News-Record.com

"The player who chose not to attend church with the rest of the team is in good standing and continues to be a starter. Bowden didn't mention his absence to the team, and it hasn't been an issue."

Well, this was my primary concern regarding Coach Bowden's attitude about religion. If he was using it as a tool to discriminate against those who didn't follow his religious lead, then I'd see it as a problem. But he appears to be handling his religion in a secular manner, which should be fine. I always did the same when I was a believer, and I always thought it made the most sense, from the perspective of the Golden Rule.

Yet, if a classroom public university professor brings up his/her own poltical views regularly, or instituted a "political rally day" at an anti-Bush event every semester, they'd be fired, or at least reprimanded, and rightly so.

It happens all the time in our left-wing universities. They are expected to slant things to the left, and do, regularly. There have been numerous reports over the years of students being oppressed because of thier traditional, conservative views. This is common knowledge.

But it is also common knowledge that no individual can be totally objective. If one has an ardently held worldview, it will surely inform every aspect of one's life expression. Bowden is only one example. The biblical Christian worldview is total and comprehensive. Islam's Sharia is thier worldview in practice. Christianity is supposed to be likewise all-embracing. God's Law/Word informs every aspect of human existence, either specifially, or in principle. A culture that has multiple worldviews is a culture fractured and paralysed.

(continued) Christian America and Victorian England, for all their predictable human flaws, were built on the Christian worldview and were vibrant and brilliant cultures – focused and unified. (I am not speaking here of colonialism or warfare, but of the normal everyday life of the people – and I do not claim these cultural expressions were mature or perfect; but they WERE vigorous and great)

A culture that has multiple, competing worldviews is a culture fractured and paralyzed. Our increasingly multi-whatever culture is more and more filled with conflict and indecision because of its intellectual, ethnic and racial divides. This saps our financial, emotional and intellectual capital and causes us to be halting and equivocating regarding our national interests and security.

Islam knows that a culture cannot remain fragmented and confused forever; and so, in the wake of a pietistic and individualistic Christianity and a bankrupt humanism, they are positioning themselves to eventually make America an Islamic republic. There is an obvious void and they are chafing at the bit to fill it. Europe is already well underway in their grand design.

Christianity is losing the cultural battle up to this point because it has been theologically neutered (to put it politely) by liberalism, postmodernism and emotionalism. It is time for Christians to stand firmly for the Faith and to live it out boldly and confidently – which, I believe, has already begun to emerge in a nascent, but vigorous form. This is the clear NT pattern. But it must not involve coercive or oppressive tactics; but rather a clear and cogent presentation of the Gospel and the Law/Word of God in the public forum; in which we have as much right as anyone else to participate – till now at least.