I found Rod Dreher blog good on it today https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/chick-fil-a-thomas-more/
I think we need to wait a little to see how it all shakes down, and over the next few weeks we will see their new settled policy on this area.... I sincerely hope they will not cave into the LGBT agenda, in which case I will no longer be a patron of their restaurants
I'm not sure that they caved the way as stated. It seems they just reorganized slightly. There's so much back and forth about it right now. Difficult to tell. Well, for me anyway. I'm taking a wait and see attitude and will wait till the dust settles to form a solid personal conclusion/opinion.
Indeed, I am not seeing compelling evidence of a capitulation. Rather it looks to me like they refocused their charitable donations strategy. Now, a lot of people are criticizing their decision to not donate to the Salvation Army, but I find myself unable to be troubled by this. I used to donate to the Salvation Army, but grew concerned and stopped. Later, when I learned more about the church which lies at the heart of the Salvation Army, I find myself rather wishing I could get a refund, because I consider it to be something of a heretical cult, for these reasons: The Salvation Army apparently, according to all information I can find, does not administer baptism or the Eucharist to its members, nor does it require or make areangements for them to receive these sacraments elsewhere. In lieu of baptism, SA laity “enlist” in the Salvation Army. Likewise, SA clergy are not ordained but become “commissioned officers.” The officer corps is open to married men and women, the latter taking us into almost as dark a territory as the problems with priestesses in some of the larger Anglican churches. The Salvation Army cannot be considered to be a properly functioning Christian church without Baptism and the Eucharist, but rather a dangerous fringe sect. Do they do good works? Yes. However, people often forget that with regards to the work they are most acclaimed for, that is, their initial work with the desperately poor in South London during the late Victorian period (indeed, this is where they originated), equally good, if not better, work, was being done by Anglo-Catholic clergy. Indeed the movement of the Church of England in a decidedly high church direction largely happened because of positive reactions of the public to the Anglo Catholics and their work among the poor. In particular, there was great anger concerning the arrest of Anglo Catholics who were engaged in such a ministry for the wearing of chasubles (which it turns out was probably legal; see the commentary on the Ornaments Rubric in the Parson’s Handbook of Rev. Percy Dearmer, who himself did as much to help the poor as anyone in the Salvation Army, by organizing church supply businesses among the poor as a source of income for those who could not otherwise supply, fashioning candlesticks and other accessories for the holy table and the altar, paraments, vestments and so on). Even today, even the Episcopal Church USA has some extremely excellent charities attached to it. The Episcopalian parish I used to attend had an extremely excellent charity on site, run by an extremely compassionate and solidly Christian lady who I greatly admired. ~ Thus, I am not prepared to denounce Chick-fil-A as being apostate simply because they withdrew support for the Salvation Army. Conversely, I also have to confess to a certain extent that I don’t care all that much. I do not view their business as being all that much of a bulwark of piety. They generate an extreme amount of revenue; their sandwiches, while good, are not spectacular. And their policy of not operating on Sunday is in my opinion misguided. Indeed I think “Blue Laws” and restricted business operation on Sunday is not justifiable from the standpoint of Christian theology properly understood. I believe that the commandment to honor the Sabbath and keep it Holy, like so much else in the Old Testament, must be interpreted in a Christological prophetic context. Specifically, in light of the Great Sabbath, when our Lord rested in the Tomb following his death, on the eve of His glorious resurrection. This is the central mystery of Sabbath, when God and mankind rested together united hypostatically in the person of Jesus Christ, the only begotten son and incarnate Word of God. Adopting a Judaic approach to the Sabbath but then applying those restrictions to Sunday just doesn’t strike me as that much of a pious thing; if anything, it merely causes an inconvenience for Christian families who might enjoy a chicken sandwich for supper in the evening, and also greatly inconveniences and causes resentment among Jews and Seventh Day Adventists, and for no compelling reason. (I believe only the Roman Catholic Church officially considers Sabbath to have been moved to Sunday, and this goes along with their policy of mandatory Sunday mass attendance, the “days of obligation”, which I also disagree with; most other ancient churches seem to understand Sunday correctly as being the celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord on the First Day). ~ Lastly, I would lament the highly publicized Christianity of Chick-fil-A gives them something of an unfair competive advantage over innumerable small Christian-owned restaurants which, owing to their small size, are not in a position to advertise their faith.
I recall, as a young child in the early 1960s, that nearly all the stores were closed on Sunday. Even some of the gas stations closed until noon on Sunday. Restaurants were open, however, and in our small town one of the two drugstores was open. This was the practice, I believe, for decades (perhaps centuries?) prior. The gradual development of stores staying open on Sundays is a comparatively modern and worldly thing. In light of this earlier, fairly uniform and long-lived demonstration of Christian piety, it seems out of place to criticize Chick-Fil-A for choosing to do the same. Alas, we have become so jaded.
I understand the small businesses thing. I'd rather pay premium from a website like ChristianBook.com than the same thing on Amazon, who, besides running a sweatshop, have trashed Christian authors and other products because of their nutcase beliefs. Same with Microsoft. When I saw their Bing search engine trashing creationists as a front-page article as if atheism were taken for granted, I had to say goodbye to their services (I am a Linux loyalist, btw). I was also very cautious about buying copies of The Apocrypha and The Imitation of Christ from new age retailers who sold pagan and antichrist literature, simply because they wanted to profit from public domain classics without regard for who they represent, so I got them from someone else. There's a Penguin Classics paperback edition of the complete King James with Apocrypha in modern spelling, but again, I passed on it because a skeptic was allowed to do the foreward and make careless jabs at it as being outdated or 'a product of its time'. I recently found out that one particular album of Anglican hymns I wanted was made available for $15 digitally on Amazon, but thank God I found that ChristianBook had the same one for only $11. Of course, I supported ChristianBook's offer over Amazon's without question! I would also be careful about dealing with people who sell Christian jewelry. I've seen numerous Anglican rosaries sold my new age retailers who donate to heretical and anti-Christian groups. I believe the reason most Anglican rosaries are so gaudy and flamboyant is because of the Episcopal Church's LGBT obsession, and that they seem to have the monopoly on the use of said rosary, largely because it originated with convicted pedophile priest, Lynn Baumann, who was LGBT himself. Fortunately, my best Anglican rosary came from a retailer who was Roman Catholic and did not support said groups.
I do agree with you in part, in that I believe that such closures were made with pious intent. However, with one important exception which I shall discuss at the end of this post, I do not consider Sunday closures to be an authentic act of Christian piety, for several reasons, which I shall now endeavor to explain: Firstly, Pious acts are by their very nature actions which are performed by individual Christians as a means of uniting them with the Church and with God. Examples of Christian piety include regular reception of the Eucharist, fasting, almsgiving, freeing people from bondage, adherence to a prayer rule, frequent prayer or unceasing prayer, making the sign of the cross at appropriate times (for example, when leaving one’s house, when God is mentioned in prayer, before eating at the dinner table, and so on), the memorization of Scripture, the recitation of the Psalms, the singing of hymns, the keeping of vigil lamps before the Cross or a suitable icon of our Lord so as to remind us of the Incarnation, regular attendance at church, kissing the hand of priests and bishops in churches where this practice is customary, embracing the Golden Rule and the other commandments, memorization and recitation of at least one of the Creeds, praying the Jesus Prayer, placing crosses and/or icons in rooms in one’s house, donating Bibles through the Gideons or the North American Bible Society or other equivalent groups, praying fervently for the health and wellbeing of afflicted persons, regular attendance at Church, health permitting, the composition of traditional ecclesiastical music, volunteering to assist at church events, kneeling or prostrating in prayer (health permitting, and subject to Canon XX of Nicea), and related devotional acts. Secondly, the theology behind the idea of Sunday closures is, as I explained previously, flawed. Sunday is not the Sabbath; on the seventh day, God rested, in the tomb. He rose on the eighth day, Easter Sunday, poetically considered in Eastern Christianity to be the dawn of the new creation (which is why Easter services in the East are usually held starting at midnight on Easter Sunday; the Syriac Orthodox also have a service in the morning, but only the Armenians exclusively celebrate Pascha on the morning of Easter Sunday, and this could well be an example of a Latinization - I should stress by the way that this approach is a difference in rite and is not better than the Western practice; rather, the two practices enrich each other, and my own personal preference is to have a midnight service, a sunrise service and a regular morning service). Every other Sunday throughout the year should be understood as a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in like manner, every Saturday should be viewed as a day to remember that on the seventh day, the Word of God by whom all things were made rested following the creation of Man (and indeed, the recreation of Man on the Cross). When the Roman Catholic Church at one point, several centuries ago, allegedly declared that they had moved the Sabbath to Sunday (I have not been able to verify if they actually said this owing to a superabundance of bogus Seventh Day Adventist propaganda), if they said that, they managed to spectacularly miss the point. Finally, imposing an interpretation of Christianity upon a third party cannot be considered an act of piety. Rome did this rather too much, and indeed the majority of denominations are guilty of having, at least on one occasion, overstepped their proper place and engaged in persecution. Indeed, in recent years, the persecution of traditional Christians who simply wanted to leave the Episcopal Church, during the tenure of Katharine Jefferts-Schiorri, is something all of us on this forum have felt the sting of (and what a waste of $40 million dollars in legal fees; imagine how many lives TEC could have saved had they spent that money on charitable work). So as much as I might otherwise personally enjoy the imposition of draconian Sunday closures in order to oppress the Seventh Day Adventists (I am of course writing in jest, but I do consider the SDAs a dangerous cult, and distressingly, one which has one of my dearest friends in its talons), I cannot justify such an act as being pious, or even being moral or ethical. In the UK, for example, large numbers of retailers are forced to close on Sundays, but this has the effect of causing resentment for Christianity among the Jews, the Muslims and the rapidly growing atheist population, and we really emphatically do not want to make people feel oppressed by Christianity. It is vital that the Christian religion be seen as a liberating force, as something which frees people from bondage both in this life and the next. For this reason especially, the legacy of Anglicanism in abolishing the slave trade and the continuing excellent work by the Church of England against the horrors of human trafficking is very dear to me, for this work continues a long tradition of the breaking of chains by the Christian Church, including the deliverance of women and children from ownership by, and murder at the hands of, the paterfamilias in Ancient Rome, the ransoming of persons kidnapped by Islamic pirates operating from North Africa in the 1200s-1500s by the Trinitarian and Mercedarian Friars, and the redemption of the poor from debtors prisons in Great Britain and Ireland for several centuries, most notably by George Frederich Handel, whose Messiah was composed and performed for the express purpose of raising funds to procure the release of Irish people imprisoned on account of their debt in squalid debtors jails in the region of Dublin. These liberative acts are not an end in themselves, although on their own merits they are extremely virtuous. But Liberation Theology is heretical in that it sees these acts of temporal liberation as the redemptive focus of Christianity. In fact, releasing people from bondage in this world points the way to the supreme release from bondage in the world to come, wherein our Lord has trampled down death by death, freeing all those who believe in Him from the supreme bondage and oppression of Hell and sacrificing himself so as to grant us the precious gift of life everlasting. Death is swallowed up in victory through the triumph of Christ our God on the cross, and every time we free someone from oppression, we follow in the example of our Lord. The liberation of men from temporal bondage is an icon of the liberation of humanity from eternal bondage. Now, of course, I should at this point clarify that I do not consider Sunday hours to be such an imposition as to liken them to the various heroic acts of emancipation that I have outlined; still less would I be prepared to consider the removal of such a restriction to be an icon of our salvation as described above. And as I stated at the beginning, the decision by Chick Fil A to close on Sundays is clearly one made with pious intent, and is in that respect entirely commendable. However, for the reasons I have set forth above, I do not believe that Christians should do anything which might potentially cause members of any religious minority to feel oppressed. SDAs, Muslims, Jews, and many other people might be greatly inconvenienced by widespread Sunday closures, and although this is no great act of oppression, it will still cause them to feel oppressed, because it is the nature of people to make a big deal out of small things, and at present, when we are confronted on seemingly all sides, by secularism which promises personal freedom from the alleged oppression of religion, from Islam which promises a sense of brotherhood and universal belonging, and from various nominally Christian or psuedo-Christian cults which preach a different gospel and to us are anathema (Galatians 1:8), it is imperative that Christianity be seen, in this era where freedom has become synonymous with virtue, a force of liberation. Thus, rather than closing shop on Sunday, I feel we should extend maximal hospitality, and rather than allowing the media to portray us as oppressors due to our rejection of abortion and homosexuality, we need to seize control of the narrative by reminding people of all those instances in the past, from the ransoming of captives by Trinitarian and Mercedarian Friars starting in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, to the freedom enjoyed by Christians in Lebanon compared to the oppression of Muslims in Saudi Arabia, to the central part the Church of England and its allies played in the abolition of slavery, to the huge improvements in individual rights brought about in ancient Rome. In this way, by stressing the emancipatory nature of Christianity, we can stress how our pro-life position is intended to ensure the freedom of the unborn child to live, and even how our traditional morality concerning homosexuality and transsexuality, can free people afflicted by what is obviously a mental illness, one which is merely ignored due to political pressure, we can free people from shame, gender dysphoria, increased risk of disease, and the many other miseries that are comorbid with the sodomitic ailment. ~ Now, as promised, I will explain the sole exception to my overall feelings on this. That exception is the pernicious trend of youth sports leagues, including public school teams, to schedule practice sessions and other events for Sunday morning. This is something wrong and evil, because it directly interferes in the ability of families to practice their religion. In the interim, it is imperative that Anglican churches resume the weekly service of Choral Evensong on Sundays (and also, where possible, a vigils service on Saturday with Evensong, Compline, Prime, Mattins and the Litany, modeled on the very successful “All Night Vigils” in various Slavic Eastern Orthodox churches, which, despite the name, usually last only for 90 minutes or so). In addition to Sunday Evensong, a Vesperal Holy Communion served once a month could further benefit not only these families, but other people who are for various reasons cannot attend the morning services (and on those days, Mattins could replace Holy Communion as the morning service, if the parish is not operating af a level where Mattins and the Litany precede Holy Communion, which is in my opinion a preferable state of affairs. But in the long run, I feel like it is an imperative that the Christian churches work together to lobby for the scheduling of youth sports events to a time where they will not conflict with either Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam.
A few comments: Firstly, can you link me to information on the Bing incident you describe? Secondly, it should be noted that Christianity and young earth creationism are not synonymous; I myself am not a Young Earth Creationist; I do believe God created the heavens and the earth, and I also believe that he created evolution, and one of the more compelling proofs of the validity of Christianity, in my opinion, is how Genesis 1 is the only description of the creation of the universe in any religion that aligns with our scientific knowledge of the creation of planets and the development of terrestrial life. No other religion even comes close (except of course for Karaite Judaism, and presumably Samaritanism, as they share a common text with us in terms of Genesis Chapter 1; there are some divergences in the Samaritan Torah, but they appear later and relate primarily to Mount Gerizim; Rabinnical or Talmudic Judaism on the other hand, due to the Talmud, places a complex layer of interpretation in front of Genesis 1, indeed, in front of all scripture, which has the effect of altering its meaning). Thirdly, while I myself enjoy Linux (although I prefer OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, and especially Illumos/Solaris), and while I do prefer Linux with SysV init to Windows (Linux with systemd and Wayland, on the other hand, is a house of horrors), I don’t think its a good idea to base ones choice of OS on religious considerations. Especially when we consider that, in the case of Linux, only one of the major developers, Theodore T’so, (who developed the ext3 filesystem and the superior ext4 filesystem, and I believe he was involved with btrfs, whixh is the best Linux filesystem; ext3 and ext4 lag behind XFS in terms of capability) is openly Christian; Linus Torvalds and Richard M Stallman, who were originally responsible for the kernel and the userland, respectively, are both atheists, and several other programmers are into what we might euphemistically call alternative belief systems. For example, Eric S. Raymond, who I do consider a friend, is, most unfortunately, into witchcraft. ~ Of course, its almost certainly the same at Microsoft, Apple, and other companies which still develop operating systems, like IBM. A small minority of Christians, but it is probable that the greater number are adherents of peculiar beliefs.
I too am a Creationist, but don't believe in young earth Creation. I, personally, don't think I know enough about evolution (and don't believe archeologists know enough about evolution), to say. I believe what I understand of Genesis 1, but have to say that other than that, I don't know and don't expect to know until I meet Him.
I quite agree with you concerning the Saturday Sabbath. As for the point you made about piety, I'm pretty certain the idea behind Sunday closures of businesses (setting aside the fact that their understanding of when the Sabbath should be was incorrect) was done in the belief that it would be wrong for the business owner to work on that day, and equally wrong for the owner to make employees work on that day. It was not done to "impose" their Christian beliefs upon the public; rather it was an act of conscience and, since it was done with the Commandment to keep the Sabbath holy in mind, an act of piety. Whether we want to call it true piety or mere pious intent is, I suppose, a rather minor quibble.
Indeed; my view is that it merely fails to keep the Sabbath holy owing to it occuring on the Feast of the Resurrection, which is not the Sabbath but rather a supreme day of joy. I think Christian businesses should operate on Sunday for reasons of hospitality and to provide jobs to non-Christians, except if such businesses exist in a country devoid of non-Christians and Seventh Day Adventists and other heterodox Christians who reject Sunday worship; in that case one might as well close non-essential services on Sunday morning, but only if the people were a really close-knit community who were good friends and neighbors, who could be counted on to assist neighbors who were ill and needed something that would otherwise be unavailable. But such places are few and far between. It is for this reason I strongly advocate Choral Evensong and Vesperal Holy Communion for use in Anglican churches to cater those who cannot attend on Sunday morning.
The Babylon Bee put it best: "Chick-Fil-A Trades Adoring Christian Fans For Outraged Mob That Won't Be Appeased Until Their Every Demand Is Met"