41 Sermon Illustrations on Virtue

For when Virtue came from heaven (as the poet feigns), rich men kicked her up, wicked men abhorred her, courtiers scoffed at her, citizens hated her; and, that she was thrust out of doors in every place, she came at last to her sister Poverty, where she had found good entertainment. Poverty and Virtue dwell together. Burton.

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) was an Anglican biship, theologian and devotional writer. Taylor on how to know if your intentions are pure:

1. Your soul's health is more a concern to you than your physical health.

2. You are not concerned about the opinions of people, but only of God's.

3. You are in private what you are in public.

4. You are not concerned about the effect of actions, but leave them to God.

5. You love and honor virtue wherever it is found.

6. You despise the world and all its vanities.

7. You are not anxious concerning the instruments and means of your actions,

but use those means God has made available to you. (riches/poverty)

[Ordered changed in sermon and some language cleared up. My wife Celeste said this sounded like a Jeff Foxworthy "You know you are a redneck" comedy routine.]

In Pursuit of Character, Part 1: Scripting our lives by the stories we choose: what’s missing from the character debate.

I turned the page and found a photograph of a man bending over and talking to a small boy. Both are dressed in black. The man, if I remember correctly, wears a flat-brimmed hat and has side curls. He stoops to the same level as the boy and looks directly into his face. His right hand is on the boy’s shoulder and his left is pointing upward toward the sky.

Lifeless bodies are lying all around them. About ten feet away stands another man, in uniform. He is holding a rifle and sighting it at the heads of the man and small boy. It is their turn to die. The squeeze of the trigger must have been almost simultaneous with the click of the shutter.

The photograph breaks my heart. But, strangely, it also encourages me. Wanting somehow to understand what I am seeing, I do what human beings have always done when confronted with something that requires an explanation. I have created a story for myself about it. The story might not be accurate, but it is an important story for me nonetheless. It makes it more possible for me to live in a world that includes the Holocaust.

This man spends his last moments on earth telling a story, or at least so it seems to me. He is a Hasid, one of those most pious and fervent of Jews. As he bends down to speak to the boy, finger pointing to the sky, perhaps he is saying something like this: “Do not be afraid, my son. This man cannot really hurt us. He is sending us to the next world, where we will join your mother and sister. God is waiting for us. Everything is going to be all right.”

The man, I believe, was making use of the story he had embraced for his life in order to come to terms with his and his son’s horrific death. I choose to see it as an act of defiance. Deprived of all other means of resistance, he resists the soldier with the rifle and all that soldier represents in the most powerful way of all — he insists on the superiority and ultimate triumph of his own story. “You, killer, have the gun and think I am nothing. But I, killer, have God, and you have nothing.” The man, however, does not actually say this to his executioner, or likely even think it. He has something infinitely more important to do. He has to comfort for a few moments longer a frightened child. And he does so by interpreting this final, terrifying event in light of the story of their whole lives.

This man has character. No, this man is a character — a character in the story he has chosen to live. The difference is crucial. Character is not something you have; it is something you are that inevitably shows itself in what you do. It is determined by the stories of which you are a part. As the concept of character makes a highly visible comeback in our public conversation, we must rescue it from glib politicians, do-gooders, and busy- body moralizers. When we worry about our character and that of our children — and we should — we ought to think of stories. We should more purposefully choose the stories in which we are characters.

America is rediscovering character. In magazines, on talk shows, in pulpits and classrooms (CT, Sept. 11, 1995, p. 35), and even in philosophy and social science journals, the recurring theme is that we need to be better people. Though it is still not possible to talk about virtue in America and be understood, it is now almost possible to talk about virtues — and that is an enormous change.

We have come to this conclusion reluctantly. Character talk used to be as American as apple pie. It was a conscious factor in whom we befriended, or hired, or married. But the whole concept of character became dated, quaint, even faintly suspect, and slowly disappeared from our public vocabulary.

The public rehabilitation of character has coincided with the values debates of recent years. Values is something of a weasel word, suggesting that the worth of anything derives from someone or other choosing it, rather than from any inherent merit in the thing itself. (Fidelity, for instance, is important if you happen to value it, but not otherwise.) The term fits our relativistic temperament, suggesting that you have your values and I have mine, and there is no valid way of choosing between the two.

We are slowly realizing that oftentimes we do have to choose, as individuals and as a society. We are being forced to admit that some values are better than others, as much as it sticks in our tolerant throats to say so. And as soon as we move from the general discussion of values to identifying the specific values by which one ought to live, we bump into character.

A leading commentator on this move is the well-known social scientist James Q. Wilson, who even a decade ago observed, “The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed — and experienced — over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry.” This concern is now omnipresent.

From the “New York Times” to “Newsweek” to “Forbes,” we find sympathetic articles on the need to think consciously about our character. And, lest we forget, 1996 is an election year. We will be treated once again to dueling editorials about the character issue in politics — why it should matter and why it shouldn’t. (My own editorial comment: how can anyone think character could ever be irrelevant in an arena so full of oughts and shoulds? Every ought is rooted in a value; every value requires a choice; every choice defines a character.)

When yapping ideologues can be gagged for a moment, there is broad agreement on the need for, and the content of, character. Ask people to list the traits of a good person and you will find consensus in an area where we are often told consensus is not possible. In fact, the list has not changed much over the centuries.

Like so much of Western culture, the traditional understanding of character arises primarily from two sources: the classical and the biblical. Common to each is the assumption that the only significant test of what you believe is how you live. Both wisdom and goodness exist only in actions in the real world. Character is values lived.

Aristotle, the godfather of the philosophical discussion of character, drew on certain common understandings in Greek thought: that human beings are social creatures, that human behavior can be shaped, that certain behaviors are helpful for the society and the individual and others harmful, that the best way to identify good behavior is to look to a good role model, and that good behavior — the key to a good life — is most likely when those behaviors have become habits after years of repetition. In short, do the right thing, and do it often.

In speaking of behaviors, I am instinctively using the language of psychotherapy in which we are all so steeped. The Greeks spoke of virtues. Virtue included the idea of strength, or the capacity to perform an act. Virtue was what you did, not what you did not do. (Avoiding certain wrong acts was not an adequate basis for goodness in Greek or biblical society.) As the skill necessary for athletic performance requires exercise and practice, so too a person could be virtuous only through exercising the virtues in daily acts. That exercise was seen as the basis for forming character.

The Greeks identified four chief or cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Prudence is practical wisdom — that is, wisdom (not to be confused with intelligence or information) that leads to good choices and results in successful living. Justice centers on acts of fairness and honesty and the rule of law. Courage, also called fortitude, gives one the capacity to do what is right or necessary even in the face of adversity. And temperance is self-discipline, the ability to control one’s impulses to do things that are gratifying in the short run but harmful in the long.

It is not good enough to get two or three out of four. That might be great for baseball, but it is bad for society. The core virtues make each other possible. A sense of justice is ineffectual if one lacks the courage to stand against injustice. Courage without wisdom is simply foolhardiness. And all the other virtues are undercut when one lacks self-control.

The Bible agrees with all this and adds more. Each of the classical Greek virtues finds support in Scripture. In the Old Testament, a wise person is a person who lives wisely — that is, in right relationship to God — not a person who is simply intelligent or learned. Justice is seen as a primary quality of God that we should try to reflect in ourselves and in our society. Courage is prized on the battlefield but even more as a necessary quality for living as God requires under hostile conditions. And the Old Testament is replete with examples of the consequences of losing self-control.

One place among many where God reveals the character traits he requires is Psalm 15. The psalm opens with a question: “Oh Lord, who may approach your holy place? Who may worship on your holy mountain?” That is, what are the qualities a person should bring into God’s presence?

The psalmist then answers the question in the rest of the psalm, part of which reads as follows: “Those who walk blamelessly, live righteously and speak truth from the heart. Those who do not gossip or wrong neighbors or speak evil of those around them.” These are actions, not passive states of being. They are not descriptions of one’s psychological state or level of self-esteem.

The New Testament brings to the forefront qualities of character that are implicit in the Old and that go beyond the classical understanding. These too grow out of the nature of God as reflected in his creatures: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). There is a more empathetic, other-directed nature to the Christian virtues than to the classical, a product of their origin in the ultimate virtue — love. (Interestingly, the concern for the poor and disadvantaged in modern secular liberalism derives from this Judeo-Christian heritage, though the debt is rarely acknowledged.)

The Bible parallels classicism in emphasizing the importance of models and mentors. “Be holy as I am holy,” God tells us. Christ calls the disciples to follow him so they can learn by word and deed how to live as they should. Paul offers himself as an example to the new Christians of the young church. Conversion begins, but only begins, a lifelong process of character formation and reformation.

And as in the classical example, that process depends more on actions than on abstract beliefs. Nothing is easier than mental assent to a set of propositions, but Christ sets a higher standard: “If you love me, obey my commands” (John 14:15).

As similar as they are in many ways, the classical and biblical notions of character differ at a crucial point — sin. For Aristotle, there is little if anything wrong in our character and our society that cannot be fixed by greater efforts in the way of wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. Paul, on the other hand, says, “I do not understand my own behavior. For rather than doing the thing I want to do, I do what I hate” (Rom. 7:15).

The classical model says there is nothing wrong that we cannot fix ourselves; the biblical says our radical brokenness can be fixed only by the one who made us. One sends us inside ourselves for help; the other sends us to someone greater than ourselves. This crucial difference continues today. A look at the overflowing shelves of the self-help section in bookstores tells us clearly which option contemporary America has chosen.

These two streams, classical and biblical, flowed together into Europe and shaped moral education (which was at the heart of all education) for 1,500 years. They were not seriously challenged until the Enlightenment. The savants of the eighteenth century recognized the need for morality, especially to keep the masses in line, and looked to the Judeo-Christian tradition to define moral behavior. But they found the God of the Bible inconvenient. Thomas Jefferson turned his Bible into a paper snowflake, cutting out all the passages that involved the miraculous. Like other leading Enlightenment thinkers, he sought to ground morality in reason, not in divine revelation.

The goal of philosophical ethics for the last 200 years has been to find that rational basis for morality — on which, presumably, all reasonable people can agree. The attempt has fizzled. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in his widely influential book “After Virtue,” reasonable people have not even been able to agree on what constitutes moral behavior, much less actually find a way to ensure it. Because we no longer share a common moral tradition, we repeatedly talk past each other on moral issues. We are left sifting the fragments of many traditions for an alternative to radical, relativistic individualism. The only universally approved virtue today is tolerance, yet we are increasingly aware that we are doomed if we tolerate everything.

The ascendancy of relativism has been hard on the idea of character. But there is an equally important reason why the idea of character has disappeared from our public discussions, and that is the dominance of popular psychology and psychotherapy in all deliberations of what it means to be a human being. The concept of character — once part of the everyday vocabulary of personal assessment — has been almost entirely replaced with the concept of personality.

Psychology aspires to be a science, and science by definition is mute in the face of any ought. It can deal with what and sometimes with why but not with should. Though character was used as a term in psychology in the early parts of this century and has persisted in Europe, it was banished from American psychology well before mid-century. Gordon Allport, an eminent Harvard psychologist and one-time president of the American Psychological Association, expressed the common view when he wrote in the 1930s that we “must frankly admit that [character] is an ethical concept” and that, as such, “the psychologist does not need the term at all; personality alone will serve.”

Psychology took the ancient idea of character, an idea that was central to education and moral development, stripped out value judgments (especially moral ones), and gave us personality to take its place. Allport says, “Character is personality evaluated, and personality is character devalued.” In Allport’s own terms, the notion of moral excellence (character) was replaced by that of social and personal effectiveness (personality). Defining the self by character traits like courage, honesty, and loyalty gave way to definition by personality traits like assertiveness, self-confidence, and introspectiveness.

Consider Allport’s definition of personality as “character devalued.” Likely he meant the self looked at objectively, unencumbered by controversial and imprecise values (”ethical moss,” in his words). But the net effect of replacing the language of character by that of personality (and that replacement is almost total) has been the literal devaluing of human beings and the human experience. This is not the fault of psychology per se, which has the right to limit what it investigates, but of the wholesale adoption of this way of understanding the human person by a naive and confused society. Psychology may not need the concept of character, but human beings and human society do.

[see #3560-62 for continuation]

”The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given.”

Gloom is a fund-raiser’s secret sauce. Spicing direct-mail appeals with threatening scenarios can be profitable for those whose ministry or livelihood depends on raising donations. Whether it is a relief organization fighting hunger, or a “faith mission” overspending its budget, or a secular organization like the ACLU warning (as it did in a recent mailing) about the “threats to basic rights” from the Christian Coalition, just a dash of panic in a chowder of dire news is a key ingredient in motivating people to part with their cash.

While there is abundant bad news with which to season fund-raising, confidence and hope remain the salt and pepper of Christian living. About five years ago, Christian social critic Richard John Neuhaus was being driven from the Pittsburgh airport to a speaking engagement. During the drive, one of his hosts persisted in decrying the disintegration of the American social fabric and the disappearance of Christian values from our culture. Cases in point were too numerous to mention, but Pastor Neuhaus’s host tried anyway. After the tedious drive, Neuhaus offered these words of advice: “The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Remember, hope is still a Christian virtue, and despair is a mortal sin.”

A PEOPLE OF HOPE

Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle did not think hope was a virtue, but rather a passion — something that hindered rational living through unrealistic expectations. Nevertheless, from the first, Christians valued hope as a positive trait.

Easter is a time to remember that Christians are a people of hope. The New Testament writers consistently link hope with the Resurrection and the coming reign of God. Peter opens his first letter this way: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance… kept in heaven for you who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Note how Peter links the New Birth, hope, resurrection, our heavenly reward, and the Last Day. Biblical hope is eschatological: it looks forward to a good outcome based on God’s power and God’s character demonstrated in the resurrection of Jesus. That first Easter not only demonstrated God’s power and covenant faithfulness, it also transformed the status and destiny of the human race.

Athanasius, the great fourth-century defender and definer of orthodoxy, calls the Christian transition from death to life the “first cause of the Savior’s being made man.” “For no longer now do we die as subject to condemnation,” he writes, “but as men who rise from the dead we await the general resurrection of all.” Thus our hope is not for this life alone, but for the fullness of future life. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” Paul writes, “we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).

FIXED ON GOD’S FUTURE

This otherworldliness (or more precisely, future-worldliness) of Christian hope used to be a favorite target of skeptics and liberal theologians. “Pie in the sky by and by,” they charged, was a way of encouraging complacency and satisfaction with a seriously flawed political and social order. Not so, contemporary theologians respond. Precisely because Christian hope is fixed on God’s future, believers are freed from the security-loving ties that would bind us to the present order. Like Wilberforce who risked reputation and fortune to fight the slave trade, like Father Damian who gave his life to care for lepers, like Jim Elliot who forfeited his life to bring a violent people the gospel of peace, we are not to be tied to success, security, wealth, or power.

Rather, we are to be open to taking risks for God, to being pioneering agents of godly change. Knowing that God has secured our future, we can work for the world’s salvation and well-being, relieving suffering, discrimination, ignorance, and injustice wherever it is found.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazines — — ctap0395mrw5T40245320

Character and virtue are necessary for society to remain free. Virtue can be taught in schools ("values clarification" isn't adequate). One of the reason schools are in decline is because virtue is being given short shrift.

Early in the 20th century, playwright and social critic George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

Sermon in 1 Peter series. Christian virtues and harmony. 1 Pet 3:8-12

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HOW TO GET ALONG

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I. Harmonica harmony.

II. Qualities that promote harmony.

A. Be sympathetic. Romans 12:15

B. Brotherly love.

C. Be compassionate. Ephesians 4:31-32

D. Be humble.

III. How do we harmonize with rotten people?

A. Easy to be in harmony with nice people - real test is rotten ones.

B. Almost seems wrong to us - fake our feelings?

C. Receive a blessing.

IV. Why can't people just get along?

A. People need to be changed.

B. God takes moral sides.

#4142

*

"Following the path of least resistance is what makes rivers and men crooked."

Colleen Spencer

Assistant to the Executive Director of Administrative Services

University of Maine at Augusta

William Bennett, the former Cabinet secretary and family values campaigner, is a high-rolling gambler who has lost millions over the past decade, according to published reports.

Casino documents show Bennett is a “preferred customer” in at least four venues in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, Newsweek and The Washington Monthly reported in stories posted Friday on the web. His favorite games: video poker and slot machines. He has a revolving line of credit of at least $200,000 at each casino, the magazines said.

The former drug policy director and education secretary under Republican presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush doesn't have to have money when he shows up at a casino, according to the magazines, which obtained internal casino documents.

Bennett, who wrote “The Book of Virtues,” gets high-roller treatment, including limos and tens of thousands of dollars in complimentary hotel rooms and other amenities.

In one two-month period, the documents show him wiring more than $1.4 million to cover losses at one casino. In one 18-month stretch, Bennett visited a number of casinos for two or three days at a time.

Some of his losses have been substantial. According to one casino source, on July 12, 2002, Bennett lost $340,000 at Caesars in Atlantic City and on April 5 and 6 he lost more than $500,000 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Some casino estimates put his total losses over the past decade at more than $8 million.

When reached by Newsweek, Bennett acknowledged he gambles.

“Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even,” he said. “You can roll up and down a lot in one day, as we have on many occasions. You may cycle several hundred thousand dollars in an evening and net out only a few thousand.”

During an 18-month period, documents show there were only a few occasions when Bennett turned in chips - worth about $30,000 or $40,000 - at the end of an evening.

“I play fairly high stakes. I adhere to the law. I don't play the ‘milk money.’ I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything,” Bennett said. The documents didn't contradict his points.

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[Version by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 5/3/03 ]

William Bennett reportedly lost millions gambling

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, New York Times

William J. Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues” and one of the nation's most relentless moral crusaders, is a high-rolling gambler who has lost more than $8 million at casinos in the last decade, according to online reports from two magazines.

The Washington Monthly said on its website that “over the last decade Bennett has made dozens of trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where he is a 'preferred customer' at several of them, and sources and documents provided to The Washington Monthly put his total losses at more than $8 million.”

In an article that depends on much the same reporting, the online version of Newsweek said that 40 pages of internal casino documents show that Bennett received treatment typical of high-stakes gamblers, including limousines and “tens of thousands of dollars in complimentary hotel rooms and other amenities.”

Bennett declined to be interviewed Friday by The New York Times, with a spokesman saying that he needed to digest the articles before responding.

The fact of Bennett's gambling is not new. He has said over the years that he likes to gamble and that it relaxes him. What is unusual is the apparent extent of his losses; neither magazine reported his winnings.

Bennett told the magazines that he has basically broken even over the years.

“I play fairly high stakes,” he said, but added: “I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything.”

The magazines said they had no documentation that he was in debt but suggested that he had lost more than he had won. In response, Bennett is quoted as saying, “I've made a lot of money and I've won a lot of money,” adding, “You don't see what I walk away with.” He said he gave some of his winnings to charity and reported everything to the Internal Revenue Service.

The magazines said that in one two-month period, Bennett wired one casino more than $1.4 million to cover his losses.

The magazines said he earns $50,000 for each appearance in speaking fees on the lecture circuit, where he inveighs against various sins, weaknesses and vices of modern culture.

But Bennett exempts gambling from this list.

He has said in the past that he does not consider gambling a moral issue. When his interviewers reminded him of studies that link heavy gambling with a variety of societal and family ills, Bennett said he did not have a problem himself and likened gambling to drinking alcohol.

“I view it as drinking,” he said. “If you can't handle it, don't do it.”

Bennett is popular among social conservatives, but many of them consider gambling a serious problem. James C. Dobson, the president of Focus on the Family and a member of a federal commission that studied gambling, said in 1999: “Gambling fever now threatens the work ethic and the very foundation of the family. Thirty years ago, gambling was widely understood in the culture to be addictive, progressive and dangerous.”

During the 1990s, leaders of the conservative Christian Coalition joined with other religious leaders to create the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, called gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.”

Friends of Bennett were reluctant Friday to criticize him directly.

“It's his own money and his own business,” said Grover G. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative advocacy group. “The downside of gambling losses is that the government gets a third of the money, which is unfortunate and probably a sin in and of itself,” said Norquist, whose group advocates smaller government.

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and another conservative ally of Bennett, agreed that this was a matter between Bennett, his wife and his accountant.

“It would be different if he had written anti-gambling screeds,” Kristol said. “I'm sure he doesn't regard gambling as a virtue but rather as a rather minor and pardonable vice and a legal one and one that has not damaged him or anyone else.”

Kristol said that Bennett was not being hypocritical. “If Bill Bennett went on TV encouraging young people to gamble the rent money at a Las Vegas casino or was shilling for gambling interests, that would be inconsistent” with his moral crusades, Kristol said.

As Bennett told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1995, “I've played poker all my life and I shouldn't be on my high horse about it.”

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Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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"The Bookie of Virtue"

William J. Bennett spends his life promoting morality -- but also has a huge gambling habit, by Joshua Green in The Washington Monthly.

We should know that too much of anything, even a good thing, may prove to be our undoing...[We] need ... to set definite boundaries on our appetites.”

-- The Book of Virtues, by William J. Bennett

No person can be more rightly credited with making morality and personal responsibility an integral part of the political debate than William J. Bennett. For more than 20 years, as a writer, speaker, government official, and political operative, Bennett has been a commanding general in the culture wars. As Ronald Reagan's chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was the scourge of academic permissiveness. As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use, arguing that individuals have a moral responsibility to own up to their addiction.

Upon leaving public office, Bennett wrote “The Book of Virtues,” a compendium of parables snatched up by millions of parents and teachers across the political spectrum. Bennett's crusading ideals have been adopted by politicians of both parties, and implemented in such programs as character education classes in public schools -- a testament to his impact. During the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Bennett was among the president's most unrelenting detractors. His book, The Death of Outrage, decried, among other things, the public's failure to take Clinton's sins more seriously.

His best-selling “The Book of Virtues” spawned an entire cottage industry, from children's books to merchandizing tie-ins to a PBS cartoon series. Bennett commands $50,000 per appearance on the lecture circuit and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from such conservative benefactors as the Scaife and John M. Olin foundations.

There is one vice, however, that has largely escaped Bennett's wrath: gambling. This is a notable omission, since on this issue morality and public policy are deeply intertwined. If Bennett hasn't spoken out more forcefully on an issue that would seem tailor-made for him, perhaps it's because he is himself a heavy gambler. The Washington Monthly and Newsweek have learned that over the last decade Bennett has made dozens of trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where he is a “preferred customer” at several of them.

Bennett has been a high-roller since at least the early 1990s. A review of one 18-month stretch of gambling showed him visiting casinos, often for two or three days at a time (and enjoying a line of credit of at least $200,000 at several of them). The documents show that in one two-month period, Bennett wired more than $1.4 million to cover losses.

On July 12 of last year, Bennett lost $340,000 at Caesar's Boardwalk Regency in Atlantic City. And just three weeks ago, on April 5 and 6, he lost more than $500,000 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. “There's a term in the trade for this kind of gambler,” says a casino source who has witnessed Bennett at the high-limit slots in the wee hours. “We call them losers.”

Bennett likes to be discreet. “He'll usually call a host and let us know when he's coming,” says one source. “We can limo him in. He prefers the high-limit room, where he's less likely to be seen and where he can play the $500-a-pull slots. He usually plays very late at night or early in the morning -- usually between midnight and 6 a.m.” His desire for privacy is evident in his customer profile at one casino, which lists as his residence the address for Empower.org (the Web site of Empower America, the non-profit group Bennett co-chairs). Typed across the form are the words: “NO CONTACT AT RES OR BIZ!!!”

Bennett's gambling has not totally escaped public notice. In 1999, The Washington Times reported that Bennett had been spotted at the new Mirage Resorts Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where he was reputed to have won a $200,000 jackpot. Bennett admitted to the Times that he had visited the casino, but denied winning $200,000. Documents show that, in fact, he won a $25,000 jackpot on that visit -- but left the casino down $625,000.

Asked by Newsweek columnist and Washington Monthly contributing editor Jonathan Alter to comment on the reports, Bennett admitted that he gambles but not that he has ended up behind. “I play fairly high stakes. I adhere to the law. I don't play the 'milk money.’ I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything.” The documents offer no reason to contradict Bennett on these points. Bennett claims he's beaten the odds: “Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even.”

“You can roll up and down a lot in one day, as we have on many occasions,” Bennett explains. “You may cycle several hundred thousand dollars in an evening and net out only a few thousand.”

“I've made a lot of money [in book sales, speaking fees and other business ventures] and I've won a lot of money,” adds Bennett. “When I win, I usually give at least a chunk of it away [to charity]. I report everything to the IRS.”

[As of Friday, Emower America had not issued any comment.]

The documents show only a few occasions when he turns in chips worth $30,000 or $40,000 at the end of an evening. Most of the time, he draws down his line of credit, often substantially. A casino source, hearing of Bennett's claim to breaking even on slots over 10 years, just laughed.

“You don't see what I walk away with,” Bennett says. “They [casinos] don't want you to see it.”

Explaining his approach, Bennett says: “I've been a 'machine person' [slot machines and video poker]. When I go to the tables, people talk -- and they want to talk about politics. I don't want that. I do this for three hours to relax.” He says he was in Las Vegas in April for dinner with the former governor of Nevada and gambled while he was there.

Bennett says he has made no secret of his gambling. “I've gambled all my life and it's never been a moral issue with me. I liked church bingo when I was growing up. I've been a poker player.”

Despite his personal appetites, Bennett and his organization, Empower America, oppose the extension of casino gambling in the states. In a recent editorial, his Empower America co-chair Jack Kemp inveighed against lawmakers who “pollute our society with a slot machine on every corner.” The group recently published an Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, with an introduction written by Bennett, that reports 5.5 million American adults as “problem” or “pathological” gamblers. Bennett says he is neither because his habit does not disrupt his family life.

When reminded of studies that link heavy gambling to divorce, bankruptcy, domestic abuse, and other family problems he has widely decried, Bennett compared the situation to alcohol.

“I view it as drinking,” Bennett says. “If you can't handle it, don't do it.” Bennett is a wealthy man and may be able to handle losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Of course, as the nation's leading spokesman on virtue and personal responsibility, Bennett's gambling complicates his public role. Moreover, it has already exacted a cost. Like him or hate him, William Bennett is one of the few public figures with a proven ability to influence public policy by speaking out. By furtively indulging in a costly vice that destroys millions of lives and families across the nation, Bennett has profoundly undermined the credibility of his word on this moral issue.

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And now a word from the pro-gamblers:

"VIRTUES, VALUES AND VEGAS," commentary by James McManus for The New York Times

“Virtue Is as Virtue Does?” reads a headline in the current issue of Newsweek. The Washington Monthly Online puts a similar story under the heading “The Bookie of Virtue.” The reporters Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green, in a joint effort by the publications, explain that the conservative author William Bennett likes to gamble and “speaks out, often indignantly, about almost every moral issue except one — gambling.”

The implication here is that playing high-stakes video poker makes Mr. Bennett a hypocrite. And on top of it, he's a “loser” too, according to one unnamed “casino source”; the reports cite “casino estimates” putting his total losses over the past decade at more than $8 million. The authors also note that he accepts the “high-roller treatment” at casinos, including free limousines and hotel rooms.

The fact is, the perks that so-called whales like Mr. Bennett enjoy are hardly free or unearned — they're paid for, and then some, because the house's statistical edge guarantees that such gamblers (as a group) will give back a least that much in the long run. More important, the authors admit that it's impossible for them to determine whether Mr. Bennett's in the black or the red as a player. If he has legally put $8 million in play over the course of a decade, it's not the same as risking that amount, let alone losing it, in a weekend.

Playing slot machines, blackjack or video poker may involve cycling a few hundred thousand into action, but for practical purposes a gambler is risking only a small fraction of that amount, since no one loses every spin or hand. A player is “taking the worst of it” by a only few percentage points. And I think a guy who earns $1,000 a minute giving speeches (and plenty more writing books) has just as much right to play high 21 as a guy on a pension who makes a couple of weekly Lotto quick picks.

Mr. Bennett now says his “gambling days are over.” I wish he had toughed it out like another celebrity who faced similar “gotcha” journalism. When Michael Jordan went to Atlantic City to play late-night blackjack for stakes he could easily afford during the 1993 playoffs, he was taken to task by several reporters. He needed more sleep, they complained; he should have been concentrating on splitting Knick double-teams, not on whether to double down with nine against eight, or to split sixes when the dealer is showing one too. Mr. Jordan made clear he could manage both tasks with aplomb, and that he didn't appreciate sportswriters peeping resentfully into his personal life.

For some people, however, betting pennies on tiddlywinks or 10 bucks on Pick 4 constitutes a “gambling problem.” They sniff that gamblers are venal because “they want something for nothing.” Yeah, well, of course we do. Players and nonplayers alike get aced out of cherished, indispensable things all the time and get zip in return, so it seems only reasonable to want to balance the equation a little.

All of us gamble. Air travel, dating, investments, education, even driving or walking to work are not for the risk-averse. Vastly more is at stake when conceiving a child than when Mr. Bennett plays video poker, yet married couples are treated to no finger-jabbing sermons when they roll the dice on reproduction. As a finger-jabber himself on some subjects, Mr. Bennett should perhaps be more alert to such ironies. Still, if he pays his taxes and abides by the law, we should keep our noses out of his personal life.

After a recent speech in Rochester, Mr. Bennett was asked what the chances were of his running for president in 2008. He responded by saying that he might enter the World Series of Poker instead. He was only half serious, I gather; his purpose was probably to stir more presidential conjecture while manfully ducking the question. But perhaps Mr. Bennett should try the real deal. The $10,000 entry fee for the championship event would appear to fall comfortably within the parameters of his bankroll. But is the God-fearing author of “Why We Fight” and editor of “Our Sacred Honor” up to this challenge?

God may play dice with the universe, despite Einstein's hope, but serious gamblers prefer no-limit Texas hold 'em, and they scoff at video poker and blackjack. Live poker strategy is the American way. Nothing bears this out more succinctly than illustrating our attack on Saddam Hussein's regime with a Most Wanted poker deck — unless it's Martin Sheen dealing draw on “The West Wing.”

Harry Truman, playing marathon sessions between momentous decisions as commander in chief, was accused by a reporter of “running a straight stud filibuster against his own secretary of state.” Richard Nixon won enough playing cards in the Navy to help finance his first run for Congress. As one of his professors at Whittier College pointed out, “A man who couldn't hold a hand in a first-class poker game is not fit to be president of the United States.” This may be a terrifying notion for some of us, but it's one that we all should face up to, Mr. Bennett included.

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James McManus is author of “Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs and Binion's World Series of Poker.” Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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[This illustration replaces a previous one]

"I do not admire the excess of some one virtue unless I am shown at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue. A man does not prove his greatness by standing at an extremity, but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies between them."

-- Blaise Pascal

There is an increasing interest among municipal governments throughout the United States in the use of surveillance technology as a crime-fighting tool. Is the acceptance of hidden -- and sometimes not so hidden -- cameras a security solution, or is it just another symptom of a society that has lost its moral compass?

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other," so said John Adams, America's second president.

Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence said, "Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time." Benjamin Franklin stated, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom."

Those who launched this great experiment we know as democracy understood well the key to success was self-governance. The freedom Americans have enjoyed for more than two centuries is fragile and can only be maintained by a societal agreement of what is morally right and wrong.

While the founders of the United States were not all Christians, they shared a consensus that the Bible was the wellspring that should nourish the individual conscience. "A free government can only be happy when the public principles and opinions are properly directed by religion and education. It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality", said Abraham Baldwin, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

The framers of American society knew well there would never be a way to insure absolute compliance with all laws at all times. Thus they understood that for democracy to be successful, people would have to police themselves. Morality would have to be understood and also embraced.

A populace unwilling or unable to bridle its behavior and comply with legal as well as social morality is devastating to democracy. "As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters," said Benjamin Franklin.

When everyone does what is right in his own eyes, the result is chaos. No society can survive anarchy for long. Some form of totalitarian system will develop and force people to comply with whatever "morality" leaders deem are most beneficial to the state.

Samuel Adams, who signed the Declaration of Independence, said, "While the people are virtuous, they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." There is no doubt virtue in America is waning. Since people are not policing themselves, society seems to think it is a good idea for government to do it for them. The result: We are willing to allow an electronic invasion of surveillance into most every aspect of our lives.

Initially, electronic monitoring was introduced to insure national security. It moved into the private sector in an effort to protect assets. Now governments are touting it as a tool in law enforcement. Cities are now using electronic surveillance to monitor high crime areas as well traffic intersections. God only knows where this technology will show up next.

More telling than municipal government's desire to police people with constant surveillance is society's lack of reaction. Rather than searching for the missing compass of morality, we are apathetically welcoming the electronic intrusion into our lives and the resulting fading of privacy. That, in and of itself, is symptomatic of a society in trouble.

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Boggs is pastor of Valley Baptist Church, McMinnville, Oregon

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“that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which [are] by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” (Philippians 1:10-11 NKJV)

Things Excellent

• approve — Rom 12:2, Eph 5:17 — discriminate, test, discern

• excellent — that transcend (Lightfoot). “The best among those that are good, of which none but those of more advanced attainments, perceive the excellence” (Bengel).

• sincere — pure

• offence — stumbling

• being…righteousness — Gal 5:22-23 — the righteousness which is by faith must needs be fruitful

• which…Christ — John 15:5, Eph 2:10 — who “wrought out and brought in” this righteousness

• unto…God — John 15:8, Matt 5:16 — the great aim of all true Christian life and faith

Fruits of righteousness — Anon.

I. The nature of righteousness:

1. The term is diversified in its meaning;

2. In the text it signifies personal holiness.

II. Its fruits:

1. It is productive of gracious fruits;

2. These fruits are abundant and progressive.

III. Its Author:

1. It is purchased by Christ as our Redeemer;

2. It is derived from Him as our Saviour.

IV. Its results. It is “to the glory and praise of God:”

1. In the scheme of redemption;

2. In the subjects of salvation.

Hating goodness — “I happened once,” says Dr Cotton Mather, “to be present in the room where a dying man could not leave the world till he had lamented to a minister (whom he had sent for on this account) the unjust calumnies and injuries which he had often cast upon him. The minister asked the poor penitent what was the occasion of this abusive conduct: whether he had been imposed upon by any false report. The man made this answer, ‘No, sir, it was merely this; I thought you were a good man, and that you did much good in the world, and therefore I hated you. Is it possible, is it possible,’ he added, ‘for such a wretch to find pardon?’”

“Thou seest, my son Marcus, the very form and features, as it were, of virtue; and could it only be beheld by our eyes, it would rouse in us a wonderful love of wisdom” — Cicero

According to a story in the book, “Hugs for Dad,” by John William Smith, a father asked his son after grocery shopping to return their cart to the retrieval area. Although it would have taken only a minute, the son protested.

“C’mon, Dad,” he said, “there are carts all over the lot. None of those people returned theirs. No one expects them to.”

Then Mom chimed in. “For heaven’s sake, they pay people to collect the carts. Returning one more won’t change the history of the world. Let’s just go.”

Dad was about to surrender when he saw an elderly couple walking together to return their cart. After a moment, he said to his son, “We’re not responsible for what other people do, but we are responsible for what we do. There are two kinds of people: those who put their carts away and those who don’t. We put our carts away because that’s the kind of people we are.”

This story isn’t just about grocery carts. It’s about doing the right thing in a world that seems to promote rationalizations and excuses that demean or trivialize simple acts of virtue. There are two kinds of people: those who find the strength to do what they ought to and those who find excuses not to.

People of character do the right thing even if no one else does, not because they think it will change the world, but because they refuse to be changed by the world.

I’m not saying people who don’t return their shopping carts are moral felons, but there is a lot to admire in people who have such a strong sense of decency and responsibility that they put principles above convenience.

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© 2007 Josephson Institute of Ethics; http://www.charactercounts.org

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20878]

Mental clutter. Funny, but I don’t remember being absent minded.

Storage facilities — they are everywhere. I don’t know about your area, but here in Florida it seems every crossroad has some kind of storage rental building being built. Are Americans the world’s greatest collectors of junque (fancy junk)? Maybe we should all move every 10 years just to get rid of junk. Rule: If you haven’t used it in two years, you don’t need it.

The greatest storage facility ever devised is the human mind. Each day we pour more information into it, yet we can clearly recall incidents from our childhood, even as we approach senior status. Amazing!

Just like storage buildings, we need to be careful not to clutter our mental storage with junk — it’s so easy with today’s TV trash, and it’s getting worse. Romans 8:6 (nlt), “If your sinful nature controls your mind, there is death. But if the Holy Spirit controls your mind, there is life and peace.” So which one wins? Whichever one you feed! So store information carefully, prayerfully and wisely!

In a short essay called “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton describes one of his favorite childhood pastimes: drawing with chalk on brown paper. He prefers brown paper to white because the colors of the chalk stand out more vividly against its rough, dark background. The most essential piece of chalk in his collection is the white one. He writes, “One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.”

I suspect most of us have been guilty of thinking of white as an absence of color; in fact, white light includes colors of every other wavelength. Chesterton draws a parallel between our mistaken thinking about the color white and our mixed up perspective on virtue. He writes, “[T]he chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.”

Have you fallen into thinking of virtue as the mere absence of vice? I have, on more than one occasion. I once led a Bible study on the subject of pride, and one of the participants asked if we were going to also study humility. “Oh, no,” I responded, “If you can conquer pride, you’ve achieved humility.” However, more study and a few more years of battling my own pride convinced me that I was dead wrong on this issue. It is only by pursuing the positive fruit of humility that we can ever hope to battle pride. Humility is not the mere absence of pride any more than white is the absence of color. Humility is a “vivid and separate thing,” a prize worth pursuing. It is only when we learn through humility to think on things greater than ourselves that we will be able to abandon our pride.

C. S. Lewis noted a similar misconception in his sermon “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis writes, “If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive....”

We should be careful to avoid substituting negatives for positives. When God commanded his people to be holy, He did not base his command first and foremost on the detestability of sin. He grounded this command in his own character, saying “You shall be holy because I am holy.” Yes, God hates and abhors what is unholy, but this abhorrence springs from his delight in what is good and true, namely Himself. Like Him, we should not look at the joyful pursuit of holiness as the wearisome extermination of vice. We should not merely hate what is evil; we should also cling to what is good. In doing so, we move from the defensive to the offensive, a move that is a major turning point in the winning of any war.

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Copyright © 2007 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Not every new use of words is intentional malpractice, of course. Words often change over time as our culture changes. Sometimes words will change because the culture has changed. Sometimes culture changes because words have changed.

Either way, imagine how much a word or a phrase might have changed over 250 years.

The word “happiness,” for example, is part of the most memorable line in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Anyone who understands just how much the word “happiness” has changed, can also understand why the American experiment seems to be coming apart at the seams these days.

Dictionary.com offers a common definition of “happiness”: “pleasure; contentment; joy.”

In an age where radical individual autonomy and disordered passions are combined with nearly unlimited technological and financial resources, an unalienable right to pursue whatever make us “happy” in that sense is basically a downward spiral into the moral abyss. What’s there to stop us from intoxicating ourselves into mindless distractions, eliminating consequences of our behavior – like unborn babies – that interfere with our freedom, or even ending our own lives when we think we can no longer be happy?

What if I told you the founding fathers had a very different definition of happiness? That’s the case Carli Conklin makes in her new book, “The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.”

In the eighteenth century, happiness “refer[red] to man’s ability to know the law of nature,” Conklin says, “and ... to choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles.”

This is exactly what Chuck Colson said back in 2010:

So what then does happiness mean? Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. This concept of happiness comes from the Greek word “eudomonia,” which refers to a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth. That is what happiness means, and that is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue — a virtuous life.

And over at Public Discourse, Justin Dyer adds an important point on the pursuit of happiness and The Declaration of Independence: that both are incomprehensible outside of the Declaration’s theological framework.

“Yes,” Dyer says, “Jefferson and some of the principal Founders ... held unorthodox religious beliefs. Nonetheless, all of these men publicly and privately affirmed a shared natural theology: that there is a Creator who has imbued the world with discernible natural laws, both physical and moral, and who governs the affairs of men with his sustaining and intervening providence.”

I know this is intellectual heavy lifting for a day set aside for parades, cookouts, and fireworks. But the concept of true happiness is crucial not only for our nation, but for the body of Christ.

Back in that same 2010 commentary, Chuck lamented a Barna survey that revealed “more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: ‘The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.’”

“Come on!” Chuck said. “If the last 50 years has taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and ... the pursuit of unbridled pleasure ... do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery ... The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good — in short, living a virtuous life.”

To that, I say Amen.

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Resources:

“The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History,” by Carli N. Conklin, University of Missouri, May 1, 2019.

"The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood,” by Justin Dyer, Public Discourse, June 17, 2019.

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Copyright (c) 2019 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

In his essay called “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell shared a crucial insight about the decline of language: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Or, as my friend Mike Bauman often says, “Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.” In Orwell’s “1984,” the masses are fed redefining slogans like “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”

The battle over cultures is often in the defining and redefining of words. Language has often been used to lower horizons and keep people from really thinking. Today, as we discuss hope, we must confront bad definitions.

We hear a lot about hope these days, from “the audacity of hope” to “hoping against hope.” Unfortunately, the word has been redefined — and, I must say, shrunken — by bad definitions.

Hope has been reduced to a kind of naïve optimism that things will get better. We hope for a changed situation, a new job, a better love, hitting the lottery, or LeBron James winning his first championship.

But real hope — biblical hope — isn’t hope for; it’s hope in: Hope in Christ — what He did for us on the Cross; and what He will do for us when He comes again and sets up His kingdom. A hope for is never better than wishful thinking. Hope in Christ is an expectation based on the certainty of who Jesus is and what He accomplished.

When hope is defined down to a limp, pallid, and ultimately useless imitation of the real thing, people and cultures are unable to live above naïve optimism or heartless despair.

But real hope is neither optimistic or despairing, and one of Chuck Colson’s closest colleagues, the late Richard John Neuhaus, described why: “Optimism,” Neuhaus said, “is not a Christian virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what you want to see and opting not to see what you don’t want to see.”

Hope is different than optimism. But we also can’t despair. As Neuhaus added, “We have not the right to despair, for despair is a sin. And we have not the reason to despair, quite simply because Christ has risen.” And that’s where biblical hope squarely rests.

This is no “pie in the sky when you die” kind of hope, but a hope that empowers us for effective service in this world right now.

For Neuhaus, hope involved calling the church to embrace the truth and power of the Gospel even in a culture he called “American Babylon.” For Chuck Colson, it meant proclaiming the sanctity of human life, marriage, and religious liberty.

And for us, true, biblical hope — hope in Christ rather than a hope for an improved situation — empowers us to keep on keeping on in the myriad battles to which the Lord calls us.

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Copyright (c) 2012 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

We often hear that a person's private conduct is unrelated to the performance of his or her public duties. This is especially true if the private failings involve sexual matters. Advocates of this point of view never tire of telling us about former presidents whose marital infidelities didn't prevent them from political greatness.

This argument was made regularly during the debates over President Clinton's impeachment. The president's defenders told us that the Founders would have been dismayed at our making a man's private conduct the basis for judging his fitness for office. And especially is this so, they said, with sexual sin which is something so personal you can be justified lying about it.

Well, a new book tells us that far from being dismayed, the Founders believed that private misbehavior would lead to a breach of public trust.

In his just released book, ON TWO WINGS, philosopher/theologian Michael Novak makes a compelling case for the biblical origins of the American experiment. As he puts it, the way that the story of the American founding is told today cuts off "one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies." That cut-off wing is America's "compact" with the God of the Bible. The Founders believed that there was a God who brings down the mighty and lifts up the poor. They relied upon this belief, and this belief is, as Novak writes, "an indispensable part of their story."

As you might expect, this belief shaped their understanding of morality and character, as well. They did not make the distinction between private and public conduct that we do. Novak tells the story of a prominent Boston doctor, Benjamin Church, Jr. Church's fellow Bostonians thought him to be a patriot and were subsequently shocked to learn that he had been selling his services to the British.

In a letter to James Warren, Samuel Adams offered an explanation that would be incomprehensible to many contemporary Americans: He linked the doctor's treason to his reputation as an adulterer.

Adams wrote, "He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life, is, or very soon will be, void of all Regard for his country." He added that "there is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his Country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections...." In other words, if a man or woman won't honor private obligations, why should we believe that he or she will honor his public ones? They won't.

If this seems hard to understand, the problem lies with us, not our Founders. Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew and Novak's book documents: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise. And as such, it assumes certain things to be true about human nature and, as Novak tells us, about the authority of the God of the Bible.

But these beliefs run contrary to our culture's worldviews. And that's why the ordered liberty envisioned by the Founders has degenerated into a demand for personal autonomy that asks nothing of its citizens, not even their virtue.

As Novak brilliantly reminds us, private virtue, rooted in biblical faith, is essential for the American experiment to work as the Founders intended. And, it's vital that Christians understand this often-ignored "wing" on which our way of life depends. The wing that teaches us that, without virtue, there can be no greatness.

For more information:

Michael Novak, ON TWO WINGS: HUMBLE FAITH AND COMMON SENSE AT THE AMERICAN FOUNDING (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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In 1965, a group of “bored witless” Catholic boarding school boys on the South Pacific island of Tonga, ages 13 to 16, decided to “borrow” a boat and escape to Fiji, which was 500 miles away, and maybe even to New Zealand.

As any parent of any teenage boy will tell you, their plans aren’t always fully thought-through. Such was the case with these boys. They set sail without a map or a compass. Caught in a storm, they drifted at sea for eight days before landing on an uninhabited island where they stayed, lost and thought dead, for fifteen months, before they were found.

The story may remind you of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of stranded boys quickly descend into debauchery and violence. But in this case, life did not imitate art. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recounted in an article in the Guardian last week, the Tongan boys turned the uninhabitable island into a functioning and decent community, complete with food production, workout facilities, a permanent fire, and religious services–all of which was constructed using, as he put it, “an old knife blade and much determination.”

Even more impressive than the physical infrastructure was the social stability. As Bregman put it, “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty.” Whenever there were disagreements and quarrels, instead of dropping a rock on “Piggy” (as they did in the novel), these boys imposed “a time-out” policy to let tempers cool.

How did these boys so thoroughly confound expectations? In the article, Bregman seems to suggest that fruitful cooperation comes naturally to most people. Instead of Golding’s dark assumptions about human nature in Lord of the Flies, we should instead “always look for what is good and positive in people,” and then expect to find it.

Unfortunately, Bregman’s interpretation of these events has two big problems. First, he assumes these boys from Tonga are the rule and not the exception, which is a stretch, given the sheer number of counterexamples from the daily news. Second, though Bregman did note that the boys “began and ended (each day) with song and prayer” and attended a “strict Catholic school,” he seems to miss the obvious connection between their formation and their behavior. Instead, he adopts a form of the “noble savage” thesis, as if how these boys behaved resulted from their inherent nature, not their schooling.

Of course, private religious education is certainly no guarantee against a Lord of the Flies descent to debauchery. As product of such an institution myself, I doubt the ending would have been nearly as happy if I were among their lot. And, to quote the greatest boys movie ever (“The Sandlot”), these boys got themselves in this “pickle” by stealing a boat. Still, not only did they survive, they nobly found ways to live together.

Did all that come from inside? Or was it put there?

I’m convinced that the best opening line in history is by C. S. Lewis’s in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” In selfish, snotty-nosed Eustace, Lewis personified how malforming and narcissistic, in both habit and pedagogy, education can be, especially when it encourages students to “look inside,” “express themselves,” and “be whoever they want to be.” He fully articulated his complaints about modern education in the essay, “The Abolition of Man,” which might have the best closing line in history: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Does anyone actually think that a bunch of Eustaces, lost on an island without any laws or food or authority figures, could yield such impressive results?

Underneath the story of these real-life boys from Tonga is the fact that they were formed, at their boarding school and likely elsewhere too, by a Christian faith and worldview. As scholar and author Anthony Esolen wrote on Facebook in response to this story, “religious faith is the strongest bond for any human society, especially when times are tough. Both of these truths are eminently borne out by all that we know about human cultures . . .”

What’s more, religious faith socializes young men. As Ravi Zacharias has often noted, if you found yourself in a dark alley late at night, with a group of rough-looking, burly young men walking swiftly toward you, would you feel better knowing they were coming from a Bible study?

The Catholic schoolboys from Tonga weren’t angels, but their religious background had shaped them in profound ways. They found ways to cooperate when times were tough because they were given resources to recognize and govern their own fallen natures. Without these resources, humans quickly devolve into our own devices. It’s either Eustace or Lord of the Flies. To miss this connection between faith and virtue, is an oversight almost as big as setting off in a stolen boat without a map or compass.

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Resources:

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months,” by Rutger Bregman, The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

“Is There Still a Place for Boys?” by John Stonestreet & Shane Morris, BreakPoint, February 6, 2020.

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Copyright (c) 2020 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Mental clutter. Funny, but I don’t remember being absent minded.

Storage facilities — they are everywhere. I don’t know about your area, but here in Florida it seems every crossroad has some kind of storage rental building being built. Are Americans the world’s greatest collectors of junque (fancy junk)? Maybe we should all move every 10 years just to get rid of junk. Rule: If you haven’t used it in two years, you don’t need it.

The greatest storage facility ever devised is the human mind. Each day we pour more information into it, yet we can clearly recall incidents from our childhood, even as we approach senior status. Amazing!

Just like storage buildings, we need to be careful not to clutter our mental storage with junk — it’s so easy with today’s TV trash, and it’s getting worse. Romans 8:6 (nlt), “If your sinful nature controls your mind, there is death. But if the Holy Spirit controls your mind, there is life and peace.” So which one wins? Whichever one you feed! So store information carefully, prayerfully and wisely!

According to a story in the book, “Hugs for Dad,” by John William Smith, a father asked his son after grocery shopping to return their cart to the retrieval area. Although it would have taken only a minute, the son protested.

“C’mon, Dad,” he said, “there are carts all over the lot. None of those people returned theirs. No one expects them to.”

Then Mom chimed in. “For heaven’s sake, they pay people to collect the carts. Returning one more won’t change the history of the world. Let’s just go.”

Dad was about to surrender when he saw an elderly couple walking together to return their cart. After a moment, he said to his son, “We’re not responsible for what other people do, but we are responsible for what we do. There are two kinds of people: those who put their carts away and those who don’t. We put our carts away because that’s the kind of people we are.”

This story isn’t just about grocery carts. It’s about doing the right thing in a world that seems to promote rationalizations and excuses that demean or trivialize simple acts of virtue. There are two kinds of people: those who find the strength to do what they ought to and those who find excuses not to.

People of character do the right thing even if no one else does, not because they think it will change the world, but because they refuse to be changed by the world.

I’m not saying people who don’t return their shopping carts are moral felons, but there is a lot to admire in people who have such a strong sense of decency and responsibility that they put principles above convenience.

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© 2007 Josephson Institute of Ethics; http://www.charactercounts.org

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20878]

The debate over whether America is a “Christian nation” has been raging for decades. On the one hand you have those who claim the founders were deists, and that the ideals that sparked the American Revolution were as secular as those that drove the French Revolution.

From this perspective, our best bet would be to keep religious views out of the public square and maintain a radical separation of church and state.

On the other hand, some Christians paint most or all of the American founding fathers as evangelical Christians, who sensed a call from God to establish a Christian nation, a new “city on the hill.” Certainly, many founders did take their personal faith in Jesus Christ seriously; but others like Jefferson and Franklin certainly did not. In fact they expressed views that were far from orthodox.

So what’s the truth? I think my friend Os Guinness offers terrific clarity in his book A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. In the book, Os points out that revolutions are not rare in the history of nations, nor is the pursuit of freedom. History tells plenty of stories about how freedom is won through revolution. But what made the American experiment unique is not that freedom was won, but that the founders provided a formula for how freedom could be sustained.

Sustaining freedom, according to Os, is incredibly rare because freedom is its own worst enemy. James Madison observed that, “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.” Think about it: The risk of freedom is that when freedom is achieved, it often leads to a sense of entitlement, justifying whatever lifestyle choices we want to enjoy. Unbridled license undermines liberty.

And as Chuck Colson often pointed out, the loss of virtue is the greatest threat to freedom.

The American founders, for the most part, shared the Judeo-Christian understanding of human nature, that man, the most creative and intelligent of creatures, is also fallible; he possesses an insatiable appetite for power. So the founders offered a recipe for sustaining freedom based on an accurate understanding of fallen human nature.

In A Free People’s Suicide, Os Guinness calls this recipe “The Golden Triangle of Freedom.” The critical thing we must understand, Guinness says, is that the three truths that make up this triangle — freedom, virtue and faith — are interdependent.

In other words, freedom requires virtue. Virtue requires faith. And faith requires freedom. If freedom, virtue or faith cease to be central to the American way of life, the most radical and effective experiment in self-government in the history of the world will fail.

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Copyright (c) 2012 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.