It's Monday, December 9, 2013. I'm Albert Moeller and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Six months. That's just about how long it took between the Windsor decision handed down this June by the United States Supreme Court... and a decision handed down Friday in Colorado where an administrative court judge ruled that a baker in that state must serve same-sex couples in terms of making a wedding cake for their ceremony. Not a marriage ceremony. Colorado has a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, but civil unions are legal in that state and there is nothing in the law legalizing civil unions that offers a religious exemption for a baker. In this particular case, Judge Robert N. Spencer said that Masterpiece Cake Shop in suburban Denver, Colorado discriminated against a same-sex couple, quote, because of their sexual orientation by refusing to sell them a wedding cake for their same-sex marriage, end quote. Masterpiece Cake Shop in suburban Denver is owned, at least in part, by Jack Phillips. He's been in the business for 40 years. He has enjoyed making wedding cakes in order to allow couples to celebrate their wedding. And he makes the argument that a wedding cake is a unique form of product or service. It is expressive. That is, it is intended by its very nature to celebrate and to facilitate a celebration. Mr. Phillips said that when it comes to same-sex marriage, given his Christian convictions, he can't celebrate that kind of a union. And thus he asked the same-sex couple in this case, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, to go elsewhere in order to get their cake. Where they went was to the American Civil Liberties Union and where the ACLU went was to court. And that's what eventuated in Friday's decision. What we need to note here is not just the state using its coercive power against a small business, in this case a baker. We've seen a similar ruling come in New Mexico when it comes to a wedding photographer. We've seen a similar case emerge in the Pacific Northwest with a florist. And now we have a situation with a baker in Colorado. But as troubling as the coercion is, the speed of this moral revolution has never perhaps been more graphically demonstrated than in this. The decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court was only in June of this year in the Windsor decision. And already you're seeing a decision like this being made by an administrative court judge in Colorado that coerces a business owner into doing business, and a business that violates his conscience. In his decision, Judge Robert N. Spence said, quote, End quote. Now we need to note that the legal argument cited by the judge in this case is not fully honest. It's not fully intellectually honest. It is modeled after civil rights protections. In other words, the kind of legitimate law that says that a business can't discriminate in terms of its client base or customers on the basis of race or ethnicity. But in this case, it's sexual orientation, and it is now being made equivalent to the issue of race. It's an argument that we've seen developing for some time. But we need to see very carefully that what the judge is saying here is that it is wrong to discriminate against this same-sex male couple, quote, simply because of who they are, end quote. Well, the simply because of who they are argument can't stop there. And I can promise you it won't stop there. In other words, what we have here is a same-sex couple being united in a civil union in the state of Colorado. But there are other sexual orientations and there are other sexual permutations, and they are sure and certain to show up with lightning speed. Why lightning speed? Well, just consider the distance between the Windsor decision and this. In that time, we've gone from the federal government of the United States establishing that marriage is only the union of a man and a woman to a situation where an administrative court judge in Colorado says to a baker, you must make a wedding cake for a same-sex union. Six months. That's all it took. Culturally speaking, some of the most important articles and essays that appear in terms of our national conversation, it's hard to top two sections of two major newspapers over the weekend for insight, even when the insight is provocative. Will you agree or will you disagree? The first is the Sunday edition of the New York Times, its Sunday review section. Always a major section potent with this kind of material. The other is the Saturday-Sunday weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and its review section. The cover story of that is often a very interesting news story. And the same is true this weekend with Lee Siegel's essay on America the Vulgar. Siegel's the author of several books, most recently, Are You Serious? How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly. But this article isn't silly. He's on to something of great importance. Siegel begins by telling of his seven-year-old son coming up to him asking the question, what's celebrity sex? He immediately has a heart attack and does his best to find out what exactly is going on here. The seven-year-old heard it and asked about it. The father tried to be evasive. It didn't work. Then he found his three-year-old with a smartphone with an inappropriate picture. Not a pornographic picture, just an inappropriate picture. The kind of thing that led this father to say, we're in a culture that is increasingly toxic. You just have to wonder when you read his article, where has he been for the last several years? This is not as new a development as he seems to think. But in terms of where it's headed, he seems to know. Siegel asked the question, when did the culture become so coarse? It's a question that quickly gets you branded as either an unsophisticated rube or some angry culture warrior. But I swear on my hard drive that I'm neither. He goes on to offer his own liberal or libertarian bona fides. But even though this is a liberal parent when it comes to the culture, he's not liberal when it comes to the effect this vulgar culture is having on his own children. He writes about the fact that locker room conversation is now prime time conversation. He writes about the fact that what had been hidden on the fringes of society is now mainstream. Siegel's essay includes comments such as this, quote, the shock value of earlier vulgarity partly lay in the fact that a hitherto suppressed impulse erupted into the public realm. Today, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and the rest have made impulsiveness a new social norm. No one is driving anyone crazy with some new form of expression. You're a parent and you don't like it when Kanye West, for instance, sings inappropriate lyrics. He goes on to say, you don't just have to worry about your kid coming across it in some strange way or from a friend. It's being played at the mall. Siegel's exactly right. Quote, now as soon as some pointlessly vulgar song gets recorded, you hear it in a clothing store. End quote. In terms of cultural analysis, Lee seagulls onto something else that's really important and we need to note there is no distinction in terms of vulgarity between high and low culture. It used to be that there were things on the fringes of society in what was considered to be inappropriate media, explicitly defined as obscene or pornographic, but now it's everywhere. He writes, The fact is that you're hearing the same language, witnessing the same violence, experiencing the same graphic sexual imagery on cable, or satellite radio, or the internet, or even good old neighboring network TV, where almost explicit sexual innuendo and nakedly explicit violence come fast and furious, old and young, high and low, the idiom is the same, everything goes." Graphic sexual references no longer shot because they have become so commonplace. They're everywhere. He writes, quote, today, our cultural norms are driven in large part by technology, which in turn is often shaped by the lowest impulses in the culture. Siegel then comments on something that we have noted several times on this program. When you're talking about the advances in digital technology, you're often talking about things that were advanced by the pornographic industry before they were advanced by anyone else. In other words, Amazon and all the others on the web are riding on the back of advances made by the pornography business. He makes some of these very clear. He writes, behind the internet success and making obscene images commonplace is the dirty little fact that it was the pornography industry that revolutionized the technology of the internet. Streaming video, technology like Flash, Sites that confirm the validity of credit cards were all innovations of the porn business. The internet and pornography go together like love and marriage. No wonder so much culture seems to aspire to porn's depersonalization, absolute transparency, and intolerance of secrets." Siegel ends his essay in a very interesting way that should also not only interest us but concern us. He writes, There is no end in sight. Let's just pause there for a moment. He's certainly right about that. There is no end in sight. And he's also right about the complex factors behind the development of the vulgarity of our culture. But then he writes, one can only hope that, as happens so often in America, restless impatience with the status quo will carry the day and the pendulum will swing to the other side, not toward censorship and repression, but toward the sacred power of sexual self-assertion and outlaw imprecations, end quote. Let's look more closely at what he said there. He said censorship and repression are out. Those are words that simply aren't even tolerable in terms of polite conversation anymore. What he argues is that we basically have to wait and hope for the pendulum to swing back. But then he says, using words that don't seem to quite ring true, as happens so often in America, end quote. Does that really happen so often in America? When you think about American history in the 20th century, it's hard to imagine that you're actually talking about anything realistically described as a pendulum. Instead, it appears to be a rocket. It's going in one direction. It may not be going in an exactly straight arc, but it is going in one direction. The vulgarity and coarsening of the culture is not going back and forth like a pendulum. It's hard to imagine that any honest assessment can say that it's doing anything other than going forward. Perhaps sometimes faster, other times slower, but still in the same direction. Sometimes in this direction, sometimes in that, but always forward in terms of the arc. There doesn't seem to be any backward movement, nor should we expect there's any realistic promise of this. And of course, when you're in a culture in which talking about any kind of movement in this direction is, to use the word Lee Siegel himself used, repression, well there you come to understand that Sigmund Freud is smiling from the early decades of the 20th century. Where Freud made very clear in terms of his argument, a very secular argument that he knew was directly at odds with the Christian worldview, Freud argued that any attempt to try to control those sexual urges amounted to repression. Now, to give Freud credit, he believed that society depended on some level of repression. But once you define all sexual limits as repression, someone's going to argue you have to get over that repression, and they're going to label it as liberation. So what Lee Siegel writes about in his own libertarian worldview, oddly enough, as the vulgarity of the culture, is something that is the inevitable result of setting loose a notion that sexuality is something that has been repressed and thus must be liberated. That's why, by the way, when you go back to that administrative court in Colorado, same-sex couples won't be the last to stand in line. Someone will be there soon, very soon, to be next. And speaking about our cultural conversation, a very interesting aspect of that conversation appeared in an article by Frank Bruni in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. The title of his article? The Bible is Bludgeon. Frank Bruni's been mentioned in terms of the briefing at several points. He's an openly gay, very liberal columnist for the New York Times, a very influential man, and in this case, a very upset man. What has upset him? It's a political ad. An ad by Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Pryor's up for re-election in 2014, so this television commercial's a bit early in the cycle, but as Bruni explains, it's because Pryor is facing a very tight race in 2014. But what really has aggravated Frank Bruni is not the fact that the advertisement came early, but rather that the commercial featured a United States Senator speaking of his Christian faith, holding a Bible, and stating, as he said, quote, this is my compass, my North Star. It gives me comfort and guidance to do what's best for Arkansas, end quote. Well, honestly, the ad also caught the attention of many in Arkansas, who had been puzzled some time back when Senator Pryor appeared to take a step back from arguing that you should use the Bible in public policy. Just last year, the senator said that the Bible, quote, is really not a rule book for political issues. He went on to say, quote, everybody can see it differently, end quote. Well, almost everyone can see exactly what's going on here, Republican or Democrat, Frank Bruni or someone else. Someone looking at this ad knows that here you have a politician trying to use the Bible and his own Christian identification in order to solve a political problem. Looking at that, the question is, what's going on and is there any way to avoid it? Frank Bruni believes that there should be some way to avoid it. He's upset by the very fact that Senator Pryor ran this article. He says that it just points out that every major politician in America is expected not only to be religious but basically to be Christian. He writes, He speaks about the Arkansas race in 2014 and says, is running this race now because his state is much redder than it is blue. And Republican strategists see his defeat as a key to retaking the Senate majority. Senator Pryor doesn't want to be defeated. He doesn't want the last thing about the Bible and the memory of Arkansas voters to be what he said last year when he said he really shouldn't rely on it in terms of political decision making. So he ran this commercial, and Republicans trying to unseat him in the state of Arkansas accused him of hypocrisy, pointing to the statements he made about the Bible last year and comparing it to the commercial in which he holds the Bible and makes those avowals this year. But that's not really what's eating at Frank Bruni. What bothers him is that the issue is even being discussed, and that here you have a United States senator who felt that he needed to make such an ad. And, Frank Bruni says, that violates our national compact. probably ought to be seen as unconstitutional. He writes, quote, the Arkansas episode is indicative of how thoroughly Americans from coast to coast let religion permeate public life, end quote. Let me just pause there for a moment. One of the things that makes the New York Times so important is because it is the most influential newspaper in America, not the most widely circulated, but it is the most influential. It is also perhaps the quintessential representation of the secular liberal outlook in America. Its columnists, by and large, not exhaustively, but by and large, and Frank Bruni illustrates that, represent that worldview. And now you have Frank Bruni writing, it's simply wrong. It should be outrageous that Americans, to use his words, from coast to coast let religion permeate public life, end quote. Well, here's one of the things we simply have to throw into this equation. Those of us who are Christians are also sometimes very concerned about the way religion is used, Christianity in particular, in terms of the political process by political candidates. We understand there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around, but let's just imagine how we might accomplish what Frank Bruni appears to want, and that is to forbid religion from permeating public life. The reason religion permeates public life is because Americans are a very religious people. Now, let's not fool ourselves here. We're not saying that all Americans, or even a vast majority of Americans, are evangelical Christians. We are saying that religious arguments, religious themes, and at least a religious memory, a Christian memory in particular, still forms a great deal of our national conversation. And when people deal with the most ultimate and important issues of their lives, even when they deal with things less than ultimate in terms of the crucial issues of politics, they can't disengage their Christian or religious convictions from those issues. It's impossible that religion won't permeate our public life. It might not appear that it's so impossible in the city of New York. It is impossible when you look coast to coast." Bruni goes on to write, "...as full of insight and beauty as the Bible is, it's not a universally and unconditionally embraced document, and it's certainly not a secular one. Yet, it's under the hand of almost every American president who takes the oath of office." In other words, that's a problem. By the way, Frank Bruni doesn't realistically think that American presidents are going to stop taking the oath of office on the Bible, but he does want there to be a renegotiation of the role of religion in public life. Why? As he writes, three of four Americans are at least nominally Christian, but that leaves one in four who aren't. One in five Americans don't claim any binding religious preference or affiliation, and their ranks have grown significantly over the last two decades. Out-and-out atheists remain a sliver of the population, but a restive sliver at that. Now, that's a very interesting assessment. And by the way, his statistics there are unassailable. They are absolutely true. America is a predominantly Christian land in terms of self-identification, but it is a secularizing culture as well. And there are more unbelievers every year and certainly every census or every major research cycle. But let's just look at a basic fact here. As a matter of fact, we need to look at at least two tandem facts. Fact number one, human beings are composite figures and they can't segregate in terms of their own thinking and worldview, even their impulses and emotions, their secular and their sacred selves. That's impossible. And yet it seems impossible for many secular Americans to understand that. Nonetheless, it is profoundly true. The second profound fact that is unassailable here is that when you have a people in a culture who have an overwhelming majority and they think in one way, whether it's about a secular principle or a religious belief, the culture is going to reflect that inevitably. If you live in a land where 80% of the people identify as Muslim, you're going to be in a land that has a constant reference to Islam. There's no way around it. And by the way, in order to get to that point, you don't have to have 80%. If you live in a county that's 80% Democratic, guess what the frame of reference is going to be? If you live in a city that's 80% anything, guess what the conversation is going to be about? It's inevitable and it's not going to change, regardless of how much it aggravates a calmness for the New York Times, or any one of us for that matter. Bruni writes that the intrusion of religion and politics can often get ugly. Well, he writes from a secular perspective. Let me argue from a Christian perspective. He's right. It can often get ugly. That's why we have to think about it very carefully. That's why Christians need to be quite sophisticated when we listen to politicians of either party or any strife speak. And that's also why we have to understand that it is impossible to get where Frank Bruni, I think, wants us to get, to a place in which religion doesn't permeate our national conversation. There's a reason that a president of the United States puts his hand on a Bible in terms of his inauguration. It might not be a deep spiritual reason, but there's a very important reason. Just try unpacking that and you'll realize what Frank Bruni and the New York Times are up against. Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website at albertmuller.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com forward slash albertmuller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, just go to spts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.