We’re going to start in an unusual place this Friday. I’m going to start with two obituaries. Both of them are for women over age 100. Both of them quite revealing in their own way. I found it very interesting that at Wednesday’s edition of The Times obituary section, which by the way, is just really interesting in terms of cultural observation. It’s massive. This is very important media real estate. And the fact that there are two women that most Americans won’t know, both over age 100, who receive these very, very substantial obituaries in the nation’s most influential paper, that tells us something. 

Number one, Mary Morello identified as, “A fierce offender of offensive lyrics dies at 102.” How’s that for your epitaph? “A fierce defender of offensive lyrics.” Now we’re talking about rock music and we’re talking about the fact that Mary Morello has a son, Tom Morello, who is a guitarist for the group known as Rage Against the Machine. So, we’re talking about a genre of rock music in which you have, let’s just say, very pornographic and sexualized terminology, imagery, driving things, et cetera, et cetera. So much so. That’s really interesting, that in the 1980s, you had a group of very concerned Americans come out and form an organization to try to limit, to put pressure on the government to limit the exposure of young people to this kind of music. The most interesting of these was known as the Parents Music Resource Center. The initials are simply PMRC. Which was started in the mid 1980s by several women, including congressional and government wives. Now, this is during the time of the Reagan administration.

Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. But you had some conservative Democrats and some Republicans whose wives came together. So, it’s very interesting. You had Mary Baker, whose husband James Baker had served in various times as White House Chief of Staff, as Secretary of the Treasury, also as Secretary of State. So, you’re talking about one of the most established Republican names there is. And you also had Tipper Gore, the wife of then US Senator Al Gore of Tennessee. Later, of course, in the Clinton administration, he would become Vice President Al Gore. His wife, Tipper Gore, was the most famous, the leading figure, in terms of this council that was known as the Parents Music Resource Center. And they made arguments that it’s just wrong for children to be exposed to such explicit lyrics. And by the way, they’re so explicit, I’m not even going to try to define or describe them on The Briefing.

I’ll just tell you, it’s the kind of thing that I think no one of any age should hear. But they were accused of censorship. And it’s really interesting, this woman whose obituary appears here, Mary Morello, whose own son, as I said, was in the group Rage Against the Machine. He was the rocker, Tom Morello. She made her name, and by the way, she was already pretty old by the time this came about. She made her name in order to press the case that it would be unconstitutional censorship for warning labels to be put on music that might be sold to children and teenagers. Now, it was also interesting that the group known as the Parents Music Resource Center really was not very effective in getting legislation passed. They did put a lot of political pressure on the companies, such as the major record labels that did at least in some cases start putting mild warnings on the records.

I realize that many people listening have no idea what a record is, LP, and then later eight tracks and cassette tapes and then the later CDs. But the point is that most of the culture looks back at this and says, “Those pathetic people who were behind that conservative movement.” And let me just remind you again, you’re not just talking about conservative Republicans here or the Reagan administration. There were the wives of Reagan administration figures in this, but you also had Tipper Gore. And that tells you how much the Democratic Party has changed. Her husband was the United States Senator, who was the son of a United States Senator from the State of Tennessee. And he was as inside the Democratic Party as you could get. He also sought the Democratic presidential nomination. And of course, he would eventually be the Democratic nominee in the 2000 election against Republican George W. Bush. That’s another historic story. But the big thing to recognize here is that when he was in the House of Representatives, then later when he was in the Senate, at least for some time, Al Gore was pro-life, and he was morally conservative on many, many positions. He then became the running mate to Bill Clinton. Let’s just say that became another story. 

But the other thing about Bill Clinton is that Bill Clinton actually gave some political support. You can come up with whatever strategy you want to deploy here. But Bill Clinton actually identified with some of those who were making the arguments that what’s going on in rock music and in popular culture has just gone too far. However, they took no direct action to try to limit it. 

So, it is real interesting you look at this and you see this obituary. Listen to this. “Armed with more passion than cash, she started her grassroots organization with $100. Ms. Morello organized letter writing campaigns from supporters across the country and pleaded her First Amendment case on CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and any other news outlet that would have her. Her list of the enemies of freedom,” that’s what she called them. “The enemies of freedom included not just the Parents Music Resource Center, but also ally groups, including the National PTA and the American Medical Association.” So, we’re talking about establishment groups that also tells you how much moral change has happened in the United States. She made this argument, “When censorship starts in a democracy, where does it stop?” Well, that’s a very interesting question. But the point is that there is some censorship in virtually every society, including the United States of America. The question is, where’s the line drawn?

And in the United States, that line has been, let’s just say, very generous, very permissive over the course of the last several decades. It’s hard to imagine anyone being arrested for saying almost anything in public, or making almost any kind of argument or any kind of sexually explicit kind of material. There are some very limited protections when it comes to teenagers and children. But by and large, we’re a society that has decided just to take all the controls off, except not all of them. You will get in trouble in certain situations if you disclose national secrets or any number of other things. And it is a reminder to us as well that when you have the coarsening of the culture, to use the phrase that was pioneered by the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you define deviancy down. That’s really what this is about.

This obituary is very interesting, because this woman was 102 years old and she’s here basically being celebrated for her brave defense of sexually explicit rock music lyrics. Let me just say from a Christian perspective, isn’t that an interesting thing to be the one most important thing about you, what justifies your half page obituary in The New York Times?

But the other woman whose obituary is at the bottom of the page died just days ago at age 109. That’s right. The first of these ladies died at 102, the second at 109. She was born in the year 1916. So, she really came to public attention about a decade ago. And lots of folks were very interested in not only how she could play the fiddle, but how she also made them, crafted them herself. Her story is really interesting.

She was born October the 21st, 1916 in Elmo, Arkansas. She’s very much identified with the Ozark music tradition. In the central western part of the state, she was raised. Her father, George Washington Brumley was a farmer. And her mother, Nora Brumley, who ran the home, died when Violet was 11. She observed her father making fiddles and at 15 began to build her own, splitting, planing and shaping wood that she found nearby. She had begun playing at 12. “I wanted to play the fiddle just because we didn’t have anything else to do,” she told a television station in Kansas City. “We didn’t have television or radio. And dad played. And I guess it struck me that I wanted to play.” And not only did she play, she played very, very well.

She also had a tremendous sense of humor. She said, the difference between a violin and a fiddle is whether the player can read music. If the player can read music, it’s a violin. If the player can’t read music but can play the thing, it’s a fiddle.” It turns out she had other talents also associated with that music tradition. She danced and she clogged. She performed in public for 27 years. And then she took some time in which she was basically married and raising a family. And then she came back to attention and was associated with Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri for more than half a century. And again, she made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry in 2016 when she was already 99 years old. Listen to this, “making fiddles was one of many skills Ms. Hensley developed over her lifetime. She also made lyesoap, tanned leather, broke horses and tended crops.” “I would always say,” she told the Tulsa newspaper, The World, “making a fiddle is a lot easier than plowing a field with a team of mules.” I have no doubt in that statement that Violet Hensley was right. I also have no doubt that she had experience to back up her analysis. 

I just found it very interesting. You look at the course of history. These are two women whose lives largely overlapped. One died just recently at 102, the other at 109, but what different lives they led at the same time. One of them known for making fiddles and for playing music. The other one known for defending pornographic lyrics. Two lives, one long lifetime, two very different obituaries for very good reasons.

Okay. Now let’s turn to questions. As always, I appreciate the questions sent in by listeners to The Briefing. And as always, I find them helpful, even helpful to me just understanding what questions are really pressing out there. And they almost always represent not just one listener, but many others who are just thinking about the same questions and I’m struggling with it. A listener wrote in, and here’s the text, “Historically, are there any nations that have thrived under socialism? Have any nations been governed by democratic socialism? Can you recommend any books?” 

Okay. Really interesting here, I’m going to take the first two questions most directly. And so, the first question is, are there any nations that have thrived under socialism? Well, that’s really good because it gets down to how you define socialism. So, when you talk about socialism, let’s just say that at least in the 19th and in the 20th centuries, socialism in its classic form meant that you had social ownership of the means of production and basically of the economy. So, in the name of society, this socialism was the replacement of an economy based upon private property and free enterprise. The true ideological socialism is the common ownership of all things, including property and the means of production. And then so, you asked the question, are any nations that have thrived under socialism? Well, not only to that. No, no. It’s been a colossal failure. 

And of course, you add to that the ideology of communism. And you look at the Bolshevik Revolution and what it produced in the Soviet Union. And then you look at other of these communist experiments. The communist part always fails. The party that is to say communist party, the party part doesn’t always fail. Sometimes they just transmogrify. That’s exactly what’s happened in China, in Mainland China, the People’s Republic of China. The fact is that there’s an awful lot of economic power there, so much so that China’s now far more powerful than Russia under Vladimir Putin. It’s got a far larger economy. And of course, it now has economic factors that are rivaling the West and challenging the United States. 

But all of that happened because in the course of the last several decades, the Chinese communist leadership came to the conclusion that classical communism, classical Marxism wasn’t going to work. And so, they basically came up with a Chinese model in which you have absolute control by the Communist Party of the entire society, but they have allowed the emergence of private property and also the profit motive in order to have an operational economy. And by the way, it’s always mixed because the Chinese Communist Party’s always ultimately in control. But let’s just say Chairman Mao, who led the Communist Revolution in 1949 that took over China, he wouldn’t recognize what’s now called Chinese communism. It’s also true that you had the development in much of Europe and in say the northern part of Europe, you had experiments in what was openly called democratic socialism. So, in other words, unlike the communist and the Bolshevik Revolution, we’re going to continue to claim democratic legitimacy. We’re going to continue to have political parties. We’re going to continue to have elections.

And so, you look at Scandinavia, just to give one example of this. And yes, some of those economies have done quite well, but you’ll also note that they have redefined socialism. Once again, if socialism works, it’s not socialism. And so, you have a lot of liberals in the United States. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren as US senators, for example. They’ll say, “Well, don’t say socialism doesn’t work. Look at Scandinavia. Look at Norway. Look at Sweden and just go down the list.” Well, you know what? You look at them and you recognize, well, the big brand names are privately held corporations. Guess what? This really isn’t socialism. The big dynamic, you talk about Nokia, you talk about any of these big companies. They are big private companies. 

Now, you will have some people say, “Well, yes, but you look at the extremes of wealth and poverty. You look at the economic imbalance, the economic inequality,” some will say. Well, it may be less than is present here in some of those societies, largely through high rates of taxation, et cetera. But the closer you look at them, actually you see, well, the economic inequality is there too. And not only that, but there’s an active engagement with the larger capitalist economy of which they’re very much a part. And so, yeah, you can go ahead and still call them democratic socialists. And that’s in the name, at least of many of the political parties. But the fact is they’ve really redefined socialism. So, this is a good question. I appreciate the listeners sending it. Are there any nations that have thrived under socialism? There are some, especially smaller countries with limited populations that have done all right with something they call democratic socialism.

I’m just going to say the closer you look at it, there’s not too much socialism in much of their socialism. 

One final note on that, you go back to the midpoint of the 20th century. I think many of them were trying to be more classically socialist, but you know what? That didn’t produce what they were looking for. And that’s why you look at Scandinavia, you’re looking at an economic powerhouse that really emerged just in the last several decades. And it didn’t come by the application of a stricter socialism.

All right. The next is coming in from a young man. He’s 17 years old and I appreciate so much him listening. He says, “I am homeschooled and will be graduating from high school at the end of this school year.” That’s a big year. I want to say to this young man and others who are in his situation, that senior year is a big thing. That last year before graduating from high school is a really big year. And I’m going to pray the Lord uses it powerfully in this young man’s life. And in particular, to answer a question he’s asking. He says he doesn’t know what to do after he graduates. What majors or career paths are worth pursuing? Okay. What a great question. 

And I am going to have to start with a word of absolute honesty, which is I don’t have a short list to offer this young man. Instead, I have what I hope is a very seasoned word coming from someone who’s not only been involved in these questions for a very long time and not only been involved in Christian work for a very long time, but who’s been president of an academic institution, graduate and undergraduate for a very long time.

Let me tell you, I think this is one of the best questions a young man can ask. And I would say it’s not exactly the same for young men and young women, especially given a biblical worldview, but it’s a question that does come to both. And that is, how do I prepare for the next stage in life? And I’m glad to say that we have so many wonderful Christian young people coming at just about this young man’s age, coming to Boyce College. And it just makes me very happy. I see what the Lord has done in their lives already. And I just imagine what the Lord’s going to do in the future. I think there are some jobs that Christians ought not to have. Let’s just say, given where we began today by talking about that woman involved in supporting pornographic music, there are just some things Christians ought not to do.

But most of the entire economy, even in a fallen world, involves some opportunity in vast sectors, vast, vast parts of the landscape of the economy for Christians, especially a Christian young man, to be actively engaged in work. And that leads me to say, I think there’s some specialized callings. If you’re going to be a medical doctor, you got to really start out in that. You’re pre-med, you got to go to medical school, your life’s pretty much mapped. If you’re going to go into many other professions, it’s good to know that pretty early. There is a distinction even between medicine and law. There is now no prescribed pre-law curriculum. There still is for medicine. And so, you can decide to go into the law later on.

I want to suggest, and I say this to not only to young men, the age of this young man, I say to their parents and to their churches, their pastors, their youth workers. I just want to say the major for young people, young Christians at these ages, is in most cases not crucial at all. It’s just not. I think there is a general body of knowledge and there are some general skills. Some of them will come through the study of business and leadership. Some of it just comes through the study of all the things that are in the curriculum of a good college guided by Christian truth. Almost all of that is going to be very relevant to a young man getting a job. 

And I can simply tell you, and I hope this is not a discouragement. I hope this is an encouragement. It is now pretty well attested, pretty well documented, that the vast majority of people who live long enough to go through adulthood end up in jobs their college major did not imply. In other words, the Lord’s going to open doors. The Lord’s going to give you interests. The Lord is going to give you areas in which you think you do better in this part of study than another. The Lord’s going to give you passions and interests. And I’m going to pray the Lord will give you a job behind it. And I want to say unapologetically, unapologetically, you need to go to a school which is going to train a young man for usable work in the church, most importantly in the family and in the church, and then in society to be able to raise a family, support a family, and fulfill the biblical vision.

And so, I will tell you that there isn’t a short list of jobs I would give you. There is however, I think, a short list of concerns I would have. And that’s about what kind of man you’re going to be, what kind of convictions are going to frame your life, what kind of obedience you’re going to give to the plan and purpose of God in creation order and in the gospel and in the Scriptures. And how you’re going to be best deployed for the glory of God, for the entirety of your working life. And again, I just want to tell you, I think the Lord will work in your life over your lifetime in which you will probably have some jobs you can’t even contemplate right now. 

One final word I want to say not only to this young man, but to an awful lot of Christian young people in his position of life. It’s not wrong to ask this question. It’s absolutely right. It shows maturity to ask this question. It shows maturity to go through a biblical process and talking with parents and others who know you well, in terms of what your aptitude and gifts are or what they might see you doing. But I just want to relieve young people, Christian young people of the weight of thinking they have to determine exactly what they’re going to do. They have to know that word from the Lord right now. I just want to say, I am not doing exactly what I thought I would do when I was 17 years old. That was about the age in which the Lord did make more clear to me that I would be following the path I’m on right now. And I’m very thankful for that, but I didn’t get all of this in an instant download, nor at age 17 had I ever heard of anything like an instant download.

That age had not yet come, but you know what I mean. This is a part of how the Lord deals with us over time. God bless you. You’re asking one of the right questions. I can promise you the Lord will give you the answers in due time.

I appreciate another listener writing in, asking, is socialism even compatible with Islam? What a great question. What a great question. So, let me just tell you that there are elements of a socialist economy that very well might be compatible with certain elements of Islam, but fundamentally they’re incompatible. And I want to tell you why. And it is because Islam, let’s just state the obvious, is inherently theistic, whereas socialism classically comes from a very different direction. 

But there are those who call themselves Christian socialists. Could there be those who call themselves Islamic socialists? Well, sure. But I think they’re going to be on the left wing of Islam. I think the more you look at Orthodox Islam and you look at the Quran, there are some issues of economics that would be very different than say modern American and European free market capitalism. But at the end of the day, it is not a socialism experiment that’s going on in classical Islam as defined by the Quran. It is a theocratic rule. And that’s a very different thing. So, you ask me, is socialism even compatible with Islam? I’m going to say I think it could be when you look at liberal Islam. And you look at some of those who have support from socialists or some who even claim socialist ideas and also say that they are Islamic. The fact is, I’m not about to say they don’t exist. I am going to say that at some point I think that secular dimension of socialism is going to run into a theological collision with Islam. But you know what? We’re looking at the fact that the further you go left, the more all these things get melded together. And I’ll just say there are larger issues in terms of the collision with Islam by the time you get there.

I’m really taking on a challenge when I look at this final question coming from a listener who asks, how would you define God’s mercy and how is mercy different than God’s grace and forgiveness? Okay. I am intentionally taking this question at this point because one way to answer this would be to go into what would just best be called a word study.

Now, let’s just go back in fact to the Greek words behind mercy and grace and forgiveness. I am taking it as a greater challenge to summarize in such a way that I want to say for Christians, there’s a blurring of meaning that means that when we say God’s mercy and His grace, we as believers are often talking about very much the same thing. Grace is unmerited favor. Mercy is undeserved grace, favor, forgiveness. Forgiveness is what a superior gives to an inferior, what a wronged gives to the one who has done the wrong, in terms of acquittal and in terms even of restoration. And we as human beings, we know only a human level of forgiveness, except for the fact that in Christ, Christians understand the Father has forgiven us our sins. Not based upon any merit of our own, but by his own mercy and his grace demonstrated in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, the substitutionary atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ in our place.

In the absolute vindication of the atonement accomplished by the son in the resurrection from the dead that was brought about by the Father’s powers, as he raised the Son on the third day. And thus mercy, grace, and forgiveness are declared in the gospel of Jesus Christ, based upon the merits of Christ alone. 

I think another way to put it is that biblically speaking, according to the gospel, the forgiveness of sins, God’s act in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins comes about because of His grace and His mercy. The grace is in the forgiveness we do not deserve. The mercy is so clearly demonstrated in the fact that Christ died on our behalf, doing what we could not do for ourselves. It all comes back to the fact that God is not divided. He is gracious here and merciful here. He is united. Everything that he does reveals His grace and His mercy.

I think another way to put it biblically is that in Christ, we come to know the grace of forgiveness by the mercy of God. I dare myself to say that in summary form. I hope I’ve done so faithfully.