Ann Coulter is saying. The secularists have their own form of religion: liberalism.

[dukeman]

And abortion is one of the secularist sacraments.

[Hillsdale Guy]

Read later bump.

[FreeRadical]

Nice article. Thanks.

For those wondering what the article says, here’s my quick synopsis:

First:
Good People Fear God, Don’t Kill Babies and tend to vote Republican.
Bad People Hate God, Kill Babies and tend to vote Democrat.

Second:
Good people tend to get pissed off at bad people because they really muck up your life with too much faith in governmental affairs.

Three:
Good people should play nice and love their enemies, the evil baby killing god haters, and hope like hell a little kumbaya moment comes along to save the day.

Here’s my question:

If God would play by the rules – the Constitution and Bill of Rights -- why can’t the “Good People that Fear God, Don’t Kill Babies and tend to vote Republican”?