Friday, May 23, 2025

Part I

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Religious Liberty Was Hamstrung Yesterday: The 4-4 Split Led to a Major Religious Liberty Loss in Oklahoma

Well, what we feared would happen did happen. The Supreme Court of the United States yesterday released a decision. It’s a 4-4 decision and that means that the decision of the Oklahoma State Supreme Court to rule that it’s unconstitutional for a religious organization to sponsor a charter school, that decision stands, it shows all the difference between the number five and the number four. Now you know there are nine justices of the United States Supreme Court. So how could we now be basically hamstrung in a 4-4 decision? It is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself from the case because she had some particular interest that led her to need to recuse herself. Recuse means that, she withdrew from the entire case from the consideration and thus from the decision she likely would have been a fifth conservative vote upholding the right of religious organizations to sponsor a charter school.

Now remember, charter school is a tax-supported school. The idea of charter schools arose when people were frustrated with the public schools as they stood and were demanding alternatives. The idea of a charter school is that it is a school within a school district, and that means most importantly within a state Because of federalism, the states mostly establish the rules related to charter schools in their state. Private organizations could sponsor, and could administer charter schools, and that would give parents the opportunity to send their children to a tax-supported school that had a different curriculum, a different approach to education. Now, I am not a huge proponent of charter schools and I’ll tell you why. It’s because they still are about state taxpayer money under the administration of something that has to be approved by the state. And over time, my sad prediction is that charter schools will go the wrong direction, perhaps just a little more slowly than the other schools.

But eventually the public school establishment, the blob of the public school establishment, it has been trying state by state to gain more and more control over the charter schools and the charter process. Basically, they hate the charter schools and they want full control of the charter schools. And I’m not saying that charter schools are in every case illegitimate. As a matter of fact, I have argued that I believe in Oklahoma the state was wrong to deny authorization for a charter school to this religious organization, in this case Catholic. And the argument here is the classic religious liberty argument. And it is: if you say that just about any organization can sponsor a charter school and then you say, but not that one when it comes to religion, religious expression, the free exercise of religion, if that one is covered by those constitutional rights and you have singled out religion in what’s called invidious discrimination and that at face value is discrimination, that should not stand.

I do have at least some confidence that if Justice Barrett had been in on this hearing in terms of the oral arguments and had been a part of the decision-making and a part of the conference of the court and a part of a majority decision, which would’ve been in all likelihood, 5-4. A matter of fact, that’s simple math. If Justice Barrett had been involved in this case, it would’ve been one way or the other, a 5-4 decision. In this case, I think the best we can say is that it is something of a sad draw. It’s a draw in the sense that it doesn’t absolutely foreclose the fact that there could be another challenge to this kind of discrimination in another state perhaps that might fare better before the United States Supreme Court. One of the things to remember about the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court is that an awful lot has to do with the facts of the case.

And it just so happened, and I will say my judgment, my assurance is, I don’t think Justice Barrett would’ve withdrawn from this case unless she believed that she ethically needed to do so. That’s just in this case a very sad development and I think it has a material impact. 

We’ll be watching this case, and as I said, it goes now back to Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Supreme Court, its decision now stands because it has not been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. We can hope that might not be the final word, but at this point it is the word and that’s where it stands for now.

Part II

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The Left is Now Furious with Target: The Company Offended Many Christians With LGBTQ Advocacy, Now Target Backs Off DEI, and the Left is Losing Their Minds

But next I want to shift to a very significant headline on the DEI front. And by that I mean DEI as in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, those letters have come to be programmatic, especially on the Left where these programs, which is the agenda at the meeting of critical theory and certain kinds of leftist ideologies, and then of course identity politics and critical race theory, all the rest, gender theories, all the rest LGBTQ issues, all the rest intersectionality.

DEI is the nexus of so much of that, but it has been deeply driven into our society. You go back just a matter of a couple of years and campus after campus, universities and colleges were trumpeting how committed they were to DEI. Similarly, when it comes to major American businesses, you had major corporations making DEI so much a part of the corporate brand or the campus brand as a matter of fact, that it began to basically explain what was going on throughout the entirety of the corporation’s operations. And it’s not just about say who they hire and who gets advanced. It also had to do with DEI and product inclusion going all the way to suppliers and all the rest. And one of the things you get into, by the way, when you push a program like DEI, is that somebody’s going to quantify it and you’re never going to be DEI enough.

And that becomes glaringly true in a headline and this is coming from the Financial Times in London, and that’s what makes this really interesting because this isn’t coming from a newspaper primarily concerned with activism from the right or from the left. This is a newspaper that isn’t particularly declarative when it comes to DEI issues, but they do know how to count the bottom line because this is after all the Financial Times, one of the most authoritative and respected financial papers in the world? So what has the attention of the Financial Times? Well, what has the newspaper’s attention is what has the board of directors of Target’s attention. Here’s the headline: “Target Shares Fall After Hit from Tariffs and Store Boycotts Against DEI Retreat.” Okay, let’s just remind ourselves of something. When it comes to Target, you’re talking about a Minneapolis-based retailer, and they’re now getting it from both sides and no company has ever deserved to get it from both sides as much as this company right now. 

Target a matter of just several years ago was so pro-DEI and in particular LGBTQ that it was forcing that activism into entire displays and product lines. And that meant that all of a sudden an awful lot of conservative Christians or just moral conservatives in America decided they were going to take their business elsewhere. And my wife and I at one point had just walked into a target store because of a need while we were out of town. Then we came face-to-face with this giant display, and let’s just say it was really all about DEI, it was all about moral revolution. It was a distillation of a crumbling civilization before our eyes and it went all the way down to onesies for babies. That’s how insidious this was. 

But the backlash against Target got the company’s attention as bottom-line actions often have the way of getting the attention of corporations. But then you also have the movement against DEI, the conservative, I’ll just say educational project of helping Americans to understand what DEI represented. And then you had the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States in November of 2024, and that means that the White House and the Executive Branch, given all the power invested in the President of the United States, was invested in opposing DEI. Now, the company had already been burned on LGBTQ and DEI, but then it had DJT to deal with as well. And all of a sudden POTUS, the President of the United States became a part of this, and then the company began to back off of DEI as so many corporations have. And guess what? The Left is now mad at Target. The very people who were thrilled with Target for all the rainbow displays right down to the onesies for the infants, they’re now the people who are furious with Target for saying they’re going to back off of DEI. 

The Financial Times it writes as if it doesn’t have a horse in the race, so to speak. “Target sales tumbled more than expected in the first quarter as customers vented their anger over the retailer’s retreat from diversity initiatives and fears about the U.S. economy mounted.” I’ll go on “Same store sales dropped 3.8% year-on-year in the quarter as fewer shoppers visited and spent less at Targets, nearly 2000 locations. The company reported yesterday the fall was the first in a year and surpassed expectations for a 1.7% slide according to Visible Alpha.”

So that’s a financial firm here, and the company’s slide was evidently even more than had been expected. But the interesting thing in worldview terms is that when you have a company that decides to get into the DEI business, and to brag about getting in the DEI business, and then it has to get out of the DEI business, by the time that’s over, it has offended just about everybody. Now, when you look at this, there is another issue should come to mind and that is that when you look at the history of corporations in American life and in particular what are known as public facing or customer facing corporations, most of them have spent most of their history trying to avoid getting into trouble on any of these issues at all.

This tells you a great deal about what’s going on in our society. I have no idea what the chairman of Sears Roebuck and Company felt about abortion in 1952. By the way, I wasn’t even alive in 1952, but you get the point. Major American corporations did everything within their power not to be identified with these issues, but everything changed when the activism of the 60s turned into the employee base of the 70s, that turned into the ideological activism that has so utterly changed America’s landscape, and that includes retail companies as well. Target put themselves, they have no one to blame but themselves, they’re the ones who put the target on themselves. There’s the irony. 

Part III

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Why Don’t You Believe Churchill Was a Christian? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from a 15-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, now let’s turn to questions. I always appreciate questions from listeners.

The first I’m going to take is from a 15-year-old young man. He writes in, he says, “In one of your recent courses on leaders and leadership, you mentioned that you do not believe Winston Churchill was a Christian.” He continues. “While it is true that Churchill expressed doubts about his faith earlier in life, I personally believe he was a committed Christian. How do you reconcile his firm defense of Christianity and his strong moral character with a lack of personal faith? He clearly believed in God as evidenced by numerous statements affirming his existence. How could someone who so passionately promoted Christian values, with such zeal, a deep sense of right and wrong and an impeccable personal record? He says, with no credible allegations of impropriety do so without a genuine faith in Christ.”

Wow, that from a 15-year-old, I don’t know what the Lord is going to do with him in years ahead, but he sounds like a lawyer in the making to me. He presses his case here and he is writing with some knowledge of Winston Churchill, and I appreciate that he asked a very good question. Now he mentions that he knows that early in Churchill’s life, he in the words here, expressed doubts about his faith. It was a little bit more than that I think in his book, My Early Life and frankly in some other writings and some other occasions as well, he basically indicated some form of agnosticism when it came to the central claims of Christianity.

Now, I also want to say to this young listener, part of the problem is that Winston Churchill lived in a society, and he actually came to office first in the reign of Queen Victoria, so Victorian values are very much a part of this. And so it was inconceivable to people that a civilization could exist without a very strong moral foundation and a Western civilization that was provided by biblical Christianity. But by the time you get to the Church of England, which remember is not a Conversationalist denomination, and you have Winston Churchill who himself said that he didn’t consider himself really a communicant member of the Church of England.

He described to himself in one sense, and this is borrowed from someone else, he said he’s a flying buttress outside the church rather than someone supporting the church from the inside. But you then go on and you raise a smart question. I really appreciate this. When you say, “How do I reconcile Churchill’s defense of moral values? How do I reconcile even his defense of Christianity?” There’s some odd things about Winston Churchill, and I think you write this because you know how much I admire him. There’s some very odd things about him, including the fact that he took on some very peculiar interests for someone who was merely secular. I’m not arguing that he was merely secular. His interest, for example, in the Old Testament. In Old Testament history, his Philo-Semitism, which meant his love for the Jewish people, his championing of the Jewish cause. That was something that I think is deeply embedded in a biblical worldview.

I think Winston Churchill, when it comes to good and evil, inhabited a biblical worldview. But what I want to say to this young listener is that holding to a biblical worldview does not mean you are a Christian. It means that you’re operating within a Christian worldview. And not only that, but deism, which means the belief in God, but not the God of the Bible, not the Trinitarian God, father, son and Holy Ghost. But it’s a belief and a form of God who begins the universe and sets it in motion, but is basically then disconnected. It is not a personal God that we would worship. It is simply a supernatural force that we would acknowledge. I think there’s a sense in which Churchill functioned as a member of the Church of England who didn’t attend church except on special occasions, and didn’t speak of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord didn’t acknowledge the central truths of Christianity. He did believe that civilization depended on Christian morality. He believed that civilization and its future depended upon an understanding of good and evil, deeply rooted in biblical Christianity. So did Abraham Lincoln. 

And so you mentioned the course I taught Abraham Lincoln was another one of the figures. There is so much to admire in the deep theological anguish of Abraham Lincoln, particularly in his second inaugural address. It’s hard to read that without understanding how much Bible is behind the pathos of Lincoln’s verbiage, but Lincoln himself, again, never gave any testimony of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, never indicated any particular commitment to obedience as a Christian in terms of the church, he didn’t identify that way. I’m not saying I know he was a deist. That’s beyond I think our knowledge. I am saying that neither Lincoln nor Churchill gave evidence of a personal commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ, which is central to our understanding of the operation of the gospel. In other words, what makes one a Christian. 

But I also think both of them represent the fact that you had major figures with huge responsibility with anguishing battles to fight with good and evil weighing in the scales and the victory of one over the other, absolutely certain. Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln on both sides of the Atlantic believed that God was working out his purposes in history. That’s absolutely true. They believe that Christian morality was absolutely necessary to civilization. That was true. That just makes them admirers of Christianity, not necessarily Christians. Now, the other thing I want to say is that you may be right because I can’t read either man’s heart. I have no idea of Winston Churchill’s heart, but the New Testament command of the church is to look for the evidence of regeneration, not just the evidence of commitment to Christian morality. So good question. I think it was a spectacularly well asked from a fifteen-year-old. So thank you.

Part IV

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What Does Fallen Asleep Mean in 1 Thessalonians 4:13? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from a 14-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, we’re on a roll with these. A fourteen-year-old young man wrote, “My mom listens to you every day, and when I came to her with this question, she suggested, we ask you, when I was reading my Bible this morning, I read in one Thessalonians 4:14 the verse that says, ‘If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.'” He then says, “I wanted to ask you if fallen asleep means death, where do we go when we die if it’s not the same heaven that we will live in for eternity?” He then went on to say, “I heard someone say that the words fallen asleep mean you are in a kind of coma or that your mind is blank or something, and I just wasn’t sure.”

Well, God bless you for asking the question. And I love both these questions because these are questions that would apply to I think people of all ages. I think there are a lot of Christians who speak of death and life of the gospel and heaven, and they wonder, how do we think about these things? Well, I want to just underline to this young man, this young listener, that of course for all these things, we are absolutely dependent upon the holy Scriptures. So we looked at the Scriptures and what do we find? Well, we find for example, that more than 50 times in the Scripture, in the Old and the New Testaments death is described as sleep. And in particular the death of believers it’s described as sleep. And so in 2 Corinthians chapter five, verse eight, we are told that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. So that’s a precious promise. 

But we’re also told that those who die are sleeping, awaiting the resurrection that is to come. And in the flow of biblical history and also in the flow of biblical promise, we are told that heaven is being prepared for us. That’s exactly what Jesus says in John chapter 14, verse three. He says, “I go to prepare a place for you.” So that means that Jesus has gone to prepare that place of everlasting peace and glory with him. But there are also some other things that are revealed in Scripture, including the return of Christ and the great judgment that is to come and remember that in the great day of judgment that is to come from the great white throne will come down the verdict, and that will mean those who are in Christ will go into eternal joy in heaven, and those who are not in Christ will go into everlasting punishment in hell.

And so in that sense, we believe that in death there’s an absolute promise that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That’s an absolute promise. So where are those who are in Christ whom we love, who have died? They’re safe with Jesus. Are they sleeping? Well even Jesus, when speaking of Lazarus spoke this way, the apostle Paul speaks this way. As I say, it’s one of the most common expressions about death in the Bible, and it is meant to comfort us, not to trouble us because in sleep we’re not conscious of being asleep and you know, you go to bed. You close your eyes, you fall asleep, you wake up in the morning, and then you understand that nothing bad happened to you in the night. And that is the promise of Christ to those who believe. We die and in that sense, we sleep.

And the most important thing there I think is rest. We rest in Christ. We are in some very real sense present with Christ. In theology this is called the intermediate state. It’s the intermediate state between death and the trumpet sounding and the Lord returning and all of that culminating in the reign of Christ with the saints in heaven to come. So I hope that is encouraging to you. It’s a good question. The reference to death asleep is not meant to trouble us. It is meant to do the opposite. It is meant to comfort us. It is as natural as when we fall asleep at night in Christ, we will awaken on that day in Christ and we will be with him in heaven then.

Part V

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In the Parable of the Soils, Do the Rocky Soil People Go to Hell? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letter from a 6-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, I don’t just take questions from children, but sometimes they ask the best questions. This must be an unusual six-year-old.

By the way, I’m told that Luther is a part of his name, and that encourages me because just today I was with friends, right where Luther defended the faith and took his stand on the authority of Scripture even as he was on trial for his life. So anyway, I love the fact that Luther is a part of this boy’s name. “He asks in Jesus’s parable of the soils, do the rocky soil people go to hell. And with Judas..” And I love this, put in brackets, “(Iscariot) have been the rocky soil.” Now, just remember that when Jesus told this parable, he was describing responses to the gospel. They’re in Matthew chapter 13. There are those who hear the gospel and they show immediate signs of response. But when the sun comes out because they have no depth of soul, they have no maturity, they have no genuine commitment to Christ, they wither away and die.

That means spiritually, and that means yes, they never were believers, true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. They fail the test of regeneration because once–and this is the promise of the gospel–once regeneration, when God’s work of salvation takes place, it is not going to be interrupted. It is not going to be refuted, it’s not going to be given away. And thus you’re looking at clear biblical evidence. Jesus’s point is this is a way of death, not a way of life. And then you ask the question about Judas Iscariot, would he have been the rocky soil? I will simply say he was the rockiest of soil. We don’t know his heart when he began to follow Jesus, but we are told that Jesus knew from the beginning who he was. And so I don’t know, but let’s put it this way, the very best, he was rocky soil and his repudiation in Scripture, the judgment that falls on him in Scripture is just incredibly clear. And so I appreciate this kind of thoughtful question. And it also points to the fact that when we look at the parables of Jesus, we need to make very certain we’re not just turning them into morality tales. But actually looking for the clear gospel content and that context.

Part VI

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Can I Officiate the Wedding of Unbelievers? Should I Share the Gospel at That Wedding? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letter from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, finally, for today, a man writes in asking if he can officiate at a marriage ceremony for a family member and his future wife. We are told that neither one is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

This listener says, “I know marriage is one of the universal gifts that the Lord gives. So I believe I’m able to do this. My question is, what might you say during the ceremony to this couple? And for all those in attendance, it doesn’t seem like the right time to present the gospel as I feel I would be changing the focus, but it also seems right to do that. Can you help me?” Well, I appreciate the question and its candor. Number one, here’s a crucial issue. You cannot marry a believer to an unbeliever. You can marry an unbeliever to an unbeliever because marriage we do believe is a civil institution. Now, I think it’s unusual for a pastor, if you’re a pastor, it doesn’t say that if you’re a pastor, that’s an unusual situation to be in.

But just recently, a very dear friend of mine found himself in a situation, and it was an extremely perilous situation, but he was asked to perform the wedding of two unbelievers, and he could do that in good conscience because there were two unbelievers. But then you ask about the context, what should you say? I wouldn’t do it unless I could say, I wouldn’t do it unless I had full freedom to say, this isn’t a picture just of love between a man and a woman. This is a picture actually of the love the Lord Jesus Christ has for his church. I would speak openly about the gospel or I wouldn’t do the wedding because otherwise, why are they asking you to do this? That’s the question. 

They must want some kind of religious sanction on this marriage. And so I could marry an unbeliever to an unbeliever. I haven’t done that by the way. I haven’t been asked to. I would not marry a believer to an unbeliever. I would certainly marry under the right circumstances and have married a believer to a believer. But regardless, I’m going to preach the gospel every time I perform a wedding because I think the wedding is a picture of the bride in the bridegroom. And I would want to make that clear. And I pray you’re able to do that in your own way as you seize the opportunity. If indeed you officiate at this wedding.