Read what Bishop Martyn Minns of the Church of Nigeria had to say at the Value Voters Summit last week. The speech was covered in World Magazine, which is edited by Marvin Olasky.
Olasky’s bio contains this illuminating section:
Olasky has taught in the journalism department at the University of Texas at Austin since 1983, becoming a full professor in 1993. Midway through his term as associate professor, he came to the attention of Reconstructionist philanthropist Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who gave him the editorship of the Turning Point series of books via his charitable arm, the Fieldstead Institute. Olasky wrote its first installment, A Christian Worldview Declaration (1987), as well as the Capital Research Center series Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy.
This initial work brought him to the attention of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funded him as a two-year Bradley scholar at the The Heritage Foundation. His two 1988 books on the mass media, Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of American News Media and The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 outlined philosophies that harmonized with the Christian agenda of World magazine, of which he became editor in 1992. He was instrumental in that periodical’s 1998 spawning of the World Journalism Institute, which seeks to recruit and train Christian journalists and inject them into the mainstream media.
Minns said:
“The real question we have had to face in the Episcopal Church… is how do we separate the values that are worth fighting for from those that are mere cultural preferences? And to what immutable standards do we appeal to make these decisions? These are not just questions for Episcopalians, or Anglicans in the rest of the world, but for all Christians everywhere.”
One can agree with this statement and disagree with his personal choices. For instance, one can believe that homophobia is a cultural preference of Minns, his followers in this country, and the Nigerian archbishop Peter Akinola to whom he now owes his allegiance.
Speaking of Akinola, one wonders what he would make of the Obama Waffles that were sold at the Value Voters Summit or the guys who created them.