Thaddeus Williams, Author at Refcast

DEI’s “Grape-Nuts problem”

By Thaddeus Williams — 4 weeks ago

DEI delivers the opposite of what it promises. It delivers not diversity but a narrow ideology. It delivers not equity but different advantages and disadvantages based on pre-judged hierarchical group identities. It delivers not inclusion but the systemic coercion and exclusion of those who dare question its methods.

On March 1, the University of Florida made a shockingly countercultural announcement. “The University of Florida” says the administrative memo, “has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”
The announcement brings the University into compliance with Florida Board of Governors rule 9.016, which prohibits expenditures of taxpayer dollars on “’Diversity, Equity or Inclusion’ or ‘DEI’ [which] is any program, campus activity or policy that classifies individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification.”
Over the last decade far more universities and industries have followed the trajectory of University of California at Berkeley, whose DEI staff ballooned from 118 in 2014 to 190 in 2023, with a price tag north of $25 million per year. Under the Biden administration American taxpayers funded $16.3 million for diversity training for federal agencies.
Why should more organizations, academic or otherwise, follow the lead of the University of Florida rather than Berkeley?
Harvard professor Roland Fryer offers a straightforward reason: “Our intuition for how to decrease race and gender disparities in the workplace has failed us for decades. …”
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Satanism on display at the Grammy Awards

By Thaddeus Williams — 1 year ago

Those who use satanic imagery to advertise self-definition through uninhibited sexual assertion may not believe in an actual Satan. They, nevertheless, do his bidding. If we seriously reckon with the hard evidence of destruction, especially to young girls’ bodies and psyches, promoted by entertainers who claim to inspire children, then it is hardly a leap to believe in the existence of some malevolent entity who specializes in deception and destruction.

At the 2023 Grammys, pop icon Madonna took the stage holding a dominatrix riding crop and expressing: “Thanks to all the rebels out there forging a new path.” She then introduced trans artists Sam Smith and Kim Petras as they performed a song entitled “Unholy.”
Many were shocked by the performance, replete with demonic imagery. This was hardly innovative. In 2021, the Lil Naz X released his 666 shoes featuring a pentagram and drop of human blood, and a music video in which he gives Satan a lap-dance. In 2022, Demi Lovato released an album in which she sings that she is “Like a serpent in the garden,” “the fruit that was forbidden/I don’t keep my evil hidden. … I’m the sexorcist.”
Satanic themes have long been a fixture of American music, going back, at least, to legends of Robert Johnson trading his soul to the devil. ACDC released “Highway to Hell” in 1979. Van Halen released “Runnin’ with the Devil” in 1978. The Rolling Stones released “Sympathy for the Devil” in 1968. This is Spinal Tap was hilariously mocking all of this as far back as 1984; As Thomas More observed five centuries ago, “the devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Perhaps, we who recognize Christ’s victory over darkness could do with more mockery and less doomsday forecasting when faced with blatant displays of the demonic. Jesus has already put Satan and his minions to cosmic shame by his work on the cross (Colossians 2:15).
The “Unholy” performance was unique in being the first time that an erotic ritual of devil-worship was targeted at children on a major network during prime time.
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A Nation of Biblical Illiterates

By Thaddeus Williams — 1 year ago

Parents can hardly pass on to the next generation what they lack themselves. How can we expect rising generations to take the Christian worldview seriously when the overwhelming majority of their parents are clueless, shaped far more by cultural trends than Scripture?

The Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University has released its American Worldview Inventory 2022. The results are disconcerting, to put it mildly. Two-thirds of parents of pre-teens in America identify as “Christian,” yet only 2 percent meet a minimal criteria of possessing a Biblical worldview.
The study exposed serious deficits in both homes and pulpits around America. As for the home, lead researcher George Barna notes that “A parent’s primary responsibility is to prepare a child for the life God intends for that child. A crucial element in that nurturing is helping the child develop a Biblical worldview—the filter that causes a person to make their choices in harmony with Biblical teachings and principles.” Yet Millennials, who now make up a majority of today’s parents, have become the generation least likely to ascribe to a Biblical worldview, with a meager 4 percent meeting the basic criteria.
Roughly one-in-four parents of preteens believe in objective moral truth, the personal agency of the Holy Spirit, and that life is sacred. Parents can hardly pass on to the next generation what they lack themselves. How can we expect rising generations to take the Christian worldview seriously when the overwhelming majority of their parents are clueless, shaped far more by cultural trends than Scripture?
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“They Must be Vilified”

By Thaddeus Williams — 1 year ago

By the logic of Kirk and Madsen, bigotry, hate, and phobia are the only possible motives for opposing LGBTQ beliefs and demands. Such vilification is not only a bullying tactic to stigmatize and silence detractors; it also happens to be false. We cannot erase male and female differences without losing something exceedingly beautiful. Marriage cannot become a wife- or husband-optional covenant without losing something precious. Sexual distinctions are a gift from God to be celebrated, not obliterated. Saying so is an act of love. Telling the truth and teaching children the truth about human sexuality, like Mr. Rogers did, is an act of love, and courageous love, in a culture so quick to cancel.

Why have award shows, professional sports, politics, commercials, education, children’s entertainment, and even churches witnessed such a steep rise in messaging that promotes LGBTQ lifestyles in recent years? Even the National Hockey League recently declared on its Twitter feed that “Trans women are women. Trans men are men.” Contrast this with Mr. Rogers singing, “Boys are boys from the beginning. If you were born a boy you stay a boy. Girls are girls right from the start. Only girls can grow up to be mommies. Only boys can grow up to be the daddies.” By the new sexual orthodoxy of our day, Mr. Roger’s basic biology lesson for children would be summarily cancelled as bigotry, phobia, and hate by the very cultural elites who now defend drag queen story hours in children’s education. This radical shift is hardly accidental.
Last month—November 2022—marked the 35th anniversary of one of the most culture-reshaping articles in modern history. In 1987 a neuropsychiatrist named Marshall Kirk and a public relations consultant named Hunter Madsen (under the nom de plume “Erastes Pill”) teamed up to write “The Overhauling of Straight America.” This article would later balloon into the 400-page tome After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. Kirk and Madsen laid out a six-phase strategy that goes a long way toward understanding the mainstream messaging about sexuality of our own day.
First, “talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible.” Why?
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Oldest Lie in the Book: “You Will Be like God”

By Thaddeus Williams — 2 years ago

Listen closely and you can still hear the old serpent’s hiss behind the popular slogans of our day: “Believe in yourselvesss. Follow your heartsss. The answersss are within.” The slogans, like the serpent’s original rhetoric, sound innocuous and even morally good—but their “feel good” vibes just mask their insidious aims to convince you of the oldest lie in the book: that you have the sovereign power to determine meaning and define reality however you like.
Thanks to Carl Trueman’s bestsellers The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Strange New World, Christians are in a far better place to understand this bizarre cultural moment. How did we get to a place where humans with XY chromosomes—otherwise known as males—have risen to dominance in female sports, won acclaim as one of USA Today’s Women of the Year, and been hosted by the Smithsonian to perform interactive drag shows for young children?
Trueman does a stellar job retracing the steps from Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and other thought leaders, through the sexual revolution, and up to our day. His analysis is spot on, so far as it goes. But what if there’s a far more ancient origin to the expressive individualism trending in our day? (Full disclosure: I had an on-air discussion with Trueman suggesting this very thesis, and he heartily agreed.)
Maker’s Knowledge
In Genesis 3 we behold the “Tree of Knowledge.” The serpent tempts humanity’s first couple with a pitch to be “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). We typically use the English word “know” in ways that blur the meaning of Genesis. Allow me to offer a real-life scenario in which our English word “know” comes closer to the ancient Hebrew of Genesis 3.
After college, I lived in a bachelor pad with friends. One of those friends, Dave, was a founding member of a band called Linkin Park. Their debut album, Hybrid Theory, had recently gone multiplatinum. Dave was hard at work with his bandmates crafting their sophomore release, Meteora, which went on to be certified platinum seven times over. He returned from the studio daily and we would listen through the rough concept tracks of what became over 50 songs, only 12 of which survived the final cut.
I had questions. What effect are you using there? What inspired that track? How did you make that part sound so face-meltingly huge? I never once stumped him. Dave knew the songs. He didn’t know them because he’d blasted them on the radio over and over or studied the sheet music bar by bar. He knew them because he made them. Dave knew why the song was that way because he personally chose to make it that way. He had a maker’s knowledge. He had what ancient Jews would have called bachar, the very thing offered by the serpent in Genesis 3.
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Beneath Our Social-Justice Strife: Four Questions for Both Sides

By Thaddeus Williams — 2 years ago

Over the last five years, the topic of social justice has become something of a jackhammer in some churches, reducing congregations to rubble, shaking denominations, even fracturing fellowship between old friends. Online cloisters have formed in which anyone to our left must be a social-justice-warrior snowflake or a neo-Marxist. And, in other cloisters, anyone to our right is probably a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, the exhausted majority feels caught in the crossfire, hoping for some new way forward.

Many social-justice battles have reached a standoff. People are entrenched behind their respective influencers, waiting for them to hurl the next truth bomb at the other side. I’m not going to reenter the wearying fray surrounding critical race theory, systemic racism, white privilege, cultural Marxism, transgenderism, or other hot topics. (I have done so elsewhere.) Yes, there are extremely important conversations to be had, there are highly seductive false doctrines to be resisted, and there is serious biblical thinking to be done on all of those fronts, but I want to get at what I believe to be a bedrock issue underneath those questions.

In John 17, Jesus prays that Christian unity among his people would become a powerful, visible apologetic to the watching world. Sadly, what should be the beautiful tapestry of Christ’s church has been torn asunder by tribalism in many places. Some churches (thankfully not all) look indistinguishable from the broader tattered and battle-bruised culture. Consider, then, a modest proposal for a way through such schism and strife, a proposal we can sum up in three simple words:

Worship God more.

I firmly believe that worship is the issue below the issue, below the issue, below the issue in our social-justice controversies. If we all take a deep breath, and reset our collective gaze on exalting and enjoying God as supreme, what might happen? I am convinced that we will not merely survive this contentious cultural moment, but that we might actually thrive as a more unified people, a properly awestruck people who “truly execute justice” (Jeremiah 7:5).

Justice Is a Worship Issue

“What,” you may ask, “does worship have to do with justice?” To do justice is to give others their due. God is the ultimate Other. It follows that, for the Christian, true justice starts with giving God his due, worshiping the triune, sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe with everything we are.

“To do justice is to give others their due. God is the ultimate Other.”

When Paul explores a gruesome array of injustices in Romans 1, he does not settle for superficial explanations. He goes deep. Why all the “envy, murder, strife, deceit, [and] maliciousness”? Because “they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21). We “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Look deep enough underneath any horizontal human-against-human injustice, and you will always find a vertical human-against-God injustice, a refusal to give the Creator the worship he deserves.

This tragedy plays out in grim detail throughout the Old Testament (and through all of human history after the garden, for that matter). Slavery, murder, rape, child abuse, theft, and other injustices happen when we bow to false gods. Refuse to give the Creator the honor he is due, and we inevitably gorge our worship-appetites on created things. We endow elephants and donkeys with ultimate value that they are not due. As G.K. Chesterton famously said, “Once we abolish God, the government becomes God.” Idolatry — worshiping created things rather than the Creator — is the carcinogenic source of every other injustice.

Pursuing Vertical Justice

If I could poll the people reading this article about what we worship, I assume almost all would happily tick the “God” box. But the heart is deceitful. It would be naive to think that our approaches to justice cannot be sabotaged by our idol-factory hearts. How could we tell if it were so? I have found this fourfold survey of the soul personally helpful, and believe it confronts and draws people to the left and right of the debates over justice. (For the record, I have failed all four, often multiple times in a day.) If we answer honestly and run to the cross of Jesus, the church will be in a better place to pursue true justice in our day.

1. The Imago Test: Are we treating opponents as image-bearers?

When we fail to give God his due, we start treating his image-bearers like abstractions, like foes to be vanquished on a culture-war battlefield, or like soulless exemplars of their identity groups.

Augustine attempted to sum up the entire Christian ethic with the famous line, “Love God and do what you want.” If I treasure God as God, that first affection should recalibrate all of my other affections. I won’t want to swindle, exploit, or oppress you, since you are a living image of the God I love most. Love God, the ultimate Other, and you will show others who bear your Beloved’s image the dignity they are due. Devalue the Original by putting something else in his place, and it’s easier to treat his images like garbage.

Try this quick thought experiment. Picture three people you staunchly disagree with on political and social-justice questions. Now, one by one, think this true thought about them: made in God’s image. Picture their faces. Made in God’s image. One more for good measure. Made in God’s image. Is that the first time you’ve thought of them that way, instead of as a nemesis in a culture war? If so, then we are hardly giving the God who said “Let us make man in our image” his proper due (Genesis 1:26). Lord, forgive us.

2. The Red/Blue Test: Are our minds hyper-politicized?

The more vertically unjust we become, the more obsessively political we become. That’s easy to do these days. The last six years, politics have dropped like a bucket of ink into a bathtub, coloring all of life red or blue. Even spheres that were mostly apolitical are now rife with political quarrels — sports, cartoons, cake-baking, chicken sandwiches, superheroes, plastic straws, bathrooms, even phrases like “beating a dead horse,” “no can do,” and “ladies and gentlemen.”

“The more vertically unjust we become, the more obsessively political we become.”

When everything is politicized, politics clouds our consciousness and erodes our lives. Are we too busy dismantling systems to do the up-close-and-personal justice of chucking a ball around with a son who is due quality time? Do we spend more time in the pointless drama of comment threads than in the great redemptive theo-drama of Scripture? Do we think more about the latest trending political hubbub than about who God has revealed himself to be? Are we more emotionally invested in the triumphs of our red or blue teams than in the advancement of the gospel to every tongue, tribe, and nation? Are we more obsessed with slaying ideological opponents than with the sin in our own hearts?

If so, then we are not giving “the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Timothy 1:17) his proper due. Lord, have mercy.

3. The Justification Test: Are we seeking righteousness apart from Christ?

The more vertically unjust we become, the more we can be caught in a hopeless tailspin of self-justification. Picture the justice-seeker on social media. How might posting daily online outrage become a misguided quest for justification?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown cites psychological research that the kind of moral outrage we typically classify as altruistic “is often a function of self-interest, wielded to assuage feelings of personal culpability for societal harms or reinforce (to the self and others) one’s own status as a Very Good Person.” In short, our justice pursuits can become a false gospel, a way of establishing our righteousness apart from the work of Christ on the cross.

This constant imputation of guilt to others — they are the phobics and fascists; they are the snowflakes and Marxists — offers a subjective sense of goodness, but it is hardly the real thing. Do we find our moral status in Christ and Christ alone, or in our proud positions on “the right side of history”? Are we preaching the gospel to ourselves daily? Are we apathetic about telling others the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection, while ever-zealous to convert others to our justice causes? Then we are not giving the God who is “just and the justifier” of sinners (Romans 3:26) his proper due. Lord, be gracious.

4. The Fruit Test: Is the Spirit less evident in our lives?

The more vertically unjust we become, the more we are fueled by resentment, suspicion, rage, smugness, and assuming the worst of others’ motives. Oh, how easy it is for our hearts to slip back into their fallen default mode when questions of social justice arise. How easy to jump to unflattering conclusions about others.

“I believe we should have sheltered in place.” “So you’re saying you love tyranny!” “I think we should not live life behind masks and locked doors.” “So you’re saying you hate science and want more grandmas to die!” “I believe racism still exists and, as Christians, we should do something about it.” “So you’re saying you’re into critical race theory and pushing cultural Marxism!” “I don’t think racism is the best explanation for this particular disparity.” “So you don’t think racism exists or that we should do anything about it.”

Painting others in the most damnable and cartoonish light is no small matter. It is sin. It violates God’s second greatest commandment to love others as ourselves (Matthew 22:39). It also breaks the divine bans on slander and bearing false witness.

Let us ask honestly: What is our quest for justice doing to our hearts? Is it making us more distrustful, easily offended, and quicker to slander? Is it stripping our souls of the Spirit’s fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control? If so, then we are not giving the God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34:6) his proper due. Lord, change our hearts.

Upward Together

Deep down, we all long for something more beautiful and hopeful than the grisly ideological battlefields of our day. Which way do we look? Alexander Solzhenitsyn closed his famous Harvard speech (appropriately titled “A World Split Apart”) with a good answer to that question:

No one on earth has any other way left but upward.

Indeed, in all the sideways social-justice drama, let’s take a breather and look upward together. Let’s recalibrate our hearts. Crack open our hymnals. Get together across our differences. Break bread. Read the word. Enjoy God together. Relish his goodness out loud and face-to-face. In the words of Deuteronomy 32:3–4, let’s join the Israelites of old:

I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God!The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice.