Today is Thursday, August 18th, 2022, and this is the Daily Article Podcast.

Today's article was written by Dr. Jim Denison and narrated by Chris Elkins of the Denison Forum.

Dr. Rochelle Wilensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

announced yesterday a reset that will focus on making the organization quicker to respond to new health threats.

She said, for 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.

She wants a new culture that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness. Dr. Wollinsky should begin with the

first. Colonial American writer Thomas Payne was right, a body of men holding themselves accountable

to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.

To illustrate, the clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the Southern Baptist Convention

continues to make headlines with recent reports that the U.S. Justice Department has initiated

an investigation into the denomination. The Southern Baptist Convention and its entities have committed

to cooperating with the investigation. And Hillsong Church, one of the largest churches in the world,

is being sued by a whistleblower who alleges the megachurch moved millions of dollars in payments

through overseas entities to avoid scrutiny by Australia's charities regulator.

The less our culture believes in objective morality, the more we need others to help us choose

to be moral. However, those who are to hold us accountable are also fallen people who need

to be held accountable themselves. And our all-pervasive political culture is exacerbating the problem.

German theologian Wolfhardt Pannonberg observed, the idea of democracy has more the

function of political religion than that of a description of political reality. He points to

centuries of conflicts between Protestants and Catholics and between Protestants,

animosity which has persuaded Western society that cultural unity cannot be based on religious unity.

So we sacralized the secular, investing religious devotion in political parties and their leaders.

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