Just for the sake of adequate seriousness, I will resist all temptations to pun. That is no easy resistance in light of the report from the Associated Press about American churches developing special services for congregants and their dogs.

The story, reported by Gillian Flaccus, begins with Rev. Tom Eggebeen of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. Faced with an aging and declining congregation, the pastor decided to do something innovative -- he started a service for both people and dogs, "Canines at Covenant."

Gillian Flaccus described Eggebeen's idea: "He would turn God's house into a doghouse by offering a 30-minute service complete with individual doggie beds, canine prayers and an offering of dog treats. He hopes it will reinvigorate the church's connection with the community, provide solace to elderly members and, possibly, attract new worshippers who are as crazy about God as they are about their four-legged friends."

Flaccus also cited Laura Hobgood-Oster, a religion professor at Southwestern University in Texas, who recently conducted a survey that revealed more than 500 churches that conduct blessing services for pets and six that go so far as to offer pet worship services like the "Canines at Covenant" service. One church near Boston offers a "Woof 'n Worship" service. The professor sees "pet-centric" services as a growing trend.

The reason she offers is especially interesting: "It's the changing family structure, where pets are really central and religious communities are starting to recognize that people need various kinds of rituals that include their pets . . . . More and more people in mainline Christianity are considering them to have some kind of soul."

The report goes on to explain that the dogs at the "Canines at Covenant" service showed little evidence of interest. Nevertheless, the service was very pleasing to the human participants who brought their dogs. One woman brought two dogs, a black Lab and a Dachshund-terrier mix. She told the reporter, "I don't have any kids, so my pets have always been my children, so it does mean a lot . . . . I haven't been to church in a long time and this may push me into it. I'm getting older and I've been thinking about those things again."

Gillian Flaccus offers a very interesting report on the "Canines at Covenant" service and the larger phenomenon of "pet-centric" services. Her report also points to a deep theological confusion that these services bring to light. There are several dimensions to this confusion.

First, the Bible clearly presents animals as part of the goodness of God's creation. As Christians, we are to see the glory of God in the diversity and wonders of the animal kingdom. We are to respect all animals as intentional creations of God and to acknowledge the gifts that these creatures represent. God created animals for his own glory, and humans are to see the glory of the Creator in each animal species and individual.

Second, God made human beings as the only creatures made in his image. As the image-bearers of God, humans alone have the capacity to know and to worship the Creator. Animals reflect the glory of God, but only human beings can see the glory of God and know the Creator.  Animals may possess consciousness, but they do not have souls. They lack the capacity to know the Creator.

Third, God assigned human beings dominion over the animal kingdom and clearly marked a separation between humans and animals. This separation is clear, ranging from the dominion theme to the prohibition of bestiality. To compromise that separation is to disobey God. Some part of our contemporary confusion over this distinction is due to emotionalism and sentiment, but much of it is driven by an ideology that reduces the status of humanity to that of the animals.

Fourth, while we recognize and celebrate the consciousness of many animals, we recognize that their consciousness is different from our own. We must also be aware that we tend to read features of human consciousness onto animals. We enjoy stories and movies that feature talking animals and endearing animal characters, but this is fiction, not fact. Many animals do enjoy forms of community and relatedness, but they are not humans. We must always be aware of the temptation to read human abilities and states of mind onto animals.

Fifth, to put the matter simply, animals do not worship God. Jesus told the woman at the well [John 4] that the Father seeks worshippers who worship him in spirit and in truth. The biblical concept of worship is not limited to attendance at a service, but involves the conscious and active knowledge of himself through Jesus Christ. Dogs do not worship. As Gillian Flaccus reported, the dogs at the "Canines at Covenant" service "didn't seem very interested in dogma." That observation is cute, but profoundly understated.

Sixth, the Bible says a great deal about animals. From Genesis to Revelation animals are keys to understanding God's revelation. Genesis shows us the indescribable wonder of the animals in creation. The Bible reveals the catastrophic impact of the Fall on animals, leading to predation and violence. At the end of the Bible, we are given the picture of the new creation and the reversal of the curse of sin as the lion and the lamb lay together. But, amazingly enough, even as the Bible mentions animals as beasts of burden and agents of violence, it gives virtually no attention to animals as pets.

Seventh, America is a pet-centric culture, and this reveals much about us. We have the wealth to spend billions of dollars on pets. The ownership and enjoyment of pets is a sign of wealth and plenty. We are also a society that is trading human relationships for the companionship of pets. We cut off our elderly from extended family and leave them alone with their pets. We see increasing numbers of younger people who decide not to have children, but instead to pour themselves into relationships with their pets. Restaurants, malls, and hotels are asked to allow pets even as they allow children. Professor Hobgood-Oster points to the pet-centricity of our society as evidence of "the changing family structure, where pets are really central." The woman who brought her two dogs to the "Canines at Covenant" service said, "I don't have any kids, so my pets have always been my children." Postmodern Americans see these statements as evidence of new lifestyle choices. Christians should see these statements as tragic.

Eighth, the churches that offer these services are concentrated in the liberal wing of American Protestantism. The declining membership of liberal churches is matched to a loss of theological focus. Churches concerned with the preaching of the Gospel, committed to authentic evangelism and biblical preaching, are not going to demonstrate the confusion that leads to "Canines at Covenant." It is not surprising that Covenant Presbyterian Church lists its support for same-sex marriage and opposition to California's "Proposition 8" defending traditional marriage on the front page of its Web site.

I am thankful for dogs. My own family cherishes a friendly and inquisitive Beagle who reveals the glory of God in just being a Beagle. But Baxter does not go to church. I am absolutely convinced that animals will be a part of the New Creation we are promised in Christ. But it is believers in Christ -- redeemed humanity -- that yearn for this New Creation. To blur the distinction between humans and animals is to confuse the Gospel itself.

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Gillian Flaccus, "Gone to the Dogs: LA Church Starts Pet Service." Associated Press (AP), November 4, 2009.

I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

"Clothes are never a frivolity -- they always mean something." Thus spoke James Laver, a famous costume designer and interpreter of fashion. He is right, of course. Clothes always mean something, which is why The New York Times gave major attention to an issue facing many schools: "Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?"

The article, right on the front of the "Sunday Styles" section of the paper, announced, "When gender bends the dress code, high schools struggle to respond." The story reveals a confusion over gender that goes far beyond the dress code.

As Jan Hoffman reports, high schools generally have very specific rules about clothing these days. Boys are forbidden to wear muscle shirts and saggy pants, and girls cannot wear midriff-exposing tops or skirts that are too short. But what happens when a boy wants to wear a skirt?

"In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation," Hoffman reports. "Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans."

This is no longer an issue limited to isolated examples. Districts across the country have reported teens who have attempted to cross the gender line in dress. Many of these cases have captured media attention, with highly publicized controversies. In other cases, the challenges have been more quiet.

The cases are, to say the least, both interesting and troubling. Boys are making news for wearing skinny jeans, makeup, wigs, and skirts. Girls are bending gender in their own way by, for example, wearing a tuxedo for the school picture or to a school event.

Jan Hoffman does a good job of setting the issue in perspective:

Dress is always code, particularly for teenagers eager to telegraph evolving identities. Each year, schools hope to quell disruption by prohibiting the latest styles that signify a gang affiliation, a sexual act or drug use.

But when officials want to discipline a student whose wardrobe expresses sexual orientation or gender variance, they must consider antidiscrimination policies, mental health factors, community standards and classroom distractions.

Well, that certainly presents a very complicated challenge. Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist cited in the article, states the obvious: "This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with. . . . A lot of youths say they won't be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field."  She added that adults then "become the gender police through dress codes."

As Hoffman makes clear, these challenges to dress codes can quickly become legal skirmishes pitting students (and often their parents) against school administrators. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute argues that this is one reason that so many schools have shifted to students wearing uniforms.

"It's hard enough to get students to concentrate on an algorithm," she reminds, "even without Jimmy sitting there in lipstick and fake eyelashes."

That sets the issue in a very clear instructional perspective. Schools are about teaching and learning, and both teachers and administrators face daunting challenges. The last thing they need is the added distraction of gender-bending teenagers on parade.

And the issues can be far more troubling than classroom distractions. Hoffman reports that some schools have faced boys wearing "pink frilly scarves" and makeup and girls trying to dress like male gang members. In Columbus, Ohio a boy wearing a girl's clothing but using the boys' bathroom. Jeff Grace, faculty advisor for the school's gay-straight alliance club told Hoffman, "One day I heard a student say, ‘Man, there was a girl in the guy's restroom, standing up using the urinal! What's up with that?'" Another student then quipped, "That wasn't a girl. That's just Jack."

These adolescents represent the younger face of a society that is giving itself over a a confusion about gender and dress that reveals a much deeper confusion about gender, sexuality, and the limits of self-expression. The controversy also reveals an even deeper cultural and moral divide over the same issues.

Should a boy who shows up at school dressed as a girl be celebrated for self-expression and transgressing the boundaries of gender roles, or should he be seen as signaling a need for help and adult-imposed rules? The widely divergent answers to that question reveal the great worldview divide in postmodern America. This controversy cannot be isolated from the movement to normalize homosexuality, and that movement cannot be separated from an effort to remove all notions of fixed gender roles and sexual identity.

The controversy over boys wearing skirts to school is a symptom of our loss of sexual sanity and the will to preserve any reasonable and healthy understanding of gender. These teenagers are telling us something important -- we are losing our sexual sanity.

For Christians, the issue is a matter of biblical concern. The Bible reveals a concern for respecting and honoring gender as God's gift. In the Old Testament, the Law taught respect for these distinctions and roles. In the New Testament, we find similar expectations. As the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11: 7-15:

For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.

While addressed to the specific concerns of a church setting, this text also generalizes the point by making a specific reference to what nature teaches concerning the recognition of the difference between males and females. The Creator is honored and glorified when men and boys dress and present themselves as males and when women and girls dress and present themselves as females. Culture by culture and generation by generation the specific form of this distinction may change, but the point remains.

God made human beings to show His glory, and an essential part of that glory is the visible difference between males and females that is reflected even in the public presentation of dress. We should be able to tell the difference between a boy and a girl by the way they dress and present themselves in public.

As James Laver reminded, clothes always tell us something. This article from the "Sunday Styles" section of The New York Times tells us something as well -- something we need to hear.

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Jan Hoffman, "Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?," The New York Times, Sunday, November 8, 2009.

I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

This week's question at "On Faith," the religion project of The Washington Post and Newsweek was posed against the tragic backdrop of the shootings at Fort Hood. The question comes down to this: "How far should the military go to accommodate personal religious beliefs and practices?"

In the days since the shootings, the question of Muslims serving in the U.S. military has been unavoidable. In one sense, the question is hardly new. It arose in the first Gulf War when Muslims asked if it could be allowable to serve in the U.S. military when action was taken in or against a Muslim majority nation. Clearly, the question now arises in the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan. Evidence that Hasan cried out a Muslim expression during the attack, that he had visited a mosque linked to Muslim extremism, and that he had been in contact with suspected Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda only served to add urgency to the questions.

The United States military is made up of citizen soldiers, and is an all-voluntary force. These citizen-soldiers defend our freedoms and constitutional rights, and they do not surrender their constitutional rights when they put on the uniform. Our cherished rights of religious belief and expression are not canceled when individuals enter the Armed Forces.

At the same time, the military is a unique institution -- a fact recognized by law. Voluntary enlistment in the Armed Forces entails the assumption of certain limitations and responsibilities that are necessary for the maintenance of military order and effectiveness.

Given our commitment to religious liberty, we must make every reasonable accommodation to the religious beliefs of military personnel. These accommodations range from the provision of military chaplains and chapels to the category of conscientious objector, based in religious conviction. Complex questions do arise, and in the context of deployment to battle the questions of accommodating religious belief can erupt in excruciatingly difficult forms.

Service in the military is open to all, regardless of religious faith. In our constitutional republic, that is as it should be. Those who wear the uniform of the U.S. Armed Services take an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States." To take that oath and put on that uniform is to accept a solemn and sacred responsibility to defend the United States. If religious beliefs conflict with this oath, the individual should never enter the Armed Forces.

We know enough by now to know that Major Hasan was a deeply troubled man. There is now no way to isolate his deeds from his Muslim identity. We cannot read his heart, but we can read of his contacts, statements, and actions. There is already a reactivated debate among Muslims about the ethics of Muslims serving in the Armed Forces in Muslim lands.

It is not fair to generalize Major Hasan's actions to the entire Muslim community, but there is also no way to ignore the fact that Major Hasan's Muslim beliefs were involved in his motive for the killings. This will take time to sort out.

In the meantime, the U.S. Armed Forces should make every effort to accommodate the religious beliefs and convictions of its personnel. That is what we owe to those who put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms. But they owe the entire nation -- and first of all their fellow soldiers --  the commitments of loyalty, obedience, respect, and protection.

The military cannot accommodate any belief system that undermines those commitments. No nation can accommodate those who would turn themselves into terrorists against their own neighbors, citizens, and fellow soldiers.

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I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is an important landmark in human history. That wall, one of history's most heinous symbols of oppression, stood as a physical reminder of Communism's essence. The Wall was not built to keep invaders out, but to imprison a people within. In the singular interest of avoiding its own evacuation, the Soviet-backed government of the German Democratic Republic erected that wall and murdered those who attempted to cross it.

The passage of time is so swift that today's younger Americans are only dimly aware of the Wall, if at all.  Their historical horizons collapse anything before their birth into ancient history.  As with all historical losses, this one is costly. We must remember the Wall in all of its ugliness and murderousness.  We must remember the gun towers and barbed wire, the broken glass and mines, the sight of human beings shot dead simply for seeking to flee a regime that crushed the human spirit.

History is never uncomplicated.  Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, several insights come into focus.  We now know that the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc had for some time been losing confidence and the will to maintain order by any and all means.  The epic economic and social failures of Marxism were impossible to deny.  Too many eyes had seen over the Wall, and denial of the obvious grew ever more costly.

The aged leaders of the Soviet Union maintained a steady face, but their own younger leaders had lost hope in the system. The Communist regimes were, quite literally, losing steam.  The amazing fact to realize now is that so few in the West seemed to see this.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Anthony R. Dolan, a former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan, offers keen insights in "Four Little Words," published in today's edition.  The article takes us into the life of the Reagan administration as President Reagan prepared to deliver a speech at the Berlin Wall in July of 1987. Reagan's speech at the Berlin Wall is rightly remembered for four words he addressed directly to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall."

As Dolan recalls, those words sent shock waves through the White House and the State Department long before the world heard the President speak them.  Powerful forces within the Administration warned that the words would "embarrass" Gorbachev.  But Reagan knew his moment, and he was fueled by a moral clarity that was missing in others.  Previous administrations had sought to avoid the kind of ultimatum of history that President Reagan delivered at the Wall.

As Dolan writes:

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

Dolan's article is important at many levels -- not least for revealing the divisions within the American government -- but his focus on moral clarity in the face of Communist oppression and criminality is both refreshing and important.  Reagan understood that certain regimes and empires were -- remember the word? -- evil.

This is not to suggest that any government or political structure is perfect.  Nevertheless, the Communist regimes that were so clearly exposed by the Berlin Wall had given themselves over to criminality and evil. President Reagan saw this when others, trained to see the world as diplomats, failed to see.  Reagan saw himself as stating the obvious, and hoped to give others courage to see and say the same.

There are two great moral dangers we must always resist: The first is declaring moral clarity before the truth is known.  The second is refusing to acknowledge a moral clarity that is right before our eyes.  These days, the second appears to be the greater temptation.

Those who took down the Berlin Wall in 1989 knew exactly what they were doing.  They knew exactly what that Wall meant.  They were willing to tear it down with their bare hands.  They were animated by freedom and guided by moral clarity.

We dare not forget the day the Wall fell, nor the moral clarity that brought it down.

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Anthony R. Dolan, "Four Little Words," The Wall Street Journal, Monday, November 9, 2009.

I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.