Books At a Glance (Fred Zaspel):
Hi, this is Fred Zaspel, executive editor at Books At a Glance. We are talking today with Dr. Al Mohler about his new book, We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong. It’s a great new book, very contemporary title, seeks to get behind the specific moral issues that have come to the fore in recent years, and it takes a look at our culture itself and the responsibilities that are left to us in the light of it all. Dr. Mohler is well known as one well-informed and articulate on these subjects. We are glad to have you with us today – Dr. Mohler, welcome.
Al Mohler:
Fred, thank you so much. It is great to be with you.
Zaspel:
Alright, let’s begin with the observation that you make at the beginning, regarding the massive reversal, the revolution that has occurred with respect to the church and Christians in the broader public perception of morality. Describe how the situation is different today. How the tables have been turned on Christians.
Mohler:
Yeah, you know, I think most of us sense that something very comprehensive has taken place in the culture and I am indebted to Theo Hobson, who is actually writing from the left, when he writes years ago about what a moral revolution really requires . I think it is extremely helpful because he says it requires three different accomplishments or three different movements for those who are pushing that kind of effort. The first is that what was condemned has to be celebrated. And that is certainly what we are seeing in terms of, just to take one example, the legalization of same-sex marriage. And secondly, what was celebrated has to be condemned. Which is the moral sexual understanding of Christianity based in Scripture. So where what has once been central and normative for the society you are now marginalized and condemned in many public spaces for even admitting to hold to such a position or to membership in such a church. But the third thing he says is necessary is that those who will not join the celebration are condemned, and that’s where we are right now. And, you know, he was writing about this particular revolution, but he said that it was noticeable, even from those that were promoting this particular set of goals that the velocity is unprecedented. And I think that’s an understatement.
Zaspel:
Yeah, it really is, and I think it will be, it may be a revelation to some, they haven’t quite thought of it in the terms that you put it, but who would have thought that in such a short time, those of us who hold to traditional views of marriage would actually be despised as deficient and harmful.
Mohler:
Well, this is a complete shift in terms of a millennium and a half of Christian experience in the West, because at least for the last sixteen or seventeen hundred years, Christianity has been publicly understood as the essential, normative center of moral understanding and of moral authority and teaching. And, you know, I found myself on the front page of the newspaper yesterday, and someone asked me about it and I said, “Look, I’ve been found guilty of teaching what the Christian church has taught for two thousand years.” I did not expect, when I took my ordination vows that I would end up on the front page of the paper for agreeing with the Apostle Paul and Tertillian and Aquinus and Luther and Calvin and Edwards and, for that matter, virtually every Christian until very recent times.
Zaspel:
Yeah, this is not a Fundamentalist issue or a Baptist issue or even a Protestant issue.
Mohler:
Not at all. As a matter of fact, what’s really interesting…and I really appreciate the way you put it… this is really, in the most part, a secularization issue. And that’s where, in terms of Christian theology, we need to look and understand that none of this could have happened without the massive secularization of the culture. Especially the elites, where so many of these issues take their form of argument and entertainment and culture shaping formation. But it’s virtually true that wherever you find theistic believers, when you say that it’s not just a Fundamentalist or a Baptist issue, certainly it’s not, it’s interesting that worldwide it’s not even just a Christian issue. So wherever you find Orthodox Judaism, you find Islam, you find even Buddhism in terms of its classic form and virtually all Asian religions in their classic form, not to mention Christianity, whether it’s represented institutionally in terms of the orthodox churches or Roman Catholicism or historic Protestantism, it is only a tiny minority of the most secularized religious folk in the world who have bought into this new world view.
Zaspel:
Amazing.
Alright, let’s pursue that a little bit. A good part of your book is given to describing how this revolution could have occurred. Sketch out for us, just in broad strokes how this came about in such a grand scale. What were some of the contributing factors that paved the way?
Mohler:
Yeah, you know, as an historian and theologian, your instinct will be as mine to go back in particular to the enlightenment and understand that that whole process of secularization that I talked about has at least its roots there, but in a very specific way, I think we can see it better just looking over the last century and we had developments such as an earthly sexual revolution in the twentieth century, especially in the 1920’s. That led to such things as increasing acceptance of birth control and every single Christian denomination on the planet was officially against birth control until the first church changed that position, which was the Church of England in the third decade of the twentieth century. So that’s how recent it is, but you can’t have this moral revolution without separating sex and procreation.
And I don’t mean to get into a long discussion about birth control and contraception, except to say, I think virtually no one understood the eventual moral revolution that would be accelerated by that. And then you had the rise of the sexual revolution of the 60’s which had far more influence on American college and university campuses than most people recognized. I was talking with a major sociologist recently when we were on opposite sides of a network television debate, and she acknowledged to me, she said, “You know, the moral revolutionaries pushing the sexual revolution of the 60’s were just far more successful than they thought.” And we are certainly seeing that now.
Then… I’ll make this fast…you had the breakdown of marriage and the redefinition of marriage with the arrival of no-fault divorce in the late 60’s and the 1970’s. And you add to that the therapeutic revolution and a revolution in the academic culture with post modernism and moral relativism, and you’re gonna have all that before you get same sex marriage.
Zaspel:
You know, we had voices here and there that would come up along the way and then warn about what would come, and they were laughed at.
Mohler:
Absolutely.
Zaspel:
Turns out they were more prophetic than we thought.
The purview of your book is broader than just same-sex marriage, but talk to us about the impact of same-sex marriage. Its acceptance both culturally and now legally will surely have some wide-reaching effects both societally and for the church. What can we expect?
Mohler:
You know, Fred, a man by the name of Pitirim Sorokin, I quote in the book—he was the founder of sociology as a department at Harvard University. He made the very interesting observation over a half century ago, that every civilization starts with marriage and it can’t start anywhere else. And so the procreative unit, the family-raising, children-raising unit of marriage and family comes before anything else. And his point was: However you define marriage, that’s the way the civilization is going to be defined because it will be in one sense, marriage writ large. And I think that’s the really haunting thing for us to recognize, is that the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage isn’t as the proponent said, simply to add one more category of marriage, it’s to imply how the entire civilization is to be ordered. And the moral revolution, the threats to religious liberty, the marginalization of those who can’t by conviction join the revolution…these are things we are going to see in very short order.
Zaspel:
I’m sure.
Mohler:
You know, Fred, can I give one example, by the way?
Zaspel:
Sure.
Mohler:
In terms of, you know, people say, “What difference is it going to make?” Well, go to the children’s section of a trade bookstore today and look at the new books coming out, and look at books on the family and see how they have to change the pictures. That’s just one concrete way you can see that’s how a moral revolution happens throughout a society.
Zaspel:
Yeah, absolutely.
Talk to us about the way in which we’ve seen a new revisionist definitions of marriage and how they differ from the traditional understanding, and why that difference is significant. What is marriage?
Mohler:
Well, you know, what we see is that marriage was reduced in the minds of many people in western nations, and just to take the United States, during the 1970’s in particular, marriage became redefined as a contract and what was left behind was the understanding of marriage as a covenant. The covenant is a Biblical understanding of marriage, and our laws have respected this by deference and by definition. Our laws understood that marriage is a reality in which it is greater than just two individuals—it’s so important to society that society has a stake in it and in holding it together. And we have marriage redefined as merely a contract between two people who want to be married as long as both of them wanted to be married. No-fault divorce – its impact was simply to say, if any one of those parties, either of them, wants to get out of the marriage, the marriage no longer exists. And that’s devastating, and nothing like that has ever happened in human history. And we underestimated its damage to marriage. And so, once we redefined marriage that way, as merely a contract between two people, you get to the Obergefell decision, written by Anthony Kennedy that was handed down just in June. I mean, because, if marriage is just a union between two people for as long as they want to be related, that turns out to be the fatal flaw.
Zaspel:
Yes.
Tell us about the transgender revolution. First, maybe you could define for us the points at issue here and then describe the impact we can expect from it.
Mohler:
Yes, it’s going to be bigger than just the issue of sexual behavior and what we had previously talked about in our lifetimes as sexual morality, because the transgender issue isn’t just about morality and activity, it’s about self-identity and about gender presentation. Transgenderism is specifically the claim that gender is a social construct and that every individual is autonomous to determine what gender in terms of our gender identity we should choose or we should know or claim at any given time and that that’s different from biological sex. And so, what we’re looking at is a deeper revolution and it’s built directly on the moral revolution having to do with same-sex relationships. This is what now follows. Gender is entirely, according to this new ideology, a social construct.
And, Fred, one of the things I point out is that they can’t live – the transgender movement can’t live with its own internal contradictions but they haven’t figured that out yet and this society has decided that we are supposed to embrace this comprehensively. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work right down to the bathroom issue, right down…you know, one theorist of that movement said recently that it’s child abuse for a doctor to say when a baby is born if it’s a boy or a girl. Well, all I’ve got to say is, doctors are still going to say that because there is no way around it, and so this is a revolution that is not going to work, but it’s going to be very damaging.
Zaspel:
It is.
Let’s talk about natural law. First of all, what is it? And then, what role should it have in this discussion—particularly in the public forum and how can the Christian best address this issue in the public forum?
Mohler:
Well, that’s a brilliant question. You know the folks like George Weigel a very, very influential and very intelligent Catholic figure in terms of public policy, he said that the secret of a Catholic argument is the fact that it can find common ground with non-Christians through arguments from the natural law. I would simply say that as an Evangelical Christian, that that’s interesting in theory, but it actually doesn’t even work in practice. In other words, I have never met anyone who said, “I reject the authority of scripture, I reject the fact that there is a living God, but I agree that marriage must be the union of a man and a woman, simply based on natural law arguments.”
So as Evangelicals—Carl Henry and I spoke at a conference 20 plus years ago on this question—and I stand on what we said together then and that is that it is an abdication of the sufficiency of Scripture to believe that we can actually use merely natural law arguments to win the argument in the public square. I would say that that understanding is wrong and it’s futile, it simply doesn’t work. The failure of any compelling argument to keep same-sex marriage from happening is the proof. I also want to say that as Evangelicals, as historic Protestants in the confessional sense, we don’t deny the natural law, we just deny that it is compelling to unbelievers. So we end up making some arguments that are natural law arguments and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about that. But we don’t stand on a natural law authority. That’s a very important distinction I hope I am making clearly.
Zaspel:
Yes, I think you characterized it really well in the book where you made the remark that in Romans 1 we have a recognition of natural law, but Romans 1 also tells us how natural law fares in the hands of fallen men.
Mohler:
Yes, you know, natural law doesn’t keep a sinner from sinning, natural law and the imago Dei explains why we cannot not know we are sinning. The sinner has a consciousness of that sin, but Romans 1 makes very clear that that does not keep people who are intent on sin from sin.
Zaspel:
Right.
Okay, a couple more questions, quickly. In your last chapter you address thirty common and very pressing questions that Christians ask today regarding homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and related issues like that. You can’t take time to answer those questions here, but I think it will be of interest to the listeners to know about it. If you could, just give us a sampling of kinds of questions that you take on in that chapter.
Mohler:
Well, the one that got me on the front page of the newspaper yesterday, was the question, “Can a Christian attend a same-sex wedding ceremony?” and my answer to that is simply, “No.” I give an extended reason why, which basically comes down to the fact that throughout human history and specifically in terms of the wedding the attendance at a wedding is the endorsement of the wedding. It is the affirmation of the wedding. So those are hard questions, but it also comes down to questions like, “Should you let you kids play with the kids of a same-sex couple next door?” And in that case I think you could come to a very different conclusion without violating conscience because you are not affirming by your presence and by your friendship. And that gives to the other issue, “Should Christians seek to be friends to those who are openly living, either as same-sex couples or in a similar situation?” And the answer is, “Yes, to the extent we can extend friendship without affirming what we know to be sin.” This isn’t new—parents have had to deal with kids who came home from college and wanted to bring a boyfriend or girlfriend home and parents in the 60’s and 70’s were dealing with this—it’s the same kind of question, and yet we’ve got to think them through.
Zaspel:
Well, I think that list of questions you have in that final chapter is a helpful clue to the kinds of ways that all of this is going to unravel for us in society, both society generally and with regard to the church and decisions we’ve got to make and changes and so on.
Mohler:
If we don’t think clearly, we are going to unravel. I like the way you put it.
Zaspel:
One last question: How should the church respond in reference to all this, both defensively and offensively, what are some measures we should take? What do we do?
Mohler:
Well, I think what we do first of all is be who God has called us to be and demonstrate the church as Christ established the church, and live that out. We’ve got to teach everything the Scripture teaches. We cannot be silent—that’s the title of the book. And it’s because we believe that what God has revealed in Scripture isn’t just for us and is for you know in terms of public truth when it comes to a matter of marriage which is rooted in creation, it is essential to human flourishing. And we can’t stand by and act as if we don’t know that. At the same time, we’ve got to demonstrate the sexual morality and all that is revealed in Scripture. We’ve got to live by it. We can’t possibly have credibility to speak to these issues if we’re not living in integrity on these issues.
Zaspel:
Absolutely.
Well, Dr. Mohler, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, about his new book: We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong. Dr. Mohler, thanks a lot.
Mohler:
Fred, it’s been an honor to be with you. Thank you.
