The One

There’s one who keeps my heart attune
Celestial lyres above,
And lulls my soul to paradise
Where life and all is love.

Whose every thought, a precious jewel
Inlaid in hours of gold,
That shine with glorious spectral rays
When nights are dark and cold.

It’s to this one, I give my love
Which ne’er can be expressed,
By words, or tones, or earthly means
Although I do my best.

Many years later—and with handwriting far less fluid than before—he finished the poem on the next page.

2/14/1967

How time has flown since first I wrote
Of love to you, dear wife,
We’ve lived for years mid toil and tears
And ups and downs of life.

God blessed our home with children dear
And love enough to give,
As each one magnifies your traits
And each for others live.

It’s for you dear I give my thanks
Which I cannot convey
To God for you dear wife of mine,
In little words I say.

That’s right, that wasn’t a typo. I called the group of student protesters, news media, and upset donors a chorus of moralists, and I meant it. Take a step out of the emotion of the situation, and you’ll begin to notice something. This entire brouhaha consists of one group of people insisting that their moral standard is better than the university’s moral standard. Take, for example, this protest sign that made it into an ill-conceived op/ed in Sports Illustrated’s online edition.

The sign says, “Jesus loves Coach Howe.” I can’t imagine the university would disagree with this sentiment. I also don’t think this is what the sign actually means to say. The message, given that it’s authored and held by a protestor, is most likely that Jesus wouldn’t have held Coach Howe to the same standard as Belmont. It’s an obvious implication that Jesus would apply this student’s standard to Howe instead, whatever moral standard that student may have.

This morning in the Tennessean, I was grieved to see one of Belmont’s longtime donors, Mike Curb, send out a call for Belmont to change.

“Belmont has to decide whether they want to be a national recognized university — particularly with their school of music business — or they want to be a church,” he said.

Curb is asking Belmont to make a choice about what is more important: fame, glory and recognition or a university unwavering in its pursuit of the Truth. His condescension makes it clear on which side Curb wants Belmont to fall.

Like I said earlier, take a step back—beyond the appeals to one morality’s superiority over another—and examine what’s happening here:

On Sunday, Belmont University’s chairman of the board of trustees told the Tennessean, “We expect people to commit themselves to high moral and ethical standards within a Christian context. That includes members of the board, faculty and administration.” This should be no surprise to anyone with a modicum of familiarity with Belmont, employees certainly being no exception. In fact, to make clear the expectations Belmont has for its board, faculty and administration, each must sign a statement outlining the ethical expectations. Belmont University intends to be a private Christian university with an unwavering position on faith and morality; whether or not you agree with Belmont’s particular beliefs, one cannot argue that it doesn’t erode such an institution’s objective to have people in positions of authority flagrantly opposing its beliefs.

On the other side, people are upset. (And let me take a moment to address the “you can’t fire someone for no good reason” argument: Tennessee is not only an employment-at-will state, but Belmont is a private, religious institution.) There are a variety of reasons given, but when the layers of umbrage are peeled back, we find the protestors saying something they would never articulate: Our moral standard is better than yours. They could never articulate it because, ironically, their moral standard forces a sort of cognitive dissonance that tells them, No one belief is more righteous than another, and that’s really the only right way to think about such things.

So if you disagree with Belmont’s decision, ask yourself this: what’s my moral standard here and why does it trump Belmont’s moral standard?

How does one find truth? What is truth? How can you define truth? What makes it “truth”? Thoughts…

Before we get to that, answer for yourself this question and remember it for the end: Is rape wrong? If you think it is, why?

So, she asked the tweeted question after a difficult conversation with a friend of hers. This fella has been asking God for 15 years to show him He’s real. Twitter is a horrible medium for the kind of conversation that must follow a question like this, though another friend and I quickly engaged her with as much pith as we could squeeze into 140 characters. Conversation advanced a bit as I referred to God as the anchor point of truth, a sentiment echoed by our mutual friend John.

If we mean that truth is something objective, then it must come from an objective source. Only God can be that.

Trying to put herself in the shoes of her own friend on whose behalf she’d posed the original question, Annie asked:

But can’t matter be objective, also? Isn’t the universe objective? Why does it have to point to God?

So yes, this conversation needs to be had, but Twitter will not do.

It’s a fair question, the original one about truth. But once asked, I think it must be honestly pursued. To ask such a bold metaphysical question, one must be willing to follow it wholeheartedly to its end. Our culture has a bad habit—with my peer group exhibiting the worst of it—of asking bold, deep philosophical questions and either accepting self-pleasing, shallow answers or feeling that it’s an academically praiseworthy thing to be always asking but never finding an answer. To address the latter of the proclivities, it’s simply worthless to pursue the truth of a matter if you’re unwilling to accept that truth when it presents itself… unless truth is an ever-changing, relative thing. And that brings us to the problem about which my friend is concerned.

For an extended dive into this answer, I can recommend nothing better than Francis Shaeffer’s He is There and He is Not Silent. Schaeffer comes at it as a former Atheist, and from a purely philosophical angle, he explains why God must exist and why He must be a multi-personal God. It’s the knowledge of a personal, triune God that caused everything to click for Schaeffer, and this book has been instrumental in pushing me to think about God with a philosophical perspective.

He begins with a profound statement by 20th century French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.” This gets at the thing we’re talking about here, and it’s something I poorly attempted to convey to Annie. Man is finite, so man is not, as Schaeffer puts it, “a sufficient integration point for himself.” What he means is that we must draw our meaningful existence from something more, something infinitely better. This is why, though it may not seem so on its face, Atheism or even merely a “all we are is just smart animals” way of thinking is so fatalistic. Honestly, if not for God, what’s the point? We would have no purpose, no meaning at all. (Of course, we would not even be here if not for God; I’m just making a point.)

Sartre, an Atheist through and through, is not alone in recognizing that finite points by themselves are not enough. Plato also understood, as related by Schaeffer, “that you have to have absolutes, or nothing has meaning.” So in response to Annie’s question about whether that objective thing has to be God… it only makes sense that there is one absolute, and He is God. Matter cannot be the reference point for truth because it is not objective; it is not independent. It is in the created order, and existential dependence is one of the grand conditions that delineates God from everything else. (I would also be interested in hearing more specifically what Annie, or perhaps the friend she was talking to, meant by, “Can’t matter be objective, also?” In terms of how truth is defined, what did she mean here?)

As an aside, I think a big reason we see so much concern over truth, creation, etc., is this: if we accept this personal, infinite God’s existence, we’ve gotta start playing by His rules and taking what he says for reality. But if we’re going to deny Him, then there are a lot of things in philosophy and science that have to shift to accommodate our denial as science itself contradicts those very notions. Take, for example, evolution free of an intelligent designer. It’s been argued hundreds of ways, but macro evolution without a designer simply violates the second law of thermodynamics. Thus the conflicts. Anyway…

To put another layer on the argument, we can look at truth specifically. The objective nature of truth is real, and it’s something we all sort of get. It’s the kind of thing common to all mankind. We’re born with it; nobody needs to explain it to us. Another famous former Atheist begins his own—and thankfully far more accessible—book on Christianity with a look at moral values and truth. C. S. Lewis opens Mere Christianity presenting us with something with which we’re all familiar: quarreling.

‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—’Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’—’Why should you shove in first?’ … People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of a standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.

If they didn’t have some kind of real standard to which they could appeal, Lewis concludes, they might indeed fight like animals. But humans don’t do that; instead, we quarrel.

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.

Philosopher William Lane Craig calls this concept objective moral values, and argues that God exists because objective moral values exist, tying a direct link between God and the existence of objective moral values.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really recommend watching the whole thing, as I can’t get across in a blog post (that you’ll read anyway) all the good stuff in that 4 minute video clip. Toward the end of the clip, raises the question about rape. Things like rape, cruelty, and child abuse are wrong, and we all know it. But why? If you appeal to Right and Wrong, what’s your standard? And if your standard is relative to something like social mores, is it really wrong or just taboo?

Now while C. S. Lewis is laying the foundation for his first chapter’s thesis by exposing how we nearly always appeal to a standard in our quarreling with each other, Craig is using our general agreement that truth is objective as the basis to prove God’s existence. As both men’s arguments continue, those arguments each would require the thinker to reject the objective nature of truth in order to reject the existence of God. I can’t honestly do that.

From Lewis, the ultimate appeal to real Right and Wrong:

[T]hey thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

[Edit: I've updated this post to provide some clarity. Where I had previously written "objective truth," I have replaced it with something akin to "the objective nature of truth."]

The true Gospel is a unique, life-altering thing. It is not merely some philosophical angle to which a person might direct his attention for a time. Not at all a high moral standard to which we must strive for redemption; this is just a new, impossible law. No, the Gospel is the truth of a doomed humanity, a God who requires perfection, and the reconciliation of two such disparate conditions that this very perfection-requiring God Himself has given each of us. (I have only far too recently realized that the often used analogy of a drowning man is woefully insufficient here. We are not merely drowning. We are not each a man adrift to whom a life preserver must be thrown. In this imperfect analogy, it is much more like we are cold and dead on the sea floor, requiring something extraordinary enough to both retrieve us and bring us to life.) The “good news” of the Gospel is that God has come into time and space to take upon Himself, in our stead, the punishment that His very nature requires of us, justifying us in His presence.

What we see in the Gospel presented is the truth of God revealed, a man’s acceptance in faith of that now startlingly undeniable truth, and Christ’s free justification of that man. What follows is God’s transformative work of remaking that man with new desires, a new purpose, and a new mind. Can a person accept the Gospel and be left unchanged? I do not think this is possible. It is only since Christ yanked me from my depravity that I have experienced the inner struggle of desires and behavior that Paul refers to in Romans 7. I have never, since my conversion, not believed the Gospel; I have just spent my most painful hours actively ignoring it and wishing it weren’t so.

The self-contradictory statement came to my mind this morning during Ray’s sermon, and it struck me as pretty indicative of the moral and intellectual relativism that’s become all too acceptable in the public square.

The comment I received from @dtmmedia on the post I wrote on Food, Inc. also came to mind, specifically that he didn’t seem all too concerned about the truth in what the filmmakers said as long as they were persuasive enough to get people to really buy into the film’s message. But if we’re looking for “the good” in things, that’s certainly not it. It’s certainly not the morally virtuous thing either, as we saw this morning in Proverbs:

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord. – Proverbs 12:22

Proverbs even has some harsh words for the person who allows himself to be taken in by such deceit because he is not a discerning listener.

An evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives ear to a mischievous tongue. – Proverbs 17:4

Words matter a great deal, and what we mean to communicate by them matters a great deal as well. We should never let ourselves think that we can determine truth in an untruthful way.

With his recurrent posts concerning bumper stickers on my mind, I finally remembered to look up a bumper sticker that I’d often seen around Nashville but never understood. It’s simple white on black with the lowercase letters “igbok.”

If you get close enough to the car in front of you, you can make out the smaller text: “it’s gonna be o.k.” I had always wondered what this meant, and to be honest, I took an immediately cyncical approach to the phrase. It’s gonna be o.k., eh? How on earth could you know that? Seems rather pollyanna if you ask me.

Anyway, I finally remembered to look up the meaning of this bumper sticker while reading Dave’s latest post on bumper stickers, and the meaning honestly floored me. According to the website, the creators chose this specific language because they believe it’s the universal language of hope. It’s the kind of thing you need to hear from a dear friend when tragedy hits your life. It’s comforting without getting into unnecessary specifics. And it’s true.

It’s true because everything works out in the end in this world, and it’s not just happenstance in this case that the phrase on the bumper sticker points to truth. It’s intentional on the part of the creators.

What if God — the creator, sustainer and redeemer of creation — made this promise? What if He shouted and whispered “igbok” from Genesis to Revelation? He’s the only one who could make this promise — and keep it. If He did, then we have reason to hope.

We think He did.

God’s “o.k.” doesn’t mean that the cancer will be healed, the relationship fully restored, the physical pain or emotional ache will go away in this life. It means that because He has entered and overcome our brokenness…we can live this life with real hope — a hope that knows one day everything will be set right forever in the life to come.

They nailed it, and it gives me chills every time I read it. This bumper sticker is one of the few substantial things I’ve seen spread rapidly in pop culture that’s backed by truth. The irony is that this bumper sticker’s genius lies in what frustrates me—and presumably Dave—about most bumper stickers: its succinctness. Most bumper stickers, aside from the snarky ones, shout something intentionally controversial without the space available to explain it. But this bumper sticker doesn’t need the space because it doesn’t need to explain it. Just as the comforting pastor or friend doesn’t need to launch into a theological discourse on redemption in order to provide comfort, neither does this bumper sticker. And while it can never replace the comforting nature of a friend, it can provide thought-provoking comfort and the opportunity to springboard a conversation on where this world is going and what this whole chaotic life is all about. It points to the truth, and that’s the most important thing.

Earlier today, a friend announced that she might become a vegetarian, a comment which was immediately followed by her asking, “Have you guys seen Food, Inc.?” I took exception to the idea that anyone could watch an even-handed documentary on a subject so typically characterized by passionate activism and actually make an informed decision about a lifestyle change. Such films follow the same tired formula: show scary images, throw frightening statistics at the viewer, include the grieving loved-ones of a person tragically affected by the target of the film, and reinforce the message that the filmmakers are underdogs and on the side of the Average Joe. Even documentaries on the History Channel have been known to spice up the facts a bit, so my approach to the evidence presented by theatrically-released documentaries has always been one of extreme skepticism. In the discussion with my friend, I admitted that while I’ve read several scathing reviews of the film, I had yet to see it myself. So having given my thoughts on the general nature of feature-film documentaries, I figured it only right that I give the filmmakers 93 minutes of my time. After all, it was available for instant streaming on Netflix.

I found it rather ironic that the film opens with a critique of the marketing imagery used to sell food in modern America: namely, that picturesque scenes of the classic American farm are supposed to assure the buyer that everything from butter to cereal is “farm fresh.” A fair critique, no doubt, yet one that is effortlessly pointed right back at the filmmakers. Their use of scary imagery, unnerving words, and alarming statistics to shock the viewer into accepting their truth claims is hardly morally superior. Crowds at a film festival might stand a cheer for the validation of their existing beliefs, but this sort of shoddy research wouldn’t stand a chance in the peer-reviewed world.

A favorite go-to in the film is to talk of the “multi-national corporations” and their “world deliberately hidden from us.” It’s great propaganda. To someone approaching the film uncritically, it sounds very horrible and foreboding. Yet it is never explained why a multi-national corporation in itself is a bad thing: the filmmakers are merely relying on the viewer’s existing social bias against it, developed after years of hearing charges against multi-nationals in the news and from other social activists. “The Industry” is time and again railed in the film for… giving people jobs? Yes, the fact that people in the US are not forced to work a particular job and are instead voluntarily working for these corporations seems to escape the filmmakers. If people are working a particular job, it’s because that’s the best one they can find. Is everything perfect? I’m sure it’s not. But without these corporations, the jobs just wouldn’t be there at all. But that’s beside the point; this is yet another place where this film delves into the irrelevant and wastes my time.

I will be the first one to invite people to seek truth and understanding in everything, to lift the veil. The American public is grossly ignorant of the entire farming and slaughter process, and the film’s director, Robert Kenner, knows it. This film does not invite the viewer to peek behind the curtain in context, realizing how little they know about the production life of most of the products they buy and use every day. Instead, Food, Inc. simply lifts the veil in front of the viewer, promising to show the truth when it is actually revealing a carefully coordinated sideshow horror, meant to get the viewer to accept the filmmakers’ truth claims on an emotional basis rather than to arrive at them as the result of proper academic pursuit. My friend’s words regarding what she saw perfectly express the sort of decision-making in which the filmmakers hope you’ll engage: “They’re so mean!”

(Before we continue further, can we all agree to put aside arguments stemming from the video clips of animals being abused? It’s heartbreaking, I know, but that’s the very reason they’re included: to elicit an emotional response. The fact that the videos exist does not prove that such practice is commonplace. Hog farmers, chicken farmers, and cattle farmers simply do not go into the business because they hate their animals, and the profit motive alone strongly suggests that these are extremely rare instances, something to be minimized and eliminated. It provides a beef producer no benefit to have its cows abused.)

Scene after scene of industrialized slaughterhouses and meat-packing facilities are shown along with the narrator’s condemnations, but does the viewer recognize that producing using such economies of scale has led to the greatest decrease in world hunger? That’s right, it was those evil multi-nationals, not a concert benefit or donation drive, that has done the most good for the greatest number of people. These video clips are, again, shown to suggest that the cold, faceless corporations are bad, bad people.

Insinuations abound with constant references to the farmers’ desire to make money, leaving the implication open-ended. Isn’t it obvious? Whatever they’re doing must be evil! But the film fails to provide any evidence that the use of hormones in animals (much like the use of pesticides in farming crops) results in a negative impact on humans. Activists have tried for years to draw a link, and the best they can come up with are proclamations that the powerful farming industry doesn’t want us to know the truth. Meh. Not very convincing.

Also not very convincing? Carole Morrison, the former Purdue chicken farmer who was dropped by the company due to her farm lacking proper modernization. So when she trudges through her own chicken houses complaining about the filth and the crowding, it’s hard to draw a conclusion other than that she’s a pretty lousy chicken farmer. If she’s concerned about the conditions of the chicken houses, maybe she should clean them up herself.

I find it hard to accept the statistic thrown on the screen following Morrison’s story: the typical chicken farmer borrows over $500,000 and only earns $18,000 per year. If that’s true, the typical chicken farmer is beyond moronic and could easily fare better in a much less labor-intensive job, but I suspect there’s something else to those stats they’re not telling us. (My girlfriend, whose uncle is a chicken farmer, scoffed at this figure.) Regardless, the message is clear: the big chicken companies are ambivalent toward their customers and corrupt in their dealings with chicken farmers.

I don’t expect movies to be factual. I generally expect them to be entertaining, and that usually involves weaving a creative storyline. But when a film comes along claiming to be important and informational, with an investigative reporter as one of the primary interviewees, it had well better pursue truth rather than facts to fit a narrative. But who wants to let facts get in the way of a good, powerful story, right?

Now think about the film in a different (enlightened, if you will) context: proponents of the organic food movement are having a hard-time selling their idea based on the results and would rather you not focus on the incredible contributions to human existence that farming technology has made in recent years. As Blake Hurst, a farmer for over 30 years, writes in The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals:

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase.

In addition to painting a pleasant picture of organic farming, they also attack the more modern methods. Reality check: the move to go organic, if fully successful, would send us back to the agrarian age. Organic farming crop yields are far too low, and would only be able to feed a fraction of the population fed by modern farming techniques. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Delimma and interviewee in the film, even admits that modern farming has allowed corn growers to produce 200 bushels per acre where a farmer could only grow a tenth of that a century ago. Would proponents of organic farming really condemn us back to a world of such low output? If they’re concerned at all about protecting natural resources, they should be promoting efficiency with cropland. In the article I Don’t Care Where My Food Comes From, Ronald Bailey points out that “organic production typically yields a third less food than other means. That means that more land is being plowed down, leaving less for forests and other wildlands.”

(Incidentally, the Vice President of the American Corn Growers Association, Troy Roush, rightly notes in the film that the vast expansion in corn crops is largely due to Government subsidies which allows growers to produce below the cost of production, but wrongly blames such policy on the shadowy “large multi-national interests.” There they are again, the Food, Inc. boogeymen! Ironically, such Government policy has far more to do with environmentalists’ push for gasoline alternatives and politicians’ desire to appear like they’re doing something to save the planet. When the corporations’ lobbyists cozy up with closely aligning interests and ready-made legislation, it just makes the politicians’ job that much easier. The result: corn subsidies to produce ethanol, who cares what happens to the rainforests!)

And again, there is just no evidence to the claims that these modern farming techniques do harm to the environment or humans. In fact, Hurst points out that he has a much lower environmental impact now by using herbicides and engaging in no-till farming.

Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. … Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.

“We’re entitled to know about our food. Who owns it, how are they making it, and can I have a look in the kitchen?” says Pollan. Yet do buyers of organic foods know any better where their foods come from than me? Or is it a nice psychic salve to heal the guilt brought on by prolonged exposure to agenda-driven films like Food, Inc.? Bailey notes that it’s precisely the fact that we don’t have to be concerned with the full production life of every good we purchase that has given rise to so much prosperity for everyone in the West.

One of the great glories of modern life is the enormous elaboration of the division of labor and how the efficiencies gained from that division makes people much wealthier than they could otherwise be. Since we all don’t have to stitch our own clothes, bake our own bread, compound our own medicines, or even cook our own meals, we are all much better off.

The film is pretty slick with most of its statistics. One example is about 26 minutes in when Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation states, “There’s always been food poisoning. As more and more technology is being applied to the production of food, you’d think it would be getting safer, not more contaminated. But the processing plants have gotten bigger and bigger… it’s just perfect for taking bad pathogens and spreading them far and wide.” [Cue ominous news stories played on ratings-starved 24-hour news channels.] Notice the red-herring? If the food supply was truly becoming less safe, he would have some statistics on it and would have said so explicitly. Instead, he narrated over video of industrialized factories while he assured us that such factories could potentially spread bad pathogens (as opposed to good pathogens, I suppose).

The reality of the situation is far, far better, as Bailey notes:

Food today is cheap, nutritious, and safe. The last century has seen a vast improvement in food quality and safety. In millennia past, food and water were the chief sources of many deadly diseases. Consider that as recently as 1933-35, a U.S Public Health Service survey found that 5,458 children between the ages of 1 and 15 died from diarrhea and enteritis, most caused by food-borne pathogens. By contrast, a recent survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that just 29 Americans died of food-borne illnesses between 1993 and 1997. Meanwhile, stomach cancer rates are down by 75 percent since 1950 because old-fashioned food preservation techniques like salting, pickling, and smoking have been replaced by refrigeration.

Hurst, the farmer, notes that organic proponents often leave the consumer out of the equation entirely or imply that consumers’ pocketbooks are resilient to an increase in food prices.

If you think [consumers] don’t [benefit from cheap food], just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices.

He goes on to make clear the point that these intellectuals banging the drum for humane animal farms seem to be woefully ignorant as to why the animals are treated the way they are. Rather than learn from someone who has been doing it his whole life, these “agri-intellectuals” saw something that offended their naive sensibilities and launched several campaigns against it.

I’m still proud of my win in the Atchison County Carcass competition of 1969, as it is the only trophy I have ever received. We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I’ve seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.

In another example of intentional misleading, Food, Inc. tries to tie Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to Monsanto, a big, evil multi-national vilified in the film. Several things they failed to mention, though, that drastically neuter the charge that his decision was the result of his association with Monsanto:

1. Justice Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 70′s, many years before they entered the biotech or seed business.
2. Thomas was part of a 6-2 decision which upheld decisions by the appeals court and lower courts.
3. There is no evidence that Thomas had any financial holdings in Monsanto when he wrote the majority opinion or since.
4. And finally, Monsanto wasn’t even a party in the court case mentioned.

When a film is so willing to play fast and loose with the facts, you’d better take a more skeptical approach.

Another great irony in the film is that after spending almost 40 minutes railing against the competition, additives, and farming techniques that put downward pressure on prices, the film profiles a Latino family struggling to make it on the few dollars they earn. The film shows them getting a full meal thanks to Burger King’s dollar menu compared to the family actively budgeting at the local market. I’m honestly not sure what they’re trying to show here. That forcing the country (through Government controls) to move to far less efficient organic farming techniques would somehow not push prices up beyond the family’s reach? The filmmakers’ logical leap staggers the imagination.

Aside from the strange, wandering, and all too frequent personal stories, the film relies far too much on the naivety and sympathy of the American public in an attempt to garner support for lobbying efforts to increase regulation. (I would obviously argue that the film itself proves the ineffective nature of regulation, but those with faith in government somehow always seem to see the same evidence as proof of the need for more Government programs and regulation.) My heart goes out to the woman who lost her son to E. coli, but detailed descriptions of their struggle with him in the hospital and him begging for water were wholly unnecessary, assuming this whole film was supposed to be an honest presentation. But then again, this wasn’t trying very hard to be a reasoned debate on the safety and health of the food supply. (Wait, was that even what it was trying to be? Rather, it seemed to be a shotgun approach using every conceivable tactic to get the viewer to forgo standard meat and grains in favor of organic. I think.)

“We put faith in our Government to protect us,” the mother declares, upset that her faith has been shown hollow. That’s a huge problem. Government simply cannot take care of us in the way we’ve come to expect it. It cannot be a good mother. It can only be a heavy-handed, tyrannical nanny. But faith in this whole belief system, not just in Government, seems to under gird this entire organic movement. At least Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, admits that he’s part of a movement preaching a new religion of sorts.

I can find an anecdote to make any point I wish to make, so heartbreaking though the mother’s story is, it doesn’t successfully argue that everyone in America should endure stricter regulations (which lead to decreasing quality, increasing price, creating monopolies). I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, but it’s not an outbreak when one or two people get E. coli. “Outbreak” is yet another charged word that’s being used to push an agenda, and words fail to have meaning when they’re used so arbitrarily. (Epidemic was also used to describe obesity in the film– another misuse that is sadly becoming commonplace. Not only is our method of measuring obesity in this country still relying on a horribly inaccurate index based on the stats of 5,000 Scottish soldiers measured over 150 years ago by a politically enterprising Belgian sociologist, but an epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease within a community at a particular time. When our system of measure declares Brad Pitt overweight and George Clooney obese, I dare say the “obesity epidemic” is no epidemic at all.)

It should be no secret that the makers of Food, Inc. are fierce environmentalists who see our method of food production as contributing heavily to global warming, and though they readily admit several times in the film that technological advances over the last 100 years have allowed us to be more efficient with farmland and feed more people with less energy, the cognitive dissonance is apparently not a problem. They still find the solution in returning to an agrarian age. Such a theory wanting greatly for evidence, however, the filmmakers resort to shock-value tactics like showing videos of animal slaughter to an audience ill-equipped to properly judge the content.

Amidst the strange contradictory philosophies this film conveyed (including the surprising implicit appeal to Capitalism right before the credits rolled) the one resounding message I did receive from the film was this: lobby the Government for more regulation and move the entire food industry to organic. Yet the inability for a small group of elites at the top to properly command an economy, especially one as large as the US, is still knowledge yet to reach the ears of such environmentalists. Can they not see how fraud and collusion are built into the regulatory system? The problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right regulators! The redemption of this world, however, will not come because a few (or many) activists convince those in office to force the mighty and uncaring hand of Government upon the rest of us.

I’m rather disappointed that anyone could be swayed by this film. I was expecting to engage in some heavy fact-based debunking, but the vast majority of the arguments made in the film are appeals to emotion. The film drags, too, and I’m left wanting a central thesis. As best as I can tell, the film would better be separated into 4 or 5 very short films, though I can’t promise I could bear to watch them all.

In the end, the problem with this film and other misdirected calls to action is this: it gives people false assurance, empowers them with emptiness, and calls them to place their hope in something so fleeting, if even good. Our hope cannot be in the things of this world. We’re should not only be good stewards of this world, but wise in our dealings. Is it really wise to take information presented in a hyped documentary at face value?

So what do you think? Have you seen the film or read similar books, and what’s your opinion? Have you decided to go organic and/or buy local? Have you learned how to be more discerning in not only the products you buy but in the information you digest?

Resources:

• The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals
• I Don’t Care Where My Food Comes From
• The Clean Energy Scam

Back in 2004, I started writing on Blogger. Like most college kids, it initially performed as the repository for all the things about which I felt compelled to write (which was far too many). As I continued to write, though, I noticed that some of my work was being picked up and spread around. My website was getting some heavy traffic to a few very popular posts. I started to realize that my posts, thoughtfully crafted, could have a real, positive effect.

In more recent years I’ve become far more intentional in my writing. Still, there wasn’t a cohesive theme to the blog. The topics seemed to revolve more around current events in the news and my own life rather than matters with a greater lifespan. Any attempt to form a central theme was compounded by the baggage my long-running blog carried with it. It was time for a clean break.

I took some time away from writing to pare down a responsibility-laden schedule. I was trying to do too much. I wanted to be involved in every good thing that came along, but soon it was controlling me. It was time to slough off the demands of the volunteer positions. And after all, I’d much rather be great at a few things than lousy at (and attempting to engage in) everything. I wasn’t even reading anymore, and like time away from the gym, I could feel its effects in my whole life.

During my time off, I kept mulling over what this new blog would be called. Not only did I need to set up a new WordPress installation (with 3.0 arriving on the scene during my sabbatical), but I would need to choose a domain name to go with it. Plans of a blog network for liberty-minded writers were scrapped in favor of less heartburn, and with it went the domain name that I’d registered only months earlier. There was a lot of work to be done to get it to this point.

And now Pursuit of Redemption is the new blog’s name. It’s an allusion to not only to my own life—and the struggle I experience daily—but every Christian’s duty for this world. We are not merely to live idly in it. We are to strive daily for the redemption of this world through the salvific work of Christ on the cross. Yet it is not us, but Christ in us! (Can you even comprehend that?) How that should play out in our individual and corporate lives flips our milquetoast idea of Christianity on its head.

It doesn’t mean being good enough. It doesn’t mean connecting with your inner self. It doesn’t mean being part of the right, socially conscious political group, and it doesn’t mean properly demanding this country revert to “the good ole days.” It means intentionally living out the Gospel in every aspect of our daily lives: in our workplaces, our churches, our cities, our states, our political and activist groups, and our country. It means to love this world as Christ loved it—enough to die for it—and to seek its redemption. It’s a tall order.

I’m not sure what every post will bring. And while the name will imply a certain thread of redemption throughout, I can’t even promise a central thesis. Blogs must be somewhat disjointed by their very nature, and this blog is, in part, an exercise in my own understanding of the pursuit in which we are engaged. I can promise you this: each post will be written with the intent to be just as noteworthy in one year’s time. What I write here will not become mired in the day-to-day. It will not merely become a regurgitation of the news alongside my own commentary. I can’t imagine you have much need for that sort of bloviation.

Forgive me where I err, but do not hesitate to challenge me when it is required. Please contribute to the discussion. And join me in the battle to uphold truth in this world.