Blog Archive
A while back I posted this emailed ethics question and invited you to think through it with me. In the meantime, some providence interrupted my life (more on that later) and I’m just now getting to it. Here’s the question again, and my response. Dear Dr. Moore, As a missionary in a West African country, I’m in a difficult situation. Here poverty is everywhere, and many people sell their young boys to the Taliban leaders at the various mosques. These half naked boys are sent into the streets to beg with a large tomato can and a stick. They are truly hungry and afraid; that was obvious to me. The Christians here have explained that if the boys do not collect enough money, they are not fed and beaten—sometimes worse. What should I do? Should I give the boys money for the Taliban hoping they will be safe? Should I refuse to support a group that proudly murders knowing that the precious eyes you are refusing could be beaten without my help? Sincerely, On Mission Dear OM, Now that’s a hard one. It’s a hard question because I’m not sure, first of all, whether it is known that all of these children are being used by Taliban leaders in this way or just that this does happen from time to time. If the latter, it could be similar to the kind of “He’ll just use it to buy liquor and drugs” argument against giving to the homeless in the United States. Let’s assume, though, the assessment here is exactly on target: these children are being raised and profited from by Islamic terrorists. Scripture tells us we are to care for the widows and orphans in their distress (Jas. 1:27). You’re face to face with a lot of them, right now. In caring for orphans and widows, Christians should work for justice on both the macro and the micro levels. These levels aren’t ultimately in conflict with one another, though they may seem to be in the short term. On the micro side of things, these children are going to grow up, typically, with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. They’re going to see their captors as sympathetic figures because these terrorists are the ones who fed them and clothed them (all the while brutalizing them). Here is a perversion of the design God has embedded in the creation, that children should identify with those who feed and clothe them. If all these children see, when they think of followers of Jesus, are the people who avert their eyes from them in need, such will only fuel their suffering and their identification with these oppressive terror cells. When faced with individual children in need, I think you should give money when you can. All the while telling them that you’re doing so in Jesus’ name. But that’s no solution to the problem. At the macro level, though, you don’t want to prop up the kind of satanic economy that is enabling this. Why are parents giving their children to these terrorist groups to rear? It’s because they are economically without options. It seems to me, if this situation is systemic in your area, that God is calling followers of Christ to start some Christ-focused children’s homes and orphanages. Counter the terror with homes the West Africans around you can see are clearly kind and loving to children. Invest your time, long term, in building a ministry that includes skill training, vocational counseling, agricultural support. If you don’t have the means to do this, appeal to your sending agency to give you help. If they won’t, go around them and appeal to the churches. And pray for the day when radical Muslims are asking why they don’t have children left to exploit anymore. What about you? Do you have a question for me to answer about some ethical decision? Email it to me at questions@russellmoore.com.
Culture of Adoption Video
— Thursday, March 1st, 2012 —
Below is a video I did for the Christian Alliance for Orphans, on how & why to create an “adoption culture” in your church. I’ve found a lot of churches, when God pierces their hearts for orphans, want to download a ready-made program to do so.
But I think adoption and orphan care have to [...]
Keep Reading...Is It Right for a Christian to Take Anti-Depressants?
— Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 —
Dear Dr. Moore,
Not long ago, my doctor prescribed me as having a (relatively) mild form of depression. He put me on an anti-depressant. I hate the side effects, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel, but maybe I’ll get used to it. My biggest struggle is whether it is right [...]
Keep Reading...Does Typology Require Sovereignty?
— Monday, February 27th, 2012 —
If Greg Boyd held to a classically orthodox view of God, he’d be my favorite contemporary systematic theologian. Boyd, a pastor in Minnesota, gets something that I think is crucially central in the Bible, what he calls a “warfare worldview” of the triumph of Christ [...]
Keep Reading...Thoughts on Midnight in Paris
— Sunday, February 26th, 2012 —
In light of tonight’s Academy Awards, I thought I’d revisit my thoughts from last year on Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris. The movie is nominated for best picture and best director. Win or lose, I think the film matters.
If the [...]
Keep Reading...Johnny Cash at Eighty
— Saturday, February 25th, 2012 —
This Sunday would be Johnny Cash’s eightieth birthday. Unlike many celebrities whose name dies out with the obituaries of their fan base, Cash continues to matter. And I think it matters that we understand why.
Cash remained—to the day of his death—a subject of almost morbid [...]
Keep Reading...“If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie” by Hank Williams, Jr.
— Friday, February 24th, 2012 —
This week on “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we’ll take a look at a song by Hank Williams, Jr., called “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie.” In this song, Williams expresses his love for the place where he grew up, and insists that “if Heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie,” then God [...]
Keep Reading...Always Mardi Gras and Never Easter
— Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 —
There’s nothing quite as bleak as a city street the morning after Mardi Gras. The steam of the humidity rises silently over asphalt riddled with forgotten doubloons, broken bottles, littered cigarettes, used condoms, clotted blood, and mangled vomit. This sight was, for some of the convictional Evangelicals in my hometown, a parable of what was wrong with Roman Catholicism. I wasn’t so sure.
I am a product of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” By that I don’t mean the 1994 statement of cultural co-belligerency led by Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus. I mean that since my father was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher and my mother was a Roman Catholic, I am, quite literally, the product of an Evangelical and a Catholic, together. Half my family was Southern Baptist and the other half Roman Catholic, and my family divide perfectly summed up the larger community around us.
Biloxi, my quirky little strip of home on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, was discovered by the French, and supplemented in that heritage with an influx of immigrants drawn to work in the seafood industry. “Vuyovich,” “Stanovich,” and “Nguyen” were as common of names on my class roles as “Smith” and “Jones.” This meant that my hometown was an outpost of a Catholic majority situated right at the bottom of the Bible Belt of the old Confederacy.
Being situated just over the state line from the Big Easy, we were more New Orleans than Tupelo, and I lived in the worlds of both southern Evangelicalism and southern European Catholicism. I could see the best side of either and the dark sides of both. I saw Catholic casino-night fundraisers and contentious Baptist business meetings, and neither seemed to look much like the Book of Acts.
When it came to the ecclesial divide between the Catholics and Evangelicals all around me, I was sure there must be some big differences that resulted in something as historic as the Protestant Reformation. But I never heard the names of any of the Reformers in my Baptist Sunday school, let alone the so-called solas at the heart of the sixteenth-century controversies. We were told that Catholics didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus and that they paid too much attention to Mary, but neither of those things seemed to describe my devout Catholic relatives.
Keep Reading...“Drive On” by Johnny Cash
— Friday, February 17th, 2012 —
This week on “The Cross and the Jukebox” we’ll take a look at a song by Johnny Cash called “Drive On.” The song itself is about a soldier who has returned from the Vietnam war, thinking about the friend he lost in battle, but more than that, about the mentality drilled into soldiers [...]
Keep Reading...Gambling and the Common Good
— Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 —
Kentucky, the state where I live, is abuzz these days with discussion over expanded gambling.The governor here wants it, and conservative Christian groups don’t. This argument is hardly limited to here. I lived through it in my ancestral home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, as [...]
Keep Reading...Let’s Have More Worship Wars
— Monday, February 13th, 2012 —
I have the worship music tastes of a seventy-five year-old woman.
There I admitted it. That’s because a seventy-five year-old woman was picking out the hymns and gospel songs in the church where I grew up. My iPod playlist is really eclectic—ranging from George Jones to [...]
