“We don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives. We have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we attend.”

Hillary Clinton, responding to Barak Obama’s decision to continue attending his church despite Pastor Wright’s controversial comments.

“Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’

Jesus, in Mark 3:34

Do we really have more choice about our churches than we have about our families?

John Maeda is the author of the The Laws of Simplicity, which discusses thirteen rules for simple living and working. He recently gave a TED Talk in which he further simplified those thirteen rules down into one principle. Enjoy!

The first was a story about “the race to rescue a Lebanese girl buried by an Israeli airstrike”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624491. It is a poignant reminder of the human toll of war, as the story could have easily come from either side (i.e. it could have been an Israeli girl buried by a rocket attack).

That afternoon I listened as Betsy Chalmers explained why “I believe in faithfulness.” Though you can read her essay, I would recommend listening, to hear the emotions in her voice; this too was a frank look at the human toll of brokeness, but within the context of God’s redemptive work.

Amazing. The coasts of America will be lashed by storms. With hurricanes increasing in number each year, America will be hit by storms. Truly a divine revelation.

Mr. Robertson reminds me of some elderly drivers; he keeps crashing but no one’s figured out how to kindly and gently take away his license.

bq. “Organizations like this one across the country are gaining access to schools through the famous people and entertainment value and then using those opportunities to proselytize,” she said. “These organizations sometimes take advantage of the schools’ desire to provide compelling experiences for their students.”

What’s the context? Another Christian morals crusader railing against liberal Hollywood or violent video games? Hardly.

That’s Drewry Fennell, executive director of the Delaware chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She’s talking about “a recent assembly at a public high school that featured two Philadelphia Eagles football players”:http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2205460. Tra Thomas and Thomas Tapeh apparently mentioned their faith during their speeches and urged students to attend a local Christian concert. Parents complained and the principle disavowed any knowledge that the speeches would have a Christian tinge.

School assemblies like there _are_ dicey ground for separation of church and state. With that said, I find it incredibly ironic that Christians are being accused of being too media and entertainment-industry savvy. Dang. Who knew? Furthermore, shame on us for using the innocent entertainment industry to spread propaganda! How dare we…

The “Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA, a favorite in Congress, makes it illegal to circumvent encryption schemes, even if the end goal is perfectly legal. Switchfoot is helping their fans break United States law and circumvent measures their label has put into place to prevent piracy. And I applaud them for it.

The Wikipedia has a good article on the controversy around “Section 103′s anti-circumvention provisions”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA_anti-circumvention, but I’ll attempt to distill my complaints against the law down to a few sentences. The Supreme Court established fair use in the case Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios. I can already see your eyes glossing over, but stay with me here because if the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled in favor of fair use, you wouldn’t have a VCR. You see, the movie studios at the time were outraged that folks like you and I could use a VCR to make copies of their movies, so they tried to sue the VCR out of existence.

So what is fair use? It basically means that we can ignore copyrights as long as the copies we’re making aren’t:

# going to make us any money
# on a large scale
# isn’t going to deprive the copyright holder of signifigant chunks of money

Music fans everywhere enjoy fair use when they make (for my parents’ generation) mixed tapes or (my generation) rip mixed CDs. And that brings us back to Switchfoot and the DMCA.

You see, the DMCA makes it illegal for you to make those mixed tapes if the record label has some sort of encryption scheme on the albums. Even though the end goal is clearly legal under fair use, you’d have to break a law to get to the end goal. And that really sucks.

DMCA is badly in need of revision–Section 103 needs to be overhauled to account for fair use or dropped entirely. But until that happens, the only avenue left to protest is a time-honored tradition in American history: civil disobedience. I, for one, salute Switchfoot’s attempt to assist their customers in breaking the law. That’s a start.

But the Christian music industry needs to begin waking up to the new opportunities in the age of digital music. Bands with a strong fan base like Switchfoot no longer need a label to get their music out to the fans, between sites like “CDBaby”:http://www.cdbaby.com/ and the “iTunes Music Store”:http://www.itunes.com/ (with an 80% marketshare and a distribution deal with CDBaby). Furthermore, Christian artists need to begin looking at the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ for copyrights that would maintain their rights as artists while allowing freedom of use for their fans.

* “opposing most conservatives on Terry Schiavo’s situation”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/politics_and_current_events/abducting_life/
* “criticizing a constitutional amendment on marriage”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/christianity/amendments_marriage_and_the_church/
* “positing that God is not a Republican”:http://www.kyleandkelly.com/scribbles/christianity/politics_and_religion/

Whether or not I’ve crossed the line to a liberal worldview is an issue for another post, but in short: I would posit that I’m critical of Christian conservative orthodoxy (if we can have neo-conservatives, we can have orthodox conservatives) because I care about the Christian viewpoint. I wouldn’t critique if I didn’t care. I want to make sure that what we bring to the world is well-thought out and truly consistent with God’s Word.

Why post this now? I don’t want to see Christian conservatives become radical zealots, and I think it’s a “very real and timely danger”:http://news.google.com/?ncl=http://olympics.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx%3Ftype%3DtopNews%26storyID%3D2005-08-23T172944Z_01_SCH362917_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-VENEZUELA-ROBERTSON-DC.XML&hl=en. What the heck was Robertson thinking? Am I being out of line in calling his statements “over the line”? Any conservatives out there who want to attempt a defense?

Unlike many of my friends and family, I oppose a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman. I oppose it from two perspectives: one political, the other religious.

From a Political Perspective

Some historical background: our Founding Fathers made it very hard to amend the constitution. Two-thirds majority in both halves of the legislature, approval by three fourths of the states–that’s quite a few people agreeing on something.

Furthermore, the tenth amendment (hence part of the Bill of Rights) states that all powers not granted explicitly to the federal government were reserved for the States or the people:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

For 200 years, states have had the right to define marriage as they desire, and the system has worked. This state of things came into question when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court struck down the state’s constitutional laws banning gay marriage. President Bush and other advocates of a constitutional amendment feel federal action is necessary to keep activist judges from overruling the state or the people.

That brings us to today, when the Senate rejected the constitutional amendment. Republicans lost the votes they needed for a two-thirds majority due in part to defections by moderates such as John McCain. McCain’s statements from the floor are an eloquent summary of my own feelings:

The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.

Furthermore, he pointed out that existing measures already in place protect against the breakdown of society and chaos feared by advocates of the amendment. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as between one man and one woman for the purposes of federal law and protects states from having to recognize marriages performed in another state with differing laws.

He concluded that if DOMA was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, or if state legislative remedies were unable to reign in activist judges, then a constitutional amendment might be appropriate:

What evidence do we have that states are incapable of further exercising an authority they have exercised successfully for over 200 years? We will have to wait a little longer to see if Armageddon has arrived.

Even if I did not have misgivings about the amendment based on my religious beliefs, I would still object on the grounds laid out above.

From a Religious Perspective

This is the area that I’m more open to persuasion on. My thoughts thus far run like this:

As a Christian, I believe that marriage is not something a secular government has the power to grant; it can only be granted by God through the agency of the Church. At best, a secular government can recognize a civil union between a couple. I believe this in part because of my beliefs in regards to weddings.

I consider a wedding to be to marriage what baptism is to one’s personal faith. It is a declaration before the church of God’s will at work, and the church’s responsibility to uphold that declaration (be it one of salvation or of marriage). Anyone who attended our wedding might remember that our service consisted of three commitments–to God, to each other, and to the Church. The last section was responsive, with the congregation asked to affirm their commitment to us as a couple.

This sidetrack onto a discussion of weddings is simply to show why I feel a marriage can only be granted through the agency of the Church, as it consists in part of a commitment between the couple and the Church. I’m not alone in making a distinction between a marriage as granted by the State, and a marriage as granted by the Church. In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis states:

Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one; the other is the quite different question–how far Christians, if they are voters or members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

How does this apply to my refusal to sign a petition supporting a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages? I believe that by signing the petition, I, as a member of the Church, abdicate my responsibility for governing marriage. Marriage thus becomes strictly the realm of the State, and controlled as such.

Though I may agree with the sentiments expressed in the amendment (marriage is between one man and one woman), I believe passing such an amendment would present a dangerous precedence of the federal government meddling in something that should be the realm of the Church. What if the amendment was passed? It would open the door for the federal government to continue to define what marriage is, and there is no guarantee that future definitions would be so Christian-friendly.

Loose Ends

Some of you may spot a contradiction in my two perspectives. In the political one I seem to have no problem with states defining marriage, yet in the religious, I advocate marriage being the realm of the Church and worry about the government defining marriage. I believe there is a middle ground in this contradiction–state government is inherently closer to the people, hence it can be more responsive to the people. While an aggressive stance on marriage by a state government would have my hackles up, I’m more comfortable with the responsibility for defining a civil union (i.e., marriage in the eyes of the state) falling on the government at this level.

When all is said in done, my feelings on this issue are still very much in flux and I remain open minded to the viewpoints of other Christians.

That route also denies any chance for exemplifying Christ to one’s customers, which I feel can be a powerful testimony to the Truth.

So if a line must be drawn, where should it go? I think purely secular enterprises are pretty innocuous. I would have no conundrum about working on a web site for a construction firm owned by a Muslim who serves a variety of customers. The line inches closer with businesses that cater to a specific religion; for example, a construction firm that courted Islamic businesses and specialized in building mosques. It gets closer still when the business could be tied to the evangelism of that religion, as in the case of Life is Zen, Inc., which could be hired to market and promote the religion by a Buddhist temple.

I think division of labor also plays into the question. Since I only create the design for a site, rather than the actual content, does that change where the line is? For example, how would Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18) reacted to a request for tent if that tent were to be used as a meeting place for another religion? Their tent had nothing to do with what occurred inside the tent, yet (to coin a pop psychology term) they were “enablers”.

So far, I’m pretty comfortable with the following:

* Web sites for organization directly involved in the practice or evangelization of other religions are right out–for example, web sites for missionary organizations or religious meeting places.
* Web sites for organizations that do not cater to a specific religious demographic are OK.

It’s the areas in between that I’m trying to hash out.

Would I do Life is Zen, Inc.’s web site again if I’d already worked through this stuff? I don’t know, but I would have given it a lot more thought and prayer than I did. What are your thoughts? How do you, as a Christian, discern the points of connection your profession creates between you and other religions?