Even the Washington Post was shocked; its editors said Clinton’s comments were “misguided.” But now it seems that Clinton was only stating what was to be official Obama administration policy.

We saw this same attitude last month when Barack Obama declined to meet with the Dali Lama. The snub was an apparent effort to curry favor with Chinese leaders—leaders who deny religious liberty and human rights, not only to their own citizens, but also to Tibetans.

Obama’s refusal to meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader reminded me of when President Ford wrongly refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the heroic Russian dissident.

Obama and his aides have also reportedly refused to meet with a representative of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

And now we learn that the President has been quietly cutting off aid to groups that monitor human rights abuses and fight on behalf of human freedom—especially in Iran.

In the Wall Street Journal, David Feith and Bar Weiss write that the administration has eliminated millions of dollars in funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Freedom House, and the State Department’s Iran Democracy Fund.

These actions go against everything America stands for. Our worldview is largely informed by our Christian heritage—one that puts human dignity first. Has this administration forgotten that human rights have always been America’s greatest export?

We believe that all humans are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, as our Declaration of Independence says. We can’t just write off these rights for the sake of climate change or the economy; they’re central to who we are. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

I knew this before I became a Christian. In 1973 President Nixon sent me to Moscow to negotiate for the release of Soviet Jews. I told Vasily Kuznetsov, the hard-line Soviet negotiator, that if the Soviets did not loosen their restrictions, Congress would not pass the trade treaty, which the Soviets desperately needed. Release the Jews, I said—or kiss American grain goodbye.

Kuznetsov pounded the table and shouted, “You have no right to interfere in our internal affairs!”

“These aren’t your internal affairs,” I replied. “Human rights are not conferred by government; they cannot be denied by government. They are God-given. We call them ‘inalienable.’”

Kuznetsov finally agreed to release the Jews—and America shipped its grain.

I can’t take credit for that; it was the U.S. Congress and the American people who freed those captives. And it will take the same pressure from Congress and the American people to free captives in China, Iran, North Korea, and anywhere else people are denied their God-given rights.

I hope you’ll contact the White House, Hillary Clinton, and your representatives with a strong message—one loud enough to be heard by people languishing in prisons around the world: The principles that guided us throughout our history are not for sale.

Then we hear two more people, Beverly Shellrude Thompson and Rich Darr, talking about sacrifice. But their perspective is very different. Thompson, Darr, and others in the film say that they themselves were sacrificed when they were children. Sent to a Christian and Missionary Alliance boarding school while their parents served as missionaries in Africa, they claim they were physically, sexually, emotionally, and spiritually abused by their house parents and teachers.

All God’s Children tells the devastating story of at least two decades of abuse that went on at Mamou Alliance Academy in Guinea. Missionary parents in the denomination were required to send their children to boarding schools at an early age. Today, some of them can’t talk about their time at those schools without weeping. They recall beatings, molestation, and other “sadistic” treatment.

The students were terrorized into staying silent. Teachers told them if they distracted their parents from their mission, souls could be lost. One man recalls, “Everything was either going to send you to hell…or cause Africans to not be saved.”

Many of the alumni of these schools suffer from depression, shame, and suicidal feelings. Not surprisingly, they also struggle with their faith. When they got the story into the media, the denomination set up an Independent Commission of Inquiry that revealed a “consistent systemic problem.” The former president of the denomination has issued a formal apology.

How could this happen in a Christian community, and what can Christians learn to keep such things from happening again?

In the film, the victims of abuse and their parents identify factors that contributed to the problem. The parents and children describe how the mission board undermined family ties. Not only did they insist that children be sent away from their parents, they also made it hard for siblings at the school to interact with each other. Children were expected not to show any homesickness, and family bonds were treated as something that got in the way of the mission.

The parents now say they should have seen this as a warning sign. One mother, looking back on it, says now, “What was I thinking of?” But she concludes, “For me, it was a matter of obedience.”

And that leads to another factor: the demand to obey even extra-biblical commands without question. Obedience to authority is a good and necessary thing, in context, but when the authority goes too far, a discerning Christian has to know where to draw the line.

Near the end of this film, one former victim declares, “I continue to refuse to be sacrificed.” It’s a strong and powerful reminder that we serve a God who does not require this kind of human sacrifice.

And that anyone who claims that children have to be sacrificed in order to lift up God’s name or the Gospel is serving the wrong god.

Film Website: All God’s Children

And people are irritated with the President for taking so long to decide. Now, I don’t agree often with the President’s policies, but I have great sympathy for him here—because the moral implications of his decision are staggering. I would not want to be in his shoes.

What the President must examine is this: whether our cause and goals are just. And the answer no longer seems crystal clear.

For nearly two millennia, Christian thinkers starting with Augustine, joined by many Muslim intellectuals, have developed what is known as the just war theory. For a war to be seen as just, it must meet several conditions. It must be waged by legitimate authority. The cause itself must be just, as well as the intention behind going to war. War must be a last resort, waged by means proportional to the threat. We must not target non-combatants, and we must have a reasonable chance of success.

There is no doubt in my mind that when the United States invaded Afghanistan, the just war criteria was met. We had been deliberately attacked by al Qaeda, which was harbored and aided by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Our goal was clear—eliminate the bad guys.

I also, as it turns out, backed our invasion in Iraq because Donald Rumsfeld personally told me that the Iraqis were harboring weapons of mass destruction. That would make a preemptive strike justified. Sadly, that information was wrong.

But now, I’ve got to wonder about the continuing effort in Afghanistan. If nation building has become our chief goal, and if we simply want to prop up a generally corrupt government and reshape Afghanistan into a state that suits our interests, then the President may justly decide to not send more troops. Using war as merely another tool of foreign policy does not meet the just-war standard. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

However, it’s not that simple. A return of the Taliban to power and the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan would pose an imminent threat to the United States. So if our intent is to eliminate them in the face of the danger, then committing more troops, or some troops, may be justified.

But just war doctrine doesn’t let us off the hook there, either. We still have to ensure that our troops act justly, that they minimize civilian casualties—and every indication is that they are doing so with honor and at great risk to themselves.

But yet another question arises: Do we have a reasonable chance of succeeding? There’s a reason Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires—from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union.

If we do not have a reasonable chance that our rightly intentioned, just cause will succeed, then it would be unjust to send more troops.

These are really tough questions for any leader. I know, having served in the White House at the side of a President. There is clearly a moral dilemma, and no simple answers.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Join me in praying for President Obama. May God lead him to a decision that will protect our country, help our troops who have sacrificed so much, and advance the cause of a just peace.

Now, to be fair to Roland Emmerich, he is simply trying to entertain people by literally projecting their anxieties onto the big screen.

If you Google “December 21, 2012,” you will get nearly 7 million hits. Do a similar search at Amazon and you find more than 400 books on the subject. There is obviously a lot of interest and more than a little anxiety about that date and both will only grow as we get closer to what’s already being called “12/21.”

December 12, 2012, is the last day listed on what is known as the Maya “long count calendar.” That calendar marks what the Maya—a now non-existent civilization—regarded as the end of the present cycle of creation.

What makes this fact rise above the level of a historical curiosity is, first of all, the Maya’s astronomical prowess. They charted the movements of celestial bodies with an accuracy unmatched until the invention of the telescope and, in some instances, not until the 20th century.

This alone isn’t enough to explain the unease about December 21, 2012, especially since, according to archaeologists, the Maya themselves never said anything about what would happen that day. Their real-world descendants find the hype annoying and are tired of getting letters from fourth-graders saying “they’re too young to die.”

This unwarranted and unwelcome attention to a long-extinct civilization is, like all apocalyptic thinking, a manifestation of cultural anxiety. Events like the 2004 tsunami and concerns about the economy, terrorism, and the environment remind us how vulnerable we really are.

Until relatively recently, we, like the psalmist, knew where are our help came from, and wouldn’t fear even if the mountains fell into the sea. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

Then that faith in the biblical God was replaced by a faith in human prowess and, eventually, faith in nothing.

Well, Western culture might have lost its faith, but folks have not lost their anxieties. So since we are no longer willing to embrace the ancient faith, many looked for solace or explanation in other ancient faiths, or at least new-age versions of these faiths.

So we’re told that the ancient Maya, the Hopi Indians, and the Chinese text I Ching all predict that 2012 will be a time of “extraordinary shift.”

But they don’t. It’s all hype.

What’s going on here is the idea that we live in a random and unintelligible universe, and that’s more terrifying than the cataclysms predicted for the year 2012. So we grasp at straws or over-interpret obscure texts, or we despair.

But there is a third alternative—real faith. Christians know that God is working out His purposes in history, and that faith removes all anxieties.

At least that’s what you conclude watching the History Channel.

For many years, the network was nicknamed the “Hitler Channel” because of all the shows it ran on World War II and the Nazis. Today, a better nickname would be the “Nostradamus Channel.” Hardly a day goes by without at least one show touting some doomsday scenario and how it was foretold.

At the center of this programming strategy lies Nostradamus, the 16th-century French apothecary whose devotees claim foresaw everything from the rise of Napoleon to 9/11. Everyone who has ever written a book on Nostradamus gets extended face time on the History Channel, where their claims are treated with the utmost seriousness.

It isn’t only Nostradamus. Name a doomsday prediction made by some long-dead person or group and chances are the Nostradamus Channel has given it a respectful airing, no matter how unhinged the claims might be.

The latest and greatest example is the new series The Nostradamus Effect . That’s the name the producers have given to the “convergence” of “doomsday prophecy” and “current events.”

We are told that for “5,000 years, prophets around the world”—including, of course, Nostradamus—“have predicted the end of days.” Operating “independently,” they have concluded that 2012 will be a “time of extraordinary shift.”

One so-called expert told viewers that “we’re on the verge of the biggest riot of all time.” Another said that “we are reaching a confluence of tipping points.” These tipping points include climate change, financial upheaval, political unrest, crop failures, terrorism, and nuclear war, to name but a few. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

That sounds ominous. Of course, nobody can cite anything that sounds like an actual prediction, such as, “In 2012, the world blows up.” It’s speaking nonsense, rank speculation.

It’s not much to go on, but then again, this isn’t about facts or reason—it’s about fear. It’s about understandable anxiety made worse because in rejecting Christianity, the West has rejected the basis of its hope. A world in which God’s purposes are being fulfilled for our good has been replaced by one that leaves man in charge, mostly for ill.

The world has become literally senseless to us. We live in, as theologian Robert Jensen once put, a meaningless world wishing we could believe in something. The more events seem to spin out of control, the more we succumb to superstition and irrationality. And of course there’s always a media conglomerate ready to sell the credulous what they crave.

There’s no better example than the subject of tomorrow’s commentary, which will give you the date of December 21, 2012. Please tune in. And in the meantime, please pay your bills on time.

Women’s groups are going to have their work cut out for them at the University of Maryland. So will the health clinics and campus police. They’re going to be busy cleaning up the mess if the school decides to give a green light to showing X-rated films on campus.

Last spring, Maryland students planned to screen a triple-X-rated film at the student union. When State Senator Andrew Harris heard about it, he threatened to cut off the school’s share of state operating funds. Good for him!

The school canceled the film, but defiant students showed a portion of it anyway in a lecture hall where they did not need permission from school authorities.

Many students are portraying this as a case of academic freedom. And the Washington Post agrees. The newspaper mocked Senator Harris for wasting the school’s time. But it’s just possible that Senator Harris knows a lot more about the consequences of viewing hardcore porn than does the Washington Post.

In CitizenLink, writer Daniel Weiss describes pornography research conducted by Dr. Victor Cline. Cline found that “once addicted, a person’s need for pornography escalates both in frequency and in deviancy.”

Weiss writes that the porn viewer gradually becomes desensitized, no longer getting a thrill out of what he’s viewing. Ultimately, he is driven to act out his fantasies on innocent victims.

Weiss notes that doctors have found that porn addiction is similar to cocaine addiction in the way it affects the brain. And because pornographic images are permanently stored in the brain, researchers believe that it may be harder to break an addiction to porn than to cocaine. Many of us remember where a porn addiction led in the life of serial killer Ted Bundy, who acted out his fantasies on more than 30 women and children.

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Porn use is also closely related to family breakdown. And yet, Weiss notes, the porn industry been extremely successful in convincing “a large segment of the population that viewing porn is not just harmless fun, but is also a fundamental right.”

Maryland Senate President Thomas Miller urged the University of Maryland regents to come up with a policy regarding what films may be shown on campus. One idea being bandied about is that any new policy include an “educational component.”

I agree. Before deciding on whether or not to drench students in pornography, the school should invite porn researchers to talk about the damaging effects of porn use on the brain. They should invite the FBI and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to talk about the strong link between porn viewing and sex crimes.

Women’s rights groups should expose the porn industry’s “free speech” argument, and how viewing porn this way leads to violence against women. The school might even invite theologians and philosophers to explain to students the difference between a worldview that values and honors women and children—and one that views them as objects of lust and violence.

If they don’t—if the school enthusiastically embraces porn—then the campus police, women’s center, and health clinic will, tragically, become very, very busy.

Well, maybe it would have in another place, time, and culture.

Martin is blind and uses a seeing-eye dog. That wouldn’t be a problem, except that B&B owner McCue “suffers from acute sinusitis aggravated by exposure to canines.” Thus, no matter how much he wanted to rent Martin a room, his health wouldn’t permit it. That should have ended the matter.

Except that, as Canadian columnist Mark Steyn notes, this was Ontario, home to the Human Rights Commission. Martin filed a complaint and demanded compensation that “started at two grand and quickly escalated into five figures.” Eventually, McCue paid a $700 fine, issued a perfunctory apology—and then closed his bed and breakfast.

What happened to McCue was outrageous, but it could have been worse. He could have been sued for refusing to allow a horse to stay in one of his rooms.

Earlier this year, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about a blind Muslim woman in Dearborn, Michigan, who rides the bus with a seeing-eye miniature horse named “Cali.” That’s because dogs—even seeing-eye dogs—can, quote, “violate [Muslim] ritual purity.”

What if the woman had visited Perth, Ontario, and needed a place to stay? Could McCue have refused her a room? After all, while a horse is a horse of course, of course, it’s also an expression of her rights as both a disabled person and a Muslim.

For that matter, would the fact that McCue is gay factor into the whole “rights” equation? Could she, as a Muslim, ban a homosexual bed and breakfast owner from his own home? Or what if the blind man, Martin, had shown up with his dog at the same time? Could she force him to leave?

What’s going on here is more than political correctness run amok. As Mark Steyn rightly says, it’s part of ongoing process wherein government is seen “as the only valid mediator of social relations.”

What Steyn characterizes as “invented rights of near parodic absurdity” is the logical outcome of what Harvard law professor Mary Anne Glendon calls “rights talk.” According to Glendon, the emphasis on “rights” promotes “unrealistic expectations” and “heightens social conflict.” function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

That’s because it condones accepting the benefits of living in a democratic society without accepting the “corresponding personal and civic responsibilities.” In a culture dominated by “rights talk,” we engage each other not as fellow-citizens or neighbors, but as autonomous rights-bearers.

When our rights inevitably come into conflict, the only recourse we have is government—the courts, human rights tribunals, or laws that favor one kind of rights-bearer over another. Coercion replaces compromise, “mutual forbearance,” and, ultimately, “peaceful coexistence.”

As Steyn notes, in the last well-publicized Human Rights Commission case involving a gay man and a bed and breakfast, a Christian couple lost their business. This time the gay man lost his.

Eventually, our dependence on “rights talk” will cost us all something much more valuable than a room to rent: our freedom.

“Professor Kuehne,” a student will say, “are you seriously going to try to persuade us that if we forgo [sex] outside of marriage we can have a fulfilling life, even if that means we never have a sexual relationship?”

Well, that’s a pretty tough sell these days.

Kuehne is the author of a new book, Sex and the iWorld. He says that the traditional world, or tWorld, as he calls it, has been largely supplanted by the iWorld, in which “the immediate desires of the individual have been deemed paramount.” In the iWorld, complete sexual freedom is a given, as long as all parties consent. Sexuality is considered essential to human happiness.

This is why iWorlders are scornful of the biblical view that sex should be reserved for marriage between one man and one woman. What about single people? What about gays in a committed relationship? they ask. Are they to be condemned to lifelong misery?

Even churches have bought into the iWorld belief that sex is essential to happiness. The idea that one cannot have relational fulfillment without sex “has been a largely unquestioned assumption of evangelical psychology, if not theology, for decades,” Kuehne writes.

That’s why many Christians now accept the iWorld teaching that anything that stands in the way of sexual fulfillment must be wrong. God wants us to be fulfilled, they reason; sex is an essential component of relational fulfillment, thus the Bible can’t really mean what it says about restricting sex to marriage.

Well, Christians who accept this idea need to open their eyes—and dig a little deeper in the Word. Scripture teaches that humans are made for relationships, and that we crave intimacy and love more than anything else, Kuehne writes.

For instance, in his teachings about sex and marriage in 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul makes clear that we can have deeply fulfilling lives without sexual relationships. And some of the richest relationships in the Scriptures are non-sexual ones. David and Jonathan. Jesus and the disciples. Jesus and Mary Magdalene. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

Moreover, where biblical writers viewed sexual relations within marriage as a wonderful good, they considered sex itself to be an appetite—something that was potentially enslaving. Tragically, many iWorlders have become enslaved by their appetites.

True intimacy and happiness are found in loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. The greater our intimacy with God, Kuehne writes, the greater our ability to share that love with others.

For those who think that sex is essential to their happiness, Kuehne has a question: Does the iWorld view of sex and relationship make them happy? The sad truth is that promiscuity inhibits our ability to cultivate the love and intimacy God designed us to enjoy.

That source was columnist David Brooks, whose work I often commend. In a recent column, Brooks wrote that, in an earlier age, the “Calvinist restraint” created a “counter-vailing stream of sound economic values” that enabled Americans to resist the decadence that usually accompanies prosperity. True.

For most of our history, Brooks argued, we Americans have been “notoriously materialistic,” but we weren’t soft. Hard work and self-denial were part of our national character—actually our Christian heritage.

In recent years, the “sound economic values” have eroded. That’s true, too. Brooks cites examples like government-sponsored lotteries or excessive executive compensation, part of a larger pattern of self-indulgence leading to record levels of personal debt.

Well, if he had stopped there, it would have been fine. But he went on to say that this self-indulgence grew while “the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things.”

According to Brooks, while Christians “were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state,” they were “oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.”

Reading Brooks you might think that the asset bubble and rampant speculation that led to the economic crisis was unprecedented—but of course it isn’t. America’s economic history is regularly marked by asset bubbles and financial panics.

Brooks writes as if it were unprecedented because it enables him to propose a new culture war. Instead of the obsolete one pitting secular liberals against religious conservatives on matters of sexual morality and religion, he wants a united front against the erosion of economic values.

But the problem, you see, is that values and the character they produce aren’t divisible. People will not exercise restraint in their economic dealings while casting off restraints in their sexual and social ones. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

For evidence, we need only to look in Brooks’ best-known book, Bobos in Paradise. The “bourgeois bohemians” Brooks describes are self-indulgent in all their dealings, building enormous houses with enormous kitchens that they seldom cook in, or vacation homes they seldom visit.

When they’re not spending money on their rationalized version of the “good life,” they engage in excessive sexual practices.

Or turn on the television. There, people are indulging every sexual desire in the midst of a consumerist paradise—big homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes. You can do anything you want.

The “Calvinist restraint” that Brooks cites didn’t preach chastity or thrift; rather it preached chastity and thrift. That’s because it saw both as proceeding from a common source: the Christian understanding of man’s nature and the purpose for which God created him.

If you try to have the one without the other, you will get neither. Far from being obsolete, the old culture war is more relevant than ever. Restoring moral values across the board is essential to rescue a sagging economy as well as renew our nation’s spirit.

Writing her first piece for Harpers’ , Rachel Aviv recounts her summer spent as an embedded journalist with Child Evangelism Fellowship. Although Aviv never mentions it, Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) is the largest Protestant Christian organization in the world that seeks to evangelize children.

CEF staff in New Jersey and New York initially turned down Aviv’s requests to spend time following them as a reporter. Finally, one CEF staff member, Joshua Guido, agreed. So in the summer of 2008, she followed with them as they conducted Bible camps for youngsters in what she describes as a “largely black and Hispanic neighborhood” on the northern edge of Waterbury, Connecticut.

Sadly, instead of an objective look at the work of CEF, Aviv’s article is what I would call a prime example of “othering”—of defining some individual or group as being different in some fundamental way and therefore not belonging. In history this “otherness,” often based on race, religion, behavior, or appearance, has often led people to view these “others” as less intelligent, subhuman, or having strange and threatening worldviews. For Aviv, it appears that Christians are that strange “other”—they’re exotic creatures to be put under the microscope and feared.

In her piece, Aviv skewers not only orthodox belief but CEF, their staff, and even the families who permitted their children to attend the camps. She compares the CEF staff to “overseas proselytizers at the turn of the century who swoop down on deprived, often illiterate people and inundate them with foreign notions.” These foreign notions include “Jesus died on the cross” and “I will meet him in heaven.”

So now the bedrock doctrines of the Christian faith around the world are merely foreign notions.

Aviv ridicules the notions of sin and salvation. To her the Bible simply offers an entry into what she calls a “fairy tale realm,” where time is everlasting and good and evil have consequences. She lampoons the CEF staff, saying that they embrace the child as “an ideal believer, a mascot for anti-intellectualism.”

Aviv’s piece is just a part of a growing pattern of the post-modern, secular media “othering” Christians and those of any religious faith. We saw this in the 2003 Harper’s article, “Jesus Plus Nothing,” when Jeff Sharlet secretly embedded himself in The Fellowship, the group that birthed and nurtures the Prayer Breakfast movement. Or with the more recent Brown University student, Jeff Roose, who embedded Liberty University and turned his experiences into a book.

The patronizing tone of these pieces is certainly bothersome. But much more worrisome is the history of what this kind of “othering” produces: it’s dehumanization.

And that’s only one small step removed from oppression, disenfranchisement, and frequently even violence. That’s one slippery slope I hope we never see our culture go down.

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