Free Republic

Last year's American Idol winner, Carrie Underwood, has a record out that has been dominating the country music charts for weeks: "Jesus, Take the Wheel." It tells the story of a young woman's desperate prayer during a car crash, leading to a reflection on her own life. The song ends with a prayer for Jesus to "save me from this road I'm on." Finally knocking off "Jesus, Take the Wheel" as the No. 1 record was Brad Paisley's "When I Get Where I'm Going." Where he is going is heaven, where he yearns to see his loved ones. At the...

In the wrangles over gay marriage, some conservatives are proposing a simple solution: Have the government just get out of the marriage business. Small-government conservatives are saying, Why not just let people have any marital relationship they want? What business does the government have regulating marriage? Christian conservatives are saying, Let the secular world throw out or redefine marriage if it wants, we'll keep marriage as a distinctly Christian institution. Colin A.P. Jones, an American attorney and professor at a Japanese law school, offers a "free market solution." Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, he argues for the need to...

For the most part, Christians oppose legalizing same-sex marriage. But some religious people from across the spectrum are trying to make a Christian case for allowing homosexuals to marry each other. Theological liberals, of course, have never seen a left-wing cause they will not support. They follow cultural trends, secularist philosophers, and progressive politicians without question or criticism. So if the liberal social class accepts homosexuality and calls for same-sex marriage, then liberal theologians will too. Some large mainline denominations, such as the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have agreed to "bless" same-sex unions, but they...

Liberals today prefer to be called "progressives." They want to escape the negative connotations that have risen around the name for their ideology. The irony is that "liberal" was itself a label to make them sound better. The term comes from a Latin word meaning "freedom." Technically, a "liberal economic system" refers to free market, capitalist economics, as championed by today's "conservatives." The classical approach to teaching and learning favored by many conservatives today is technically "liberal education," referring to the equipping of a free citizen. Such an education specifically designed for freedom is in contrast to John Dewey's self-styled...

From WORLD magazine, Gene Edward Veith has an essay, Liberal conservatives, that may indeed describe part of a problem many evangelicals face: they are conservative everywhere but at church. As Veith writes:Todd Wilken, the Lutheran talk-show host, has identified another kind of liberal conservative. In an article titled "Bible-believing Liberals" in Issues, Etc. Journal, he observes that many Christians are conservative politically, economically, culturally, and in every other way except one: They are liberal/progressives when it comes to church. "While they believe that the culture needs to return to its historic traditions, they think the church needs to abandon hers,"...