The New Calvinism

This article was published in TIME magazine more than 6 years ago, and I am happy that it's still on their archives.

Just in case they take the decision to take it down, I am posting it here, for later reference.
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By David Van BiemaThursday, Mar. 12, 2009

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.

No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.

Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.

So now abortion is safer than childbirth? Safer to whom?

It's not everyday that you read, really stupid things of such magnitude, that you are so appalled that you really wish you could talk to those who were personally involved in such a study as I am going to talk about today.

TIME has published a study that says that abortion is safer than child birth. Yes, you read that right. According to this new study, abortion supposed risks are none existence.

Abortion has a scary reputation, regardless of whether you’re for or against it. But the perception that it’s a high-risk procedure isn’t rooted in truth, according to new research. 

Although more than half of states counsel women on the risks of abortion, a study published online Monday in Obstetrics & Gynecology finds that a legal abortion is actually far safer than giving birth.

From the beginning, you can ask, "safer to whom? Not for the baby of course, who is killed. Does the baby in the womb count for something to this people? What if they were threatened when they were at the womb with death, would they still say the same about abortion being safe?

The research discovered that women are actually 14 times more likely to die during or after delivery than as a result of complications from abortion. “There’s a lot of stigma surrounding abortion,” says Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state policies on reproductive health for the N.Y.-based Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice reproductive health research group. “This study is telling us it’s a lot safer than having a baby.”

There you go, a group that promotes abortion says that abortion  is safe, and even better than giving birth, is not surprising for them to reach such a conclusion. Well, if it is safer to abort than giving birth, then I think they hope for people to abort by hordes, and make them a lot of money along the way. What's a baby for them? Worthless as it seems, seems it doesn't matter if the baby dies during abortion, therefore, it's not safe for the baby.

Twenty-six states have intensive counseling for women who seek abortions. Some of the states distribute materials with questionable information, such as the risk of breast cancer after having an abortion or the negative impact on mental health. 

“The people developing these counseling materials are not really interested in talking about the facts,” says Nash, who wasn’t involved in the study. “They are interested in persuading a woman from getting an abortion in the first place.” 

That said, most of the counseling materials also includes information about the risks of pregnancy, although it can get overshadowed by the emphasis on the dangers of abortion.

Well, I don't know about cancer, but sounds about right. But a woman who performs a lot of abortions, may damage their womb so much, that they end up being unable to hold onto an embryo, therefore, never being able to have a baby. 


The article goes on praising the new figures about abortion, and how better it is to abort than to give birth. I wonder, if everybody opts to abort, within a few years, these people would go broke, since there wouldn't be anybody to abort!!


It is a good thing, that at the end, and with few lines, the study was refuted. But I get the feeling that the article wanted to promote abortion, rather than to report on the new study.

Anti-abortion groups took issue with the study, complaining, as did Paul Wilson of the Culture and Media Institute in a post on LifeNews.com titled “Reuters Pushes Biased Study Claiming Abortion Safer Than Birth,” that the researchers “were either abortion doctors or had strong ties to the abortion industry.” 

Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research and public policy at the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told HealthDay News that she doubted the study’s findings and called them “speculation.”

If the authors of the "study" have strong ties to the abortion industry (yes, it is an industry, they make millions out of killing innocent kids), then such a study is suspect to the most!!


We will have to wait till another, more credible study appears, to see if really it's safer to abort than to give birth.


But then again, even if it would be clinically true, you know that by killing the baby, that position is totally wrong!!