Category Archives: Topics

April 5, 2021

Franklin Graham Supports COVID Vaccinations…. And Gets “Cancelled” For It By Some of His Followers?

By Clarke Morledge

I just got my first COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.

Some of my Christian friends, however, are a bit nervous about the vaccines. Sure, there are genuine concerns. But most of these concerns, upon closer examination, are unwarranted.

Hesitancy about using vaccines has a variety of factors behind it. A March 2021 Pew Research study observes that about 33% of Black Protestant Christians are wary of taking a COVID vaccine. The same study observes that about 45% of White Evangelical Christians are either cautious or dead set against any COVID vaccine.

So it comes as no surprise that when Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, and an influential spokesperson for many evangelical Christians today, announced his support for taking COVID vaccines, the reaction from some of his most ardent followers was swift and furious. Like Graham, I have relatives in my family line who served as medical missionaries, where the administration of vaccines have saved countless numbers of lives. Nevertheless, some denounced Graham as promoting a “devilish lie.” Some of Graham’s critics believe that taking the vaccine is a sign of taking “the mark of the beast.” However, a careful reading of Scripture shows that taking “the mark of the beast” in the Book of Revelation, is a loyalty oath, and not something that can be forced upon someone by someone else. It would appear that bad interpretation of the Bible is just as much a pandemic as is COVID-19.

Furthermore, when people use Bible passages like 1 Corinthians 6:19 (“Do you not know that you body is a temple of the Holy Spirit…“), that is really a misuse of the Bible. You might as well decline the use of any modern medicine, if you plan to be consistent with that way of thinking. Paul even recommended that Timothy take some wine to remedy the latter’s health ailments (1 Timothy 5:23). So it seems odd for Paul to suggest that if he really had in mind a prohibition against all forms of medicine.

Others are hesitant about such vaccines because of suspicions about government programs.

Others are unsure, because as in the case of the Moderna vaccine that I took, these mRNA vaccines are so new and have not been tested across millions and millions of people. However, the mRNA vaccine technology is not as new as people think, having undergone a number of other successful test trials in other applications over the past several decades.

Then there is the long held distrust of the medical establishment by the “anti-vax” movement, which is totally against vaccines of any and all kinds.

Critics of vaccines do have at least one point to make in their arguments, and it is an important one: No vaccine is entirely risk free.

When I went to get my vaccine, I was asked a whole list of questions, to make sure I was the right candidate to receive the vaccine. Not everyone should take the vaccine, because of certain side effects. But the percentage of people who should not take the vaccine is very, very small. For most people who do experience side effects, those side effects are relatively mild and do not last for long. If people have questions about their use of a vaccine, they should consult their doctor. If their doctor does not offer good answers to these questions, then that might be a strong signal suggesting that it is time to find a new doctor.

But while no vaccine is entirely risk free, that is true with just about everything in life. I know of many people who think nothing of it to hop into a car, and drive across town to run an errand or go to work. However, the likelihood of getting into a life-threatening automobile accident is orders of magnitude higher than is experiencing a life-threatening injury from a vaccine. Still, I see thousands of people driving in their automobiles all of the time. Furthermore, taking a COVID vaccine is much, much safer than being exposed to the COVID virus itself.

I have come to learn that vaccine hesistancy is not just an American evangelical Christian thing. A large percentage of secular Europe is more skeptical of vaccines than is the American evangelical Christian community. I have also seen paranoia at the other extreme, too, where some people are so freaked out by COVID-19, that they will wear a mask while driving in their car…. even though no one else is with them!!

Yesterday, Christians in the West celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus, along with the hope of Christ coming once again to right all wrongs and heal all diseases. Yet unless Jesus returns in the near future, the likelihood is that mass COVID vaccination programs will continue to be effective in reducing the pandemic, and life should return to a more regular pattern of normalcy.

COVID will never fully go away. Yet the same is true about the 1919 Spanish Flu, based on the N1H1 virus, that killed millions of people, in the wake of World War One, a century ago. Descendants of the 1919 N1H1 virus still exist today, though they typically come in a more muted and less deadly form. Still, getting a yearly flu shot goes a long way towards making the flu more of a nuisance and less deadly than it was when 50 million people died a hundred years ago, when fewer treatment options and no effective vaccines were available then.

Aside from the health factors, Christians really should support COVID-19 vaccination, for the simple reason that such decisions impact their witness to the truth of the Gospel. For if Christians get the reputation that they are highly susceptible to conspiracy-thinking that goes against science, then the next generation of young people will be only more and more inclined to judge the Christian faith itself as yet just another conspiracy theory that should be rejected.

Let us help our young people have more confidence in the truth of the Gospel… and not less.

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March 28, 2021

Passion Week Devotionals for Mind and Heart …. In a Pandemic Year

By Clarke Morledge

Greetings on this Psalm Sunday! A year ago, much of the world was in COVID-19 pandemic mode. A year later, while conditions have improved, there are still many whose Passion Week experience is still relegated to watching stuff on Zoom, YouTube, and Vimeo. For this week, I have dug up a set of online video devotionals, put out by Justin Taylor of Crossway Publishers and the Gospel Coalition, one 3-4 minute video per day, that will help anyone think through the events of Jesus’ last week, before his Crucifixion and Resurrection.  In each segment, an evangelical New Testament scholar walks us through the events each day, giving us a deeper sense of what Holy Week is all about, to inform our life of prayer.

Of course, I am following the Western calendar, but my Eastern Orthodox friends can follow this in a month when they celebrate Pascha (Easter) on May 2nd!  I pray that these devotionals, for head and heart, will edify you:

Psalm Sunday:

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Holy Monday:

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Holy Tuesday:

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Holy Wednesday (some call it “Spy Wednesday”):

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Maundy Thursday:

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Good Friday:

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Black Saturday:

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Easter Sunday:

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March 8, 2021

Let Loose The Seuss!!

By Clarke Morledge

Critics of Dr. Seuss find the “Chinese man, Who eats with sticks” (lower left) to be racially offensive, found on this page from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, recently taken off the market, due to pressure from woke-ness critics.

Did Dr. Seuss really get canceled? As with all of these “woke-ness” controversies, there is some grain of truth in every complaint.

In his earlier years, of the 1930s and 1940s, Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a “Dr. Seuss,” did advertising and political cartoons, featuring some occasional racist themes, which was not terribly unusual during those times. But his greatest legacy was the series of children’s books, that I feasted on as a kid. Over time, Seuss’ cartoon books matured, overcoming earlier missteps, and have continued to have tremendous staying power, for newer generations of children.

Perhaps the Dr. Seuss Enterprises took the step to cease publication of certain titles, such as Seuss’ first children’s book And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, to preemptively assuage Seuss’ anti-racism critics. After all, The Cat and the Hat has for years received accusations of promoting racist stereotypes. But it would be a shame to cancel The Cat and the Hat.

The trend towards taking certain written materials out of the marketplace is deeply disturbing. Private companies have the right to do what they want, but it does not bode well for instilling the value of freedom of speech, for rising generations. As a Christian, where freedom of speech is threatened, the threat against the freedom of religious expression is not too far behind.

Thankfully, there are others, who would not consider themselves conservative Christians, who share the same concerns. The Intellectual Dark Web is a loose collection of mainly (though not exclusively) classic liberal thinkers who believe that the contemporary fascination with “woke-ness” and various forms of critical theory present the greatest threat to Western civilization, in our day. Among them is Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, who makes no particular claim to having a Christian faith. But Weinstein has served us well by offering his own Seussian verse, in less than 4-minutes, in an effort to stem the tide against unfettered “woke-ness.” I hope you enjoy this.

Let the Seuss loose!

The woke-mob may think that they know what is best and morally correct for the rest of us, but I would rather make those decisions for myself, thank you very much.

By the way, speaking of the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson is back!! Here is an interview Jordan has with Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox icon-carver. Great, thoughtful conversation!

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March 3, 2021

More QAnon Nonsense: March 4 as Trump’s True Inauguration Day?

By Clarke Morledge

Just when you thought folks would be done with this, QAnon roars back with yet another wild prophecy. According to QAnon proponents, Donald Trump will replace Biden and be inaugurated as President. Why? Because of some convoluted reasoning that Ulysses S. Grant was the last legitimately elected President, and that Trump will be Grant’s true successor, on March 4, and will come in and finally clean up Washington, for the glory of God.

What is so bizarre about this whole thing is that various reports say that 1 in 4 evangelical Christians “believe the widely debunked QAnon conspiracy theory is completely or mostly accurate.”

1 in 4? Are that many Christians really serious about this??

If you find this unbelievable that so many well-meaning folks in evangelical churches believe this, then just sample some of these following interviews yourself. I warned about this kind of stuff in previous posts (#1 and #2 and #3), acknowledging that every conspiracy theory has at least SOME element of truth to them. But this latest QAnon concoction is off the charts.

Of course, I know how this is going to go down. Dedicated QAnon folks will double-down and say that I am blinded and “liberal” biased because I reference videos done by CNN, which is just the lying “mainstream media.” Such folks would rather believe their Facebook feed, that Facebook’s algorithm engineers have already steered towards them, down the rabbit hole….. as though Facebook’s social media steering mechanism is somehow more trustworthy than CNN.

But they will not stop there. They will either say that the fake March 4 Inauguration prediction was simply a warning before the REAL storm comes at a later, yet undisclosed date; that is, we must simply “trust the plan.” Or they will throw these folks interviewed under the bus! They will say that all of the folks interviewed in the following videos were actually planted there by Antifa, or other elements of the Radical Left, and they really are not true Trump supporters…. another example of “fake news.”

Folks, this just makes Christians look foolish. What a contrast with the early Christians who gave their lives for the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. People need to let this go and move on. If on the one-in-a-billion chance that something DOES happen like this, then I will surely post an update with a profound acknowledgement of error on my part….. But mark my word, come Friday morning, March 5th, folks will be able to look back on this and say that this was a false prophecy.

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (2 Timothy 4:3 NIV)”

ADDENDUM:  If you are still convinced that I am just a hack for CNN, then I would encourage you to consider the following thoughtful analysis by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying about how the New York Times steers the thinking of many of their readers, on a broad spectrum of topics. Be careful, as you might have to think about what is being said in this video. Weinstein and Heying are center-left liberals, in full disclosure.

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February 27, 2021

Welcoming Justice: Carrying on MLK’s Legacy

By Clarke Morledge

The year 2020 will be known for many things, notably the coronavirus pandemic. But it will also be known for “Black Lives Matter” protests, all over world, not just the United States. Why all of the protests?

For an explanation, one could point to a number of essays, books, blog posts and Twitter tweets, chronicling the history of racism, and the sad story of how the Christian church has been complicit in furthering problems related to skin color. Christians in my generation and older think of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), and his efforts to try to get the white church involved in overcoming racism.

The amount of literature on these type of topics is staggering. Many of these sources of information are insightful and helpful. A number of other sources are not. So, I was looking for a resource written by a seasoned veteran in the black struggle, who might have wisdom gained over the years, to give some necessary perspective, in our present day and age. What does it mean to carry on MLK’s legacy, in the first half of the 21st century?

When I saw Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community, co-written by John M. Perkins, I knew I had found the book I needed to read. It was the perfect book to read during Black History Month. An African American, Perkins came to Christ in the late 1950s at age 27, and then founded a Bible institute in his home state of Mississippi. Perkins was almost beaten to death by white police officers in 1970, an experience which gave him a deeper and renewed vision for his ministry calling.

Perkins framed this as the “three R’s”: relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation, all fundamentally grounded in the life of the church. His work in Bible teaching soon grew to address social issues in racially divided Mississippi, and the ministry grew as Perkins and his wife moved to California. His first book in 1976, Let Justice Roll Down, established him as a leading voice in evangelicalism, calling his fellow evangelical believers to expand ministry efforts towards racial reconciliation, instead of focusing narrowly on saving souls. At age 90 now, Perkins has the breadth of insight to give to a new generation of Christians, who struggle with how to best continue this type of reconciliation work.

Co-author Charles Marsh, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where America’s racial divide was on full display just a few years ago, nearly 50 years following MLK’s death. Those events in Charlottesville prompted an expanded reprint of this book. Both Perkins and Marsh offer a summary of insights, gained from years of ministry and writing on the topic of racism. Marsh, a scholar of the life of German 20th century theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a white Baptist, is a generation younger than Perkins. Perkins mentored Marsh, and the debt owed to Perkins’ experience and wisdom clearly shows in Welcoming Justice. Both Marsh and Perkins are convinced that the greatest strength of the movement towards racial reconciliation is to be found in the roots of the Christian church. Whenever efforts to combat racism have failed, they have failed because they have lost the Civil Rights movement’s original vision rooted in the Christian faith.

Sadly, much of the movement to combat racism today has indeed left the church. Yet without that spiritual vision, today’s efforts to deal with racism have often exacerbated the problems instead of providing sustainable solutions. MLK’s vision of a colorblind society is being replaced with a philosophy of antiracism, which makes practically everything an issue of race. Just meditate on the thought of John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and leading African American intellectual today, who warns that 21st century antiracism is becoming a greater threat to society, more so than the 20th century racism, that to a certain degree still plagues us.

Through a series of anecdotes covering the decades following World War 2, Welcoming Justice is a renewed call for the church to reclaim a biblical vision for racial reconciliation, one founded on the idea of a colorblind church. There is still much work to be done to expunge the sin of racism from our society (not just the church), but Perkins and Marsh give us encouragement for the task that still lies ahead. This is not a doctrinally rigorous book, but it does not intend to lay out precise and detailed theology. It does not seek to address some of the larger cultural problems associated with the secular rise of critical race theory and wokeness, that divides Christians today. But it does challenge Christians to engage in God’s program, to bring about reconciliation among persons of different skin color. A fairly short series of essays, Welcoming Justice communicates a vision for the beloved community, that seeks to carry on Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.

For more on what the Bible actually teaches about racism, please read this previous Veracity blog post. For more on Martin Luther King, Jr., look up these previous blog posts (#1 and #2) For more on the dangers of critical race theory, read about those topics here and here. If you want to know more about the story of John M. Perkins’ life, here is a biographical film made about him:

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