As a Caucasian male, I am reticent to wade into this deep end of the pool. However, my personal impressions, and I do understand that the plural of anecdote is not data, is that racism is even more entrenched in the American experience than sexism, although both are still alive and well in our society. Globally, I would argue that sexism is more prevalent, but in the United States, we’ve done a better job of vitiating the impact of sexism than racism.

The role of religion is to speak moral truth to society, both individually and collectively. Christianity, my faith, believes that all human beings are of equal value and worth to God and thus, should be to each other. As the confessional statement of Southern Baptist’s, the Baptist Faith & Message states, “The sacredness of human personality is evident in that God created man in His own image, and in that Christ died for man; therefore, every person of every race possesses full dignity and is worth of respect and Christian love.”

Thus, followers of Christ have the responsibility to speak out against sexism and racism whenever and wherever they occur.

Email is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because we have much faster access to information as communication than ever before. Email is a quantum leap forward in technology from the fax machine.

However, like all technologies, it’s a mixed blessing. Unless one uses email with considerable self-discipline, it can become a tyrant in one’s life. Email comes to you so fast and in such volume that you have no time for reflection and contemplation in considering your response to correspondence unless you deliberately slow the process down and with conscious action make time to THINK.

In other words, you must set the pace with which you read and respond to email. Otherwise, email becomes master and you the servant, instead of the other way around. Unless we cultivate time for reflection it will be eaten up by email.

One test of whatever you or email is master: Can you “unplug” for a morning, for an afternoon—dare we say—a whole working day?

The fact that 40 percent of Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood is a sign of health. As A Baptist who believes in soul liberty, absolute freedom of conscience, and the priesthood of every person of faith, I can only be encouraged that so many Americans, experiencing dissatisfaction with the religious tradition into which they were born, would feel the freedom and have the courage to change their personal religious allegiance to one they find more satisfying to their hearts and souls.

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I had been urging Governor Romney to give such a speech for over a year, ever since he invited me to his home, along with about a dozen other Evangelical leaders to have an open and free-wheeling discussion about his candidacy and the questions he needed to answer to get a serious hearing from Evangelicals.

I told him then that he needed to give a JFK style speech and I even gave him a copy of my then forthcoming book, The Divided States of America? which contains then Senator Kennedy’s speech as an appendix.

I had the privilege of attending Gov. Romney’s speech, and sitting on the second row, you could not only see the Governor’s emotions, you could feel them. One of his staff members told me, “I’ve been working for the Governor for six years, and I have never heard him more eloquent.”

I responded, “Nothing generates more eloquence than heart-felt conviction.”

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It is proper that we give thanks to almighty God on every day of the year, but as we mark Thanksgiving in America this week, we can be particularly thankful there is not more religious, ethnic and geopolitical conflict across the face of the globe than there actually is. While the world is certainly not in the state we would wish it would be, the reality is that it could be catastrophically worse.

In the not too distant past, India and Pakistan were at each other’s throats, literally on the brink of a nuclear showdown. Millions of people on the Indian subcontinent could have perished simply through a miscalculation. As dire as things appear to be in Pakistan at the moment, tensions between India and Pakistan have certainly deescalated from that very dangerous nuclear precipice of a few years ago. While we certainly hope and pray things will improve in Pakistan and that Pakistanis soon will be able to participate in free and open elections, in which people who are committed to the democratic process and to human rights and freedom will be elected, things could be far worse in Pakistan than they are currently.

And in the neighboring country of Afghanistan, we should be grateful that while conditions are far from where we hoped they would be, the future for citizens of this nation is far brighter than it was when the Taliban was in control just a few short years ago. Hope and opportunity grow daily in Iraq as well.

We are mindful of the thousands of coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. These men and women will spend this Thanksgiving away from their families, focused on securing freedom for the citizens of those two countries and on defeating those committed to unleashing even more terror on innocent civilians. I am grateful for those men and women who are willing to risk their lives so that we can live our lives in peace. My prayers are with all those who have family members in harm’s way, as well as the soldiers, sailors and airmen who serve our nation.

We also can be grateful that for all the tensions in the world, there are more people living in freedom today than at any time in human history. The expectation is that freedom is waxing, rather than waning, in the world, even in places like China.

Here at home, we can acknowledge imperfections in our country and the fact there are many who are in want and in dire circumstances, yet at the same time be thankful for the bounty of our country. Blessings by definition are undeserved, and by virtually any calculation that one could construct, average Americans of average income living in average communities have more to be grateful for in terms of their freedoms, health care, opportunities and their share of the world’s goods than any comparable people at any time in human existence.

We live in a great country, but we serve a much greater God.

Those who settled our nation experienced firsthand the providence of God. The colonists of the Plymouth Plantation gave thanks to God in a feast held in the fall of 1621. From that day forward, Americans have marked a day of Thanksgiving to express gratitude to the God from whom all blessings flow.

When Christopher Hitchens observes that, “Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children,” he is both right and wrong.

Hitchens is right because humankind is sinful and selfish. Indeed, I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who said that the one Christian doctrine that was demonstrably provable, even to casual observers, was the sinfulness and depravity of man. Thus, human expressions of the religious impulse will inevitably produce some religious practices and beliefs that would fit Hitchens’ rather grim description.

Human history is replete with such flawed expressions of religious faith.

However, this would be true of all secular philosophies and ideologies as well. Three of the most heinous and barbaric ideologies, which produced the greatest cruelties and violations of humanity in the 20th century, were fascism, Nazism and communism—all secular.

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No, I am not satisfied with where I am in my life because that would imply complacency.

I do feel extraordinarily blessed to have the great good fortune to be born in this incredible country. I also am blessed to be married to an extraordinarily patient, loving, and supportive wife, and to be the father of three healthy and spiritually devoted children. I have a challenging and rewarding job to go to every day, and I have far better health than I deserve.

I am dissatisfied with where I am now in my life because I wish that I were more consistently expressive of my gratitude to the many people that give sacrificially of themselves to help me do my work. I also wish that I were more consistently appreciative of my incredibly patient and considerate wife, and I wish that I were more disciplined in my use of time and in my personal diet and exercise routine.

A true giant of the faith has gone on to his heavenly reward. Our grief at our loss of his witness, energy and giftedness for the kingdom is mitigated by the fact that he is now with his Savior for eternity. Dr. Falwell’s home-going leaves an enormous gap in the leadership ranks of evangelical Christianity in America and around the world. He will be greatly missed. Our hearts and prayers go out to his church members and the entire Liberty family, including professors, alumni and students, as well as his immediate family. We pray for them in this time of loss, as well as our loss of this true giant of the faith.

In response the last post of the Feb. 28 debate with Richard Land and Randall Balmer that can be found at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/evangelicalism.html,

C’mon Randall. You’re a better historian than that. You continue to perpetuate this inside-the-beltway urban myth that the religious right “organized a political movement effectively to defend racial segregation” as a result of Carter administration efforts to lift the tax-exempt status of private Christian academies. This one just doesn’t pass the “smell test,” Randall. Most people involved in the pro-life movement didn’t and don’t send their children to such academies. As I said earlier, I was a sergeant in the pro-life movement from the mid-70s onward and I attended no rallies to defend private schools. If such rallies had been held, few, if any, would have attended. Most Evangelicals I knew considered Bob Jones’ segregationist policies to be abhorrent and embarrassing. And you misrepresent my claim about what gave the pro-life movement its surge and staying power. It wasn’t Roe and it didn’t happen from 1973-1976. It was the horrible flood tide of approximately 1.5 million abortions that drove reluctant Evangelicals into the political process and it happened between 1976 and 1980. In 1976, two-thirds of white Baptists voted for Jimmy Carter against an equally pro-choice Gerald Ford. In 1980, two-thirds of white Baptists voted for the pro-life Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter. Anyone attending any pro-life rallies in the last 25 years, (I have attended and spoken at hundreds.) would never have heard any mention of Christian schools or tax exemptions. I’ve been at the rallies and I haven’t heard it mentioned once. As I have told you before, Dr. King is a personal hero of mine, and I resent your attempting to slander pro-life Evangelicals as racist. The Southern Baptist Convention over the last generation has become a multi-ethnic denomination, approximately 20 percent of our membership is ethnic, and over the last decade approximately half of all of our growth has been ethnic. Historians should debunk myths, not perpetuate them. I have yet to meet anyone actually involved in pro-life Evangelical political activism who doesn’t view this inside-the-beltway myth of the “segregation academies” being the sine qua non of conservative pro-life Evangelical activism as outrageous and preposterous. I was told that this was what we were supposed to debate and I’m sorry we were not allowed to get to it until the very end. On a more personal note, I am glad that we are both pro-marriage and pro-wife. I know I don’t deserve mine, but I’m very grateful for her. Have a happy anniversary.

Yes, I pray. To me, prayer is talking to God, my heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus Christ—His Son, my Savior—in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I begin each day by meditating on and praying the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen” (Matthew 6:10-12).

Our Lord taught His disciples to pray this prayer. I find that praying the prayer and contemplating each phrase focuses my prayer life. For instance, praying that God will forgive me like I forgive others makes me a much more forgiving person.

I have sought in my life to cultivate an attitude and posture of prayer where I am persistently praying for forgiveness of sins (“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” 1 John 1:9) and seeking to appropriate spiritual discernment and wisdom (“Be filled with the Spirit” Ephesians 5:18).

Also, I try to close every prayer as my Savior closed his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).

My most formative religious experience would be my conversion to being a follower of Jesus as a small child on Palm Sunday in 1953, in my seventh year.

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Yes. Jesus is God in every sense that God is God (John 1:1) and that He became flesh (John 1:14) and dwelt among us, adding a human nature to His divine nature.

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It is both inaccurate historically and inappropriate theologically to describe America as a “Christian nation.”

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In American history, Thanksgiving has been a “religious holiday” at least in the sense that most people have understood themselves to be thanking God for his blessings. This was true with Jamestown’s “Thanksgiving service” (Spring 1610) when the supply ships arrived from England with desperately needed food. In the Fall of 1621, the Puritan colonists of Plymouth celebrated “Thanksgiving” for a bountiful harvest.

On October 11, 1782, the Continental Congress proclaimed “a day of solemn THANKSGIVING to GOD for his mercies” concerning victory in the Revolutionary War. October 3, 1789, President Washington declared the first national “Thanksgiving Day” under the new Constitution to be celebrated “Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

Thus, the course was set from the earliest days of the Republic that “Thanksgiving” was to be offered to God for His blessings. This is unsurprising since Americans then were even more overwhelmingly religious (over 90 percent of the population identified themselves at Protestant Christians in 1790) than they are today (when nearly 4 out of 5 Americans identify themselves as some form of Christian).

Most Americans in most places at most times have understood themselves to be thanking a Judeo-Christian God for his provisions and blessings on the nation.

As an Evangelical Christian, I thank God for physical and material needs being met, for His providential blessing in having been born a citizen of this country, and for His bountiful blessings on this nation from our settlement until now.

I hesitate to give “non-believers” advice on such matters, but I would think that they could celebrate the undeniable “good fortune” experienced by America past and present, whatever they believe the source may have been.

Followers of various religious traditions, some certainly within Islam and Christianity, including Evangelicals, believe they have received a truth that is absolute, not relative, and not subject to compromise. That is different than asserting they have a “monopoly” on truth.

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