A shocking set of recordings was released this week that could prove disastrous for Planned Parenthood’s ties with the African-American community. Lila Rose, a pro-life student and reporter at UCLA, launched an undercover investigation aimed at exposing the racism of the nation’s largest abortion merchant. With the help of an actor, she contacted Planned Parenthood clinics in seven states, inquiring if they would be willing to accept a donation earmarked for the abortion of black babies. The results were jaw-dropping.

Rose was appalled to discover that every last clinic agreed. Not one employee objected or questioned the request, even when the actor insisted that the purpose was to “lower the number of black people” in America. When the caller phoned an Ohio branch, he was told that Planned Parenthood “will accept the money for whatever reason.”

Lila Rose’s audio montage is below:

After having seen There Will Be Blood three times in packed theatres there is no question it deserves its seven Oscar® nominations. But many evangelical Christians might disagree.

Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood chronicles the degeneration of the fictional 19th Century oil man Daniel Plainview who (as my own 15 year old son has accurately described) becomes “less and less human and more and more reclusive” as his story unfolds. Because the movie vividly depicts the violence, lust, and greed which accompanies Plainview’s decent, many Christians see in it no socially or spiritually redeeming value. I beg to differ.

The Passion of the Christ exceeded all expectations at the box office and since it did, evangelical Christians have come to expect “socially redeeming” films to overtly, explicitly, and clearly spell out the Christian gospel almost “verse by verse.” The gospel is present in There Will Be Blood more in the form of a photographic negative than as a detailed Technicolor® print. Christians prefer their gospel pretty and bright, not dark and foreboding, and many evangelical Christians object to There Will Be Blood because they believe it displays needless violence.

There Will Be Blood contains less dark elements than does the gospel story itself. Salvation was, after all, secured for us through what can be properly characterized as a miscarriage of justice leading to the torturous, bloody, and shameful public execution of the Son of God. The sterile Sunday School version of events surrounding the death of Christ does not accurately reflect just how violent it was. If the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ were accurately depicted on the big screen today, it would probably earn an NC-17 rating and Christians would boycott the film for not reflecting “Christian” morality. What irony.

The whole point of There Will Be Blood is violence; therefore the violence cannot be characterized as “needless.” Jesus said, “An evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil things” (Matthew 12:35). A critical element of the gospel (which is left out of many contemporary presentations of the gospel) is the reality of the evil that abides within us, and the damning effect it produces through our words and deeds. This film exposes the evil heart of Daniel Plainview (and of every human being) as he recklessly pursues the satisfaction of his passions. Some people are psychologically abused in this pursuit, others are physically abused, and some even die. Even family ties are no match for the unrestrained depravity that overtakes this man by the end of the film, resulting in his truly being abandoned by everyone, including his own conscience, which is the ultimate end of sin. Daniel Plainview’s closing line in the film is nothing more than a paraphrase of James 1:15: “Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.”

Many evangelical Christians have also concluded the film is openly hostile toward the Christian faith. In reality the film doesn’t depict the true Christian faith at all. It depicts a counterfeit religion masquerading as Christianity, accurately depicting the sin within the heart of those who profess to be ministers of the gospel but who are in reality committed only to their own profit and pleasure at the expense of deceived followers.

The final scene brings this point home. The faith healing prophet/preacher Eli Sunday comes to Daniel Plainview with a proposition which unveils the depravity of his own heart. Plainview unmasks the preacher, exposing the preacher’s hypocrisy by demanding him to repeat, “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition.” The philosophy expressed in those words rightly offends the sensibilities of Christians. But taken in the context in which they are spoken, these words are an honest confession of faith, revealing a heart far from God spoken through lips that have heretofore honored Him (cf. Matthew 15:18), thus exposing the evil heart. Unless and until we are confronted with the evil within our own hearts, we have nothing to be saved from and therefore the Christian gospel has nothing of importance to say to us.

There Will Be Blood is not the positive, uplifting “Christian” film evangelicals prefer, but it doesn’t have to be in order to proclaim Christian truth. Truth is present in the inability of its lead characters to achieve lasting peace through the unrestrained pursuit of their depraved passions, affirming that only the gospel of Jesus Christ can cure the evil in the human heart. The absence of this gospel is the reason for the violence. In the end the film cries out for a resolution that only the gospel of Jesus Christ can offer. By leaving out an explicit presentation of the gospel the screenplay inadvertently, if not intentionally, leaves the gospel in PLAIN VIEW.

Rolling Stone has printed a letter from the band Boston’s lead guitarist in which he states,  ”Although I am impressed [Huckabee] learned my bass guitar part on ‘More Than a Feeling,’ I am an Obama supporter.”  Scholtz disrespectfully requests that Huckabee stop playing Boston’s music on the campaign trail (or anywhere for that matter) because Huckabee is ”a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for.”

I have every album Boston ever produced. Anybody want to join me for a Boston bonfire? In an effort to be as narrow minded as Tom Schmutz, I can’t in good conscience any longer listen to music produced by people who hold to an ideaology which is the polar opposite of everything I stand for.

BTW, Tom Scholtz closes his letter to Huckabee by referring to him as the “straight talk candidate.” Uh, it’s not Huckabee who is referring to himself on the campaign trail as the “straight talk candidate.” That would be JOHN MCCAIN.

Is Tommy Boy sure he sent the letter to the right candidate?

Dr. Albert Mohler announced today that a colonoscopy on February 11 revealed a pre-cancerous tumor which will require surgery. Read the full press release here.

If the Hillary campaign is cash strapped, might I suggest her communications director Howard Wolfson put his ubiquitous lucky sweater up on ebay and convert it to cash.

Within the last week former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has used the City of Detroit to illustrate the devastatingly negative effects of liberalism.

During his speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee Speaker Newt said:

I had no idea how decisevely and deeply entrenched our opponents are at every level…A Detroit school bureaucracy which is crippling the children of Detroit, which graduates only 25% of its entering freshman on time, which is one of the highest paid and one of the most expensive programs in the country, and which when a successful millionaire offered to give $200 million dollars to help create charter schools to save the children of Detroit, promptly attacked him as a racist because no white man had the right to step in and save black children, and in fact drove him out of Detroit because he was such a threat by insisting that teachers actually be competent and that the purpose of schools was actually to teach.

Speaker Newt was a guest on the Sean Hannity Show on Tuesday, February 12 when he said:

Senator McCain ought to be in the middle of Detroit saying he agress with Senator Obama, now’s the time for real change and the right change would be smaller government, lower taxes, more jobs, and a school system that actually educated children rather than failed them so decisively that they ended up in jail. And he ought to go to Lansing, Michigan and stand at the state capitol and say that Michigan is in an artificial recession because there are high taxes, too much regulation, too big a bureauracy, and we need real change now.

The Religious Left is successfully redefining what it means to be a conservative evangelical by misrepresenting what it means to be a conservative evangelical. In a recent conference call hosted by Faith in Public Life, one of the emerging voices of the Religious Left, Dr. Joel Hunter, said,

“There’s also a change in the voices that are defining what is conservative now, and what is evangelical. In the past couple of decades you’ve had some very loud voices on both sides – hard right, hard left – and when those were the only choices, then of course many evangelicals are going to go with the hard right because, well, that’s kind of where we mostly are. Now there are many more voices that are expanding the agenda, and so those people that have always had kind of a holistic approach, rather than just a one or two issue approach, are now feeling permission and given permission to be more nuanced and more sophisticated in their approach, rather than just going in a very bifurcated system. And so, what you’re hearing now is that the old voices that appointed themselves as the definers of what was evangelical or what was conservative are not holding sway with the majority of evangelicals anymore.”

By convincing America that conservative evangelicals are concerned only with two issues, stopping abortion and preserving traditional marriage, these new voices of evangelicalism are effectively making the case that conservative evangelicals ignore poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the environment. The history of evangelicalism tells a different story.

Evangelicals have set the standard throughout history for social action which continues into the present through numerous humanitarian relief organizations. The Association of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations claims 64 such organizations as members, including World Vision, Compassion International, Samaritan’s Purse, and Mercy Ships.

One of the largest humanitarian relief organizations in the world is the Salvation Army. It defines its commitment to social services as “…an outward visible expression of the Army’s strong religious principles.” Those social services include disaster relief, services for the aging, AIDS education, medical facilities, and shelters for battered women. The Salvation Army impacts 30 million people a year in the United States alone. The founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, was a Methodist minister. On its website the Salvation Army defines itself as an “evangelical group.”

To these readily recognizable evangelical organizations add the innumerable evangelical churches across America that in very quiet and unrecognized ways minister to the needs of the poor and suffering every day. In my own community a local evangelical church runs the oldest and largest homeless shelter in our county. Grace Gospel Fellowship in Pontiac, Michigan serves 127,000 meals a year, provides rehabilitation services and housing for drug addicts and single mothers, and creates jobs. It accomplishes its mission without one dime of government funding, and is “dedicated to recovery through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The Religious Left’s appeal for the Religious Right to “broaden its agenda” to include poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the environment ignores the fact that conservative evangelicals have always had a strong commitment to these issues. So if conservative evangelicals are already leading the efforts to relieve poverty and disease, what’s behind the call to “broaden the agenda”? Another agenda altogether.

What’s really happening here is an attempt by the Left to define evangelicalism down by moving it away from its emphasis on the power of the gospel to change lives. The church’s ability to affect social and cultural change, bringing relief to the poor and suffering, is rooted first and foremost in its commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and what the gospel says about the condition of man in sin which results in the symptoms of poverty and disease.

The Religious Left invalidates the conservative evangelical commitment to humanitarian relief because we are achieving our ends in the name of Jesus Christ through the gospel, without the assistance of government funding. The fundamental tenant of modern liberalism is that a government program funded by redistributed wealth is the preferred method of humanitarian relief rather than what the church is accomplishing by faith through compassionate hearts.

The new voices of the Religious Left – Rick Warren, Joel Hunter, Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, et al – are defining down what it means to be an evangelical by making the symptoms of man’s sin (poverty, disease, etc.) a priority rather than addressing the cause of those symptoms (sin) and the cure found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The argument for this reprioritizing is a convincing one, suggesting the new priorities for evangelicals ought to be determined by asking, “How would Jesus respond to (fill in your favorite social cause here)?” The implied answer is that Jesus would be more concerned about the treatment of the poor (especially illegal immigrants) and, at best, neutral on the questions of abortion and homosexual marriage because Jesus never spoke against abortion or homosexual marriage.

These new voices of evangelicalism wear the label “red letter Christians,” but they are in reality “white space Christians,” determining Jesus’ view of abortion and homosexual marriage by focusing on what he didn’t say rather than on what he did say. In Matthew 5 Jesus upholds the standard of the Mosaic Law, which is clear in its call for punishing anyone responsible for killing a child in the womb (Exodus 21:22-25). When Jesus wanted to illustrate true greatness, he set a child in the midst of the disciples and said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). In Matthew 19 Jesus clearly affirmed that marriage is between one man and one woman by validating the story of Adam and Eve, holding it up as the standard for marriage. As for the question of how Jesus would respond to illegal immigrants, I’m pretty sure he would tell them to obey the law (Matthew 22:21).

The new voices of evangelicalism sound eerily similar to the old voices of the social gospel movement who moved their churches away from the priority of the gospel in the early 20th Century, focusing instead on positive thinking and welfare as a solution to social ills. The result was empty pews and even emptier hearts. I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, then I’ll get down on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again (with apologies to Pete Townshend).

I think we’ve just come up with a way to decide the Republican nominee fairly: a sudden death face-off in air hockey between Mike Huckabee and John McCain using the remaining primary states as pucks: 

YouTube removed the video. View it by following this link to The Stephen Colbert Show at Comedy Central:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=156269&is_large=true

(CBS/AP) A German photographer caught the heart-stopping moment when a father decided there was no other way to save his 2-year-old son from a blazing apartment fire than to drop him out of fourth-story window.

Read the full story here.