“Just the facts, Ma’am.” In the 1950s, this phrase caught hold in our American vocabulary, inspired by the persona of Sergeant Joe Friday of the TV show, Dragnet. The no-nonsense police investigator reflected a concept (even if he never uttered the exact words that became so well established in pop-culture) embraced by the Modernist worldview.

When a culture increasingly redefines marriage, marriage itself will eventually become meaningless. If marriage can mean anything you want it to, then it actually means nothing. An example of this is a new trend that is emerging in our country: open marriages and polyamory.

In my last article I addressed the reality that many born-again Christians have been thinking and acting too much like the non-Christians around them.  I pointed out particularly the willingness of so many to lie, or misrepresent the facts, when it appeared to benefit them.  Sadly, abandoning truthfulness is not the only similarity between many of God’s people and the world.

This September, Edwardsville H.S. will begin construction on its building to include multi-stall, unisex bathrooms... Doing so will force girls to share bathrooms with boys and vice versa – all in an effort to be more “inclusive” to transgender students. School Board officials decided to move forward with a bathroom remodel after HB 1286 was signed into law by Gov. Pritzker last year.

If there is one thing that our cultural leaders are not very earnest about anymore, it is marriage. There is much ado made about dating and the wedding ceremony itself, but how to succeed in marriage itself is given little attention. Statistics indicate that approximately half of marriages end in divorce. This is more than scandalous, it is destructive to the nation and dreadfully harmful to children, to say nothing about how God vies such things!

It was 1995 and I was hosting an afternoon talk show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A buzz had formed around an announcement that the Pittsburgh mayor had planned to conduct a feasibility study of proposed riverboat gambling on the city's three rivers. This study would generate estimates of how many outsiders would travel to Pittsburgh to gamble.

We are calling your attention to an alarming and pathetic bill that is currently pending in the Illinois General Assembly. We are hoping and praying that there is a strong response in opposition to this totalitarian effort to this outrageous effort to dismantle parental rights in Illinois.

Our ability to protect children from sexual exploitation is declining every day.  The environment has become sexually saturated.  Prime-time programs on broadcast television promote casual sex, even for teens.  Pornography is impossible to avoid short of disconnecting all electronics.  Standards of dress and conduct have become eroticized.  Societal taboos about sexual experimentation have severely eroded, and internal inhibitions have steeply declined.

We are expecting our third child, due to join us in about a month. Life is full, a little stressful, often mundane, and infinitely more purposeful and joyful than it would be without our kids. I’m tired a lot of the time, but that’s a small price to pay in exchange for my daughter’s unbelievable sense of humor, the weight of my son on my chest when he snuggles after his nap, and the rolls and kicks I feel in my abdomen as I write.

Jesus forgave the sinner. He didn’t accommodate the sin. We read about this in John, Chapter 8 — often referred to as the “Woman caught in the act of adultery.” (John 8:2-11) Any of us who have read or heard this story about the adulterous woman should be asking why the Pharisees were not so hot on the idea of dealing with the sin of the adulterous man. And we should clearly see that Jesus is a God of mercy and forgiveness. Does He then excuse adultery? Hardly.

Online sports gambling has been around for a while, but it has really put the pedal to the floor over the last few years. This is partly because the activity enjoys much more legal leeway now than it has in the past. Only just a few years ago, states were forbidden by federal law from operating or sponsoring sports lotteries, but the Supreme Court struck down that law in the case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (2018).

Would you like a government that reflects your Christian beliefs? If so then congratulations, you’re a threat to democracy! Or so says Rob Reiner, who produced a movie meant to alarm you about Christian nationalism, He even tweeted that Christian nationalism is “a danger to Christianity itself.” His message, and his movie, joins an already noisy crowd just dying to tell you that applying Christianity to politics is wrong.

“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound-that saved a wretch like me!  I once was lost but now am found. . . .” These opening words from John Newton’s famous gospel song acknowledge the reality of our lost condition without Jesus Christ.

Every school has to know at least a little bit about the students it is teaching, and every school has to provide at least something of value to its students. But there's a flipside—in pursuit of these goals, schools should not pry into areas of family life beyond their proper purview. While every family will have slightly different standards about what is appropriate for schools to inquire about or provide for their kids, I think that concerned parents and observers of the education system may soon sound the alarm that schools are becoming too intrusive.

In a recent American Reformer article detailing the decay of doctrine among Evangelicals, the point that generated the most attention by far concerned popular pastor Alistair Begg’s counsel from September of last year in which he advised a woman to attend her grandchild’s transgender “wedding.”