When Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker delivered the commencement address at Benedictine College—a small Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas—on May 11^th, he understood that his speech would be controversial. In fact, he essentially led off by acknowledging “These are the sorts of things we are told in polite society not to bring up.” However, I doubt even he thought he’d still be making headlines nearly two weeks later.

So what is it about Butker’s speech that has caused such a stir? And is the criticism he’s received warranted, or is it another example of modern society’s penchant toward free speech for me but not for thee?

As you might expect, the answer to both questions is complicated.

Using the right lens

Let’s start by looking at what Butker actually said.

The part of his address that has received the greatest amount of attention is when he spoke specifically to the women in the audience:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly, because I think it is you—the women—who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross this stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles that you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

While those thoughts would not have been terribly controversial fifty years ago, they understandably caused quite a stir today. The problem, however, is that much of the criticism he’s received has been levied by people who took his words and interpreted them through a lens that did not necessarily fit the context of his speech.

AJ Willingham, for example, claimed “Butker suggested that a woman’s accomplishments in the home are more valuable than any academic or professional goals.” It’s easy to see how Willingham would reach that conclusion, particularly since Butker proceeded to spend the next few minutes of his address thanking his wife for making the choice to stay home with their kids and detailing the joy she feels as a result.

Yet, his statement about women was one example within a larger message encouraging people to find peace and contentment by accepting God’s plans for their lives. If he truly thought that the only path God could have for a woman would be as a wife and mother, he would not have surrounded that statement by congratulating the women graduates for earning their degrees or for the “successful careers in the world” that some of them will surely go on to achieve.

Now, it’s probable that, given the larger worldview he espoused within his speech, he would agree with the idea that the most fulfilling life a woman could lead would be as a mother and wife. And it’s all right to disagree with that assessment.

WHO DEFINES SEXUALITY?

In our book, Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design, we look at God’s intentions for our flourishing.

However, it’s important to note that he did not say—as Sam McDowell surmised—that such a life was “their duty as a husband’s servant.”

Fortunately, there were some—including from some surprising sources—who saw Butker’s comments differently.

“Can’t that just be a choice too?”

On last Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host addressed both Butker’s speech and the response it received.

He started by saying, “I can’t express how much this guy is not like me. He’s religious. He loves marriage. He loves kids.” He then went on to state, “I don’t see what the big crime is. I really don’t.” Speaking specifically of Butker’s comments about being a wife and stay-at-home mom, Maher added, “Can’t that just be a choice too?”

And I think that final thought was at the heart of Butker’s address.

Is motherhood and homemaking the only acceptable vocation for women? Absolutely not. Is it God’s calling for some? Yes, and in such cases it is every bit as valuable and worthy of praise as those who are called to pursue a career outside the home.

You see, what ultimately defines the value of a person’s vocation is that it comes from the Lord. Everything else is secondary, and that is true for men and women alike.

Unfortunately, that part of Butker’s message has been largely lost amidst the controversy over his thoughts on the role of women.

The admonition to find our sense of peace and purpose in God’s call for our lives rather than the expectations of the world—or even ourselves—is something our culture desperately needs to hear.

Learn to be content in your calling

One of the primary sources of the stress and anxiety permeating every facet of the population today is the result of our lives failing to live up to the expectations we’ve placed on them. And when those expectations come from someone or something other than the Lord, we should not be surprised when they prove unsatisfying.

After all, why would God bless a path that differs from the one he has called you to take?

Ultimately, you don’t have to agree with Butker’s views on women, Catholicism, or any number of the other topics he addressed in his speech to see the wisdom in finding contentment within the vocation God has called you to uniquely pursue.

And while, as the Apostle Paul notes, contentment in the Lord is something we have to learn rather than a state that will come naturally to us, it is by far the best way to go through this life and the only way to experience the peace and strength God longs to give (Philippians 4:11–13).

Quote of the Day:

“A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is enter into it.”  — D.L. Moody

Denison Forum

The rise of the “nones” in the religious demographics of our society has been among the most troubling trends for many Christians across recent decades. The group is typically comprised of those who do not claim membership in any religious tradition, though there is variation at times as to whether atheists and agnostics are considered part of the nones or their own categories.

However, the latest data points to an interesting and encouraging trend:

• When the General Social Survey (GSS) first began to follow the nones back in 1972, they comprised roughly 5 percent of the total population.
• The nones stayed in the 5–6 percent range until 1991 when they began a rather precipitous and steady rise that reached as high as 30 percent by 2013 and 35 percent by 2019.
• However, the nones haven’t really grown in the last five years, ranging between 34–36 percent of the total population.
• And, what’s perhaps most encouraging, their numbers have actually started to fall among the younger generations.
• Similar findings have also been reported in both the Cooperative Election Study and in Pew’s latest research.

As Ryan Burge—who has studied and written about the nones for many years—concludes, “The rise of the nones may be largely over now. At least it won’t be increasing in the same way that it did in the prior thirty years.”

That’s good news. Yet, as he goes on to note, the more pertinent question is why.

Building on bedrock

One of the dangers with placing too much emphasis on trends is the temptation to think that they’ll continue unabated into the future. That danger has led to quite a bit of hand-wringing in Christian circles as report after report detailed the rise of the nones across the last thirty years.

And that’s understandable.

After all, the rise of the nones was one of the leading causes that burst the bubble of how Christians viewed our place in the culture. The ensuing angst was the result of the thought that Christians were leaving the faith in droves and the cascade of doubts that followed.

However, looking back on it now, it seems clear that the issue was less about genuine believers leaving the faith—though that does happen at times—as people growing increasingly comfortable with being honest about their faith (or the lack thereof).

And, as Burge writes, the fact that the percentage of nones in our culture has leveled off in recent years likely means that we’ve reached the point where “The loose topsoil has been scooped off and hauled away, leaving nothing but hard bedrock underneath.”

WHO DEFINES SEXUALITY?

In our book, Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design, we look at God’s intentions for our flourishing.

The scariest passage in Scripture

As Dr. Jim Denison notes, only 17 percent of the nones are atheists. The rest range from agnostic to spiritual, with as many as 69 percent claiming to believe in God or some higher power. In short, most of the nones today would have probably called themselves Christians fifty years ago, with the biggest difference being that many of them would have gone through life thinking that their claim to be a Christian was true.

Jesus spoke to the danger of such an approach toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

In Matthew 7, Jesus warns the crowds—many of whom considered themselves to be his followers—that:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’” (Matthew 7:21–23).

At first glance, this passage is perhaps the scariest in all of Scripture for those who claim to be Christians. However, if you read this text and are concerned that it might be talking about you, then chances are good that it’s not.

That’s not a guarantee, as it could be that God is using these verses to alert you to the fact that you do fall among those who have served the Lord without having a personal relationship with him. But it’s important to remember that the people about whom Jesus speaks in this passage were genuinely surprised when he rejected them. It had never occurred to them that they might not be saved because they were certain that their good works were enough to merit that salvation.

And it is that latter category that stands in dire need of the true gospel today.

Share the whole gospel

As our culture becomes increasingly accepting of the decision to reject religion—and Christianity in particular—there will be fewer people who go to church on Sundays and claim to follow Jesus because it’s simply the acceptable thing to do. And the research across the last few decades bears that out.

Still, it would be naïve to think that everyone with whom we worship on Sunday morning is going to heaven. Odds are that there are still some in our communities of faith who think themselves saved but who lack a personal relationship with Jesus.

So whether the nones are our coworkers, neighbors, or the people sitting next to us at church, Christ’s call is the same: go and make disciples by sharing the gospel—the whole gospel—with those who need to hear it (Matthew 28:19–20).

How can you carry out that calling today?

Quote of the day: 

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. — C.S. Lewis

Denison Forum

One person died and more than thirty others were injured after a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence this morning. The jet was headed to Singapore from London when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Bangkok.

Even though flying is statistically the safest form of travel, all of us who fly read stories like this and shudder, knowing the deceased person could have been us. It could one day be us. What is true of air travel is true of every other dimension of life on this fallen planet: we are not in control of our lives. To the contrary, we are “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14).

This fact amplifies yesterday’s focus on the urgency of living in the power of the Spirit so fully that the Spirit changes us and changes the culture through us. We have only today to live for God in the power of God. Eternity beckons for us all.

A story making headlines today illustrates our theme powerfully and poignantly.

Why Dennis Quaid’s new movie grieves me

A few months ago, Dennis Quaid told People magazine that he returned to his Christian roots some years ago in the midst of an addiction battle. He even recorded an album titled Fallen: A Gospel Record for Sinners.

As a result, I was grieved when I learned that he is starring in a new horror movie in which, according to one reviewer, his costar is in “several scenes featuring full nudity.” (I won’t name the actress or the film or link to its content or reviews.)

When Christians act in ways that violate Christian beliefs, our secularized society is confused and misled even further. Then I looked more closely at Quaid’s interview with People. He tells us that amid his addiction struggle, he began rereading the Bible, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur’an, and other religious texts.

According to Quaid, “All of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.” He says we’re all looking for “the joy in life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have.”

My purpose is not to disparage Dennis Quaid, but to respond to two related issues this story raises, both of which are pervasive among evangelicals and vitally relevant to our cultural influence (or lack thereof).

WHO DEFINES SEXUALITY?

In our book, Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design, we look at God’s intentions for our flourishing.

“Faith” is not an objective reality. We don’t “have faith”—we have faith in something or someone.

And the object of our faith is the crucial determiner for our faith’s validity and agency.

You can have faith that you are on the right road home, but if you’re not, your faith won’t get you to your destination. You can have faith that you’re taking the right medication, but if you’re not, your faith can make you sick or worse.

Our “post-truth” culture’s dogmatic (and contradictory) insistence on tolerance leads many to applaud the idea that “all of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.” But Jesus disagreed, stating of himself: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18).

His first followers said of him, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12, my emphasis).

Our lost culture also separates Sunday from Monday, the spiritual from the secular, and religion from the “real world.” It is therefore unsurprising that professing Christians can be involved in “secular” activities that contradict their “spiritual” beliefs.

For example, Scripture forbids public nudity, teaching that “women should adorn themselves in respectable attire, with modesty and self-control” (1 Timothy 2:9; cf. Matthew 5:28). But the pervasiveness of pornography and adultery among self-professing Christian men is just one tragic example of the way so many separate their Sunday religion from their Monday lives.

“The world will be amazed and astonished”

We cannot do the same thing and expect different results. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted, “We’re not going to solve our problems at the same level of consciousness on which we created them.”

Brooks cites the work of Black theologian Howard Thurman, a contemporary of Martin Luther King Sr. who had a strong influence on the activism of his son, Martin Luther King Jr. According to Brooks, “Thurman reminds us that when networks of relationships in a society are broken and unjust, national transformation must flow from a tide of personal transformations.”

Such holistic transformation is truly possible only by the agency of the Holy Spirit. As Pentecost Sunday reminded us two days ago, the first Christians were “filled with the Holy Spirit” on the day of Pentecost and “began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). These were languages they did not know but could now use to share the gospel with people from fifteen different locales now gathered in Jerusalem for the holiday (vv. 8–11).

The people who heard them were understandably “amazed and astonished” at the miracle they witnessed (v. 7). Br. James Koester of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston comments:

The wonder of Pentecost is not that people suddenly spoke in foreign languages. The wonder of Pentecost is that people suddenly spoke in the language of God, the language of compassion, unity, and understanding. And like those early disciples, the gift to speak the language of God is ours for the asking.

Then he adds:

“When we truly are people of the Spirit, we will be people of compassion, unity, and understanding, speaking the language of God, and the world will be amazed and astonished, once more.”

Whose “language” will you speak today?

Tuesday news to know:

• US national security adviser, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince meet to discuss “semi-final” security deal
• Container ship removed 8 weeks after Francis Scott Key Bridge crash in Baltimore
• Who is Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s interim president?
• War crimes prosecutor seeks arrest of Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Netanyahu
• On this day in 1881: American Red Cross founded

Quote for the day:

“To be a witness means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.” —Madeleine L’Engle

Denison Forum