24AR29-21

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AR 29.21 - Resisting the belief that abnormality is the "new normal"

In this issue:

MORMONISM - former RLDS Kirtland Temple acquired by LDS Church

PSYCHOLOGY - how experts who claim to tackle the "mental health crisis" often cultivate it

RELIGIOUS CLASSIFICATION - is the label "Christian Nationalism" a banner or bogeyman?

Apologia Report 29:21 (1,662)
June 6, 2024

MORMONISM

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acquires Kirtland Temple, artifacts in nearly $193 million purchase" by Aubree B. Jennings (East Idaho News, Mar 5 '24) -- "The Utah-based Church announced Tuesday that it received several buildings and artifacts from the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ('RLDS').

   "The purchase included the Kirtland Temple which was the first temple built by Latter-Day Saints. It was left behind in the 1830s during the migration west to Utah. According to the press release, the Community of Christ has legally owned the title since 1901. ...

   "Other historical buildings included in the transfer are the Smith Family Homestead, the Red Brick Store, Joseph and Emma Smith's 'Mansion House' and the 'Nauvoo House.'

   "The purchase also included artifacts such as the Bible used in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, seven letters from Joseph Smith to his wife Emma, original portraits of Joseph and Emma Smith, the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House and the original door of Liberty Jail." <www.tinyurl.com/ycx7kvh5>

   Also on March 5th, the LDS Church and Community of Christ issued a rare "Joint Statement" explaining that "The Kirtland Temple will remain an historic building. ... Likewise, in Nauvoo, the Smith Family Homestead, the Mansion House, and the Red Brick Store will also reopen on March 25, 2024, for year-round public tours at no charge." <www.tinyurl.com/43t5y8f8>

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 PSYCHOLOGY

"Healers Who Harm" by Lola Salem (The Critic, Mar '24) -- briefly reviews Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier. <www.tinyurl.com/ynus7pzn>

   "In her earlier work Irreversible Damage (2020), <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-A-Shrier> she showed how the goods and evils of therapy emerged as a thread to understand the surge in 'gender dysphoria' referrals. She now dives deeper into the mental health establishment from a US perspective. The focus of Bad Therapy falls on the most vulnerable among us - children and teenagers. Shrier convincingly demonstrates that the very experts who claim to tackle the 'mental health crisis' in the West in fact often cultivate it. ...

   "Chasing positivity tends to make children more depressed. Stressing the almighty importance of feelings tends to make them too sensitive. Always affirming and accommodating their worries makes them more salient. Habituating the youth to externalise their 'locus of control' produces adults who fail at adulthood. ...

   "In the lucrative business of mental health, the commonest side-effect of therapy is … more therapy. Despite the credo of expertise that argues in favour of science and measurable data, the sophistication of therapy has led to more depression and anxiety, with little effort to track long-term results. The recent push for 'climate-focus therapy' (whatever that is) is a 'choice' made by 'experts', Shrier tells us, that validates and reinforces children's terrors.

   "Her insightful interviews outline serious issues in the school setting, where 'therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally'. She shows that exigencies and accommodations on behalf of 'wellness' create a burden for everyone....

   "One of Shrier's most heartbreaking revelations is showing how the system tends to 'take parents hostage'. The principle of safeguarding is turned on its head and, more often than not, 'experts' encourage information to be held back from parents for their children's sake. By attacking the natural and fundamental relationship between parents and offspring, 'bad therapy' emerges as a sort of new bio-power, which encourages intrusive and harmful methods.

   "The influence of tech on the system makes things worse. ... 'Thanks to artificial intelligence,' Shrier writes, 'the rain shower may soon become a flash flood.' AI is increasingly used to gauge the state of children's presumed loneliness and inability to fit in socially. Mental health algorithms judge as suspicious any denial of one's natural state of depression. ...

   "Bad Therapy reads as a call to resist the current belief that abnormality is the new normal." <www.tinyurl.com/2p8jexa9>

   Writing in City Journal, contributing editor Kay Hymowitz cautions that "naysayers will likely object to a paucity of data and experimental research. Shrier has a good answer here: there simply isn't much of either available. Nor is there likely to be. Educators are often secretive, especially when treading in areas that parents have reason to find intrusive. Social scientists struggle to get accurate, measurable information about people's emotional states; it's even harder when those people are minors. A bigger obstacle still is how to study 'therapy,' whose very meaning is hard to pin down." <www.tinyurl.com/4rjbdzez>

   Positive reviews in evangelical media include those by Baptist theologians Denny Burk <www.tinyurl.com/mscc49ta> and Andrew Spencer <www.tinyurl.com/5dyxzjjv>.

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RELIGIOUS CLASSIFICATION

As American culture literally leaves the rails and we disagree with each other more and more, near the root of it all is how common terms suffer from confusion. For example: "spiritual" and "religious." <www.tinyurl.com/mvbkc23k> In "The Smear of 'Christian Nationalism'" (Real Clear Religion, Mar 8 '24), Jerry Newcombe (executive director, Providence Forum, D. James Kennedy Ministries) complains that "Rob Reiner's hitjob movie against the religious right ... makes 'Christian Nationalists' into the bogeyman." (No link or even a movie title is given. Perhaps that's intentional.)

   "The thesis of the movie is that 'Christian Nationalists' are bad and are trying to take over the nation and turn it into something we were never intended to be.

   "Commentator Heidi Przybyla of Politico even told a panel on MSNBC that anyone who believes our rights are derived from God is a 'Christian Nationalist.'

   Newcombe provides needed perspective. "One famous American said, 'God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?'

   "Who was this sneaky American trying to impose Christian Nationalism on an unsuspecting populace? It was Thomas Jefferson. Those words are chiseled in stone at the memorial in Washington, D.C. dedicated to his memory.

   "Another man said that we must remember the beliefs of this nation's founders: 'And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.'

   "Who said that - D. James Kennedy?

   "No, actually, that was John F. Kennedy. That's a quote from his Inaugural Address in 1961. ...

   "'Without God, there could be no American form of Government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first - the most basic - expression of Americanism. Thus the Founding Fathers saw it, and thus, with God's help, it will continue to be.'

   "Who was that? Jerry Falwell? No, that was President Dwight D. Eisenhower."

   Guess what famed American said "what we need so desperately today is a spiritual revival? Here are his own words: 'No greater thing could come to our land today than a revival of the spirit of religion - a revival that would sweep through the homes of the Nation and stir the hearts of men and women of all faiths to a reassertion of their belief in God and their dedication to His will for themselves and for their world.' (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

   Another said "without God's help, a nation will not be blessed."

   In addition, this last famous American said "it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."

   "The very last part of that quote is from Psalm 33. And the speaker's hearers knew that because most of them were Biblically literate, as was he.

   "In this quote, this Christian Nationalist (by the new definition) is saying that a nation is blessed only when it belongs to the God of the Bible."

   This was "President Abraham Lincoln, calling on the nation to fast and pray and ask for God's mercy.

   "The only way the elite class can get away with trying to impose state-sanctioned atheism on a land that was secured on the foundation of God-given rights is when we the people forget that God is indeed the source of our rights, not the government. Or when they become so fearful of a made-up label like 'Christian nationalism' that they go mute in the face of a little name-calling." <www.tinyurl.com/mvuxvk2k> 

   In his foreword to the newly released book <www.tinyurl.com/ykh9h2xv> Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, by Miles Smith, Presbyterian theologian Kevin DeYoung offers this timely clarification and endorsement: "As I write ... public theology (at least on the internet) is dominated by arguments for and against Christian Nationalism. I agree wholeheartedly with Miles [Smith] that historians and ministers would do well to set aside the term, whether one wants to wave Christian Nationalism as a banner or employ it as a bogeyman. The fact is that the term is of recent vintage and that no one agrees what it means. Is Christian Nationalism shorthand for theocracy, Catholic integralism, Trumpist Republicans, church establishments, the necessity of a strong-armed Christian prince, the views of the magisterial Reformers, Christian discipleship, Christian laws, Christian influence, or something else? As Miles points out in the book, it is all too easy for one side to label everything they don't like as Christian Nationalism, and the other side to label everything they do like at Christian Nationalism. Religion and Republic makes a convincing case that Christian Nationalism does not represent the best of the disestablished liberal Protestant tradition as it came to flourish in the American republic."

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