Page 5060 – Christianity Today (2024)

CHRISTIANITY TODAY/October 6, 1989

As the saga of the fallen preacher continues, ministry leaders and former followers try to sort out the pieces of the PTL empire.

At the Heritage USA theme park that Jim Bakker built, Dorothy Barry is praying that the pain of the last two-and-a-half years will soon end. From her vantage point at a concession stand in the Heritage Grand Hotel, she has been a front-row witness to the spiraling turmoil begun with the downfall of Bakker in 1987.

A few miles away at the new Heritage Ministries, former PTL employees are also praying for an end to the pain. Many have distanced themselves from the Bakkers, but the effects of the PTL scandal continue to influence their daily lives.

Bakker’s high-drama criminal trial has refocused national attention on the plight of the disgraced television evangelist. Less attention has been given to the remnants of the ministry he founded and to the thousands of Christians whose lives he touched.

Uncertain Future

At press time, the future was still very uncertain at Heritage USA, the 2,300-acre Christian retreat center in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Thrown into bankruptcy in June 1987, Heritage USA is still fighting for its life. The 500-room Heritage Grand Hotel, the Inspirational Network cable-television facility, and the recreational water park/camping grounds have continued to operate, administered first by a bankruptcy court and then by apparent buyer Stephen Mernick, a Toronto businessman.

Mernick’s attempt to take control has been put on hold, even though the bankruptcy court accepted his $65 million bid to buy the place in December 1988. Under the terms of the sales contract, Mernick was to have closed the deal on Heritage USA by September 30. However, late in August his attorneys asked the bankruptcy court for another year.

Mernick has been unable to take undisputed possession of the property because a group of Catawba Indians is claiming rights to part of the land. The bankruptcy judge was scheduled to hear arguments from both Mernick and the Indian group on September 27.

In the meantime, creditors with mortgage holdings at Heritage USA are pushing to take control of assets there. The largest creditor, Fairfax Savings and Loan of Baltimore, is raising doubts about whether Mernick can come up with the money to fulfill his bid. If Mernick does not go through with the deal, the bankruptcy court will have to decide whether to seek a new buyer, sell off assets piecemeal, or allow the creditors to control the assets.

Staying The Course

Amid the uncertainty, Heritage USA employees—many of them hired by Bakker—are struggling to continue the original vision. The number of visitors has dropped dramatically, and the occupancy of the Heritage Grand Hotel is averaging only about 20 percent, according to a hotel employee. The Heritage Tower Hotel remains unfinished and boarded up. Grounds, once immaculate, are showing signs of deterioration. Yet employees are frustrated at media portrayals that the place has shut down.

Selina Sherill, who runs a craft shop in the hotel, said the uncertain ownership has prevented property development, publicity, and repairs. “And the negative news stories haven’t helped us any,” she said. Sherill said the water park had two record days this summer, and the hotel still sells out for periodic conventions. “This is still the best place in the world to come,” she said.

Ten minutes up the road in Charlotte, former PTL partners and employees are working on a new dream. Last month Heritage Ministries, led by Sam Johnson, dedicated new ministry facilities. Begun in 1988, the group had raised $5.5 million to buy back Heritage USA, but this spring decided the effort was futile.

Johnson, who was PTL director of world missions for two years before resigning and being brought back by Jerry Falwell in 1987, said nearly 27,000 former PTL partners gave gifts to buy back Heritage. He said about 90 percent of them agreed to allow the money to be used to buy new property instead.

Over Labor Day weekend, Heritage Ministries dedicated 20 acres of land, three buildings, and television facilities “very close to debt-free,” Johnson said.

Heritage Ministries produces “The Old Fashioned Camp Meeting Hour” weekdays, televises Sunday services at the Assemblies of God Heritage Church, holds camp meetings daily on the grounds, maintains a 24-hour prayer line, sponsors marriage and healing workshops, and has recently begun a Christian school and a prison ministry.

On Sunday mornings, the 750-seat church auditorium is generally filled to capacity, largely with former PTL partners. Johnson said no matter what happens with the Mernick sale, Heritage Ministries will stay at its current site.

Hard Feelings

While Johnson’s ministry has attempted to distance itself from Bakker, many ties still exist with Heritage USA. Heritage Ministries staffs the Upper Room Prayer ministry, the Welcome Center, and the Chapel by the Lake at Heritage USA, and runs a shuttle bus between the two facilities. “What we’ve tried to do … is to take the good and leave the bad,” Johnson said.

Relationships between the two facilities are often rocky. Many of those at Heritage USA feel Johnson and the others betrayed the vision of Heritage by moving from the grounds. Some will always connect Johnson with Falwell and the downfall of Bakker.

Conversely, many of the partners who joined Heritage Ministries still feel hurt and bitterness toward Bakker. “The situation has had an adverse effect on us all,” Johnson said.

Perhaps the deepest effect has been on those who contributed money to the cause. Some, like retired coal miner Lamar Kerstetter, are still angry. Kerstetter testified for the prosecution at Bakker’s trial. Outside the courtroom another contributor, retired construction worker Joseph Cicciaro, voiced bitterness, telling reporters, “I was robbed. [Bakker] did me wrong.”

Gil and Mabel Zechman of Middleburg, Pennsylvania, are taking a more restrained view. The couple, who contributed $2,000 in 1985, said they made several trips to Heritage USA, stayed in the Grand Hotel, and enjoyed a number of activities. “We got our money’s worth out of it,” Mrs. Zechman said. “We don’t feel cheated at all.”

Lifetime partner Dorothy Barry remains staunchly behind the Bakkers. She spent several weeks this summer volunteering with the new Jim and Tammy Ministries in Orlando and is now working at Heritage USA. “I believe in a God of restoration and a second chance,” she said.

Many Bakker supporters feel shunned by the rest of the body of Christ. “My Bible says if you can’t forgive your brother … you’re a liar and the love of God is not in you,” said Tony Cutrufello, who works in a Heritage USA shop. “Even if [Bakker] were guilty of all of it, that’s no excuse for us to say, ‘Stay out.’”

Good Neighbor?

As Jim Bakker’s criminal trial got under way at the federal courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, local curiosity seekers waited for hours to catch a glimpse of their community’s most infamous son. In the region that watched Bakker’s ministry grow to national prominence, many people have sympathetic feelings toward the disgraced evangelist.

Bakker’s Heritage USA theme park was a major tourist attraction—6 million people were reported to have visited the grounds in 1986—and most community leaders were elated at the boost PTL gave to local tourism and area businesses during its heyday. Even local people who never gave a penny to the ministry visited the grounds for special events, such as the annual Christmas light show. Citizens describe how traffic into Heritage USA would back up for miles every December as people came to see the free show. Often they would receive a free Christmas ornament just for visiting. “Jim Bakker couldn’t have squandered all the money,” one visitor said. “Heritage USA didn’t come from the Big Bang theory.”

Although Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were not active in community politics and other civic activities, they nonetheless became local celebrities. Many citizens can recount the times they saw Tammy Faye in her white mink at the flea market, or ate dinner at the same restaurant as the Bakkers.

Yet, local sentiment runs in the opposite direction as well. Two retired construction workers picketing with signs outside the courthouse said the Bakkers brought nothing but shame to the area. “God doesn’t need a theme park over Jesus,” Bob Eckhardt said. “The Bakkers have damaged the cause of Christ, and we’ll all suffer as a result of it.”

Lingering Effects

Partners on all sides are eager to put the scandal behind them, but many doubt that will happen soon. Insiders say more indictments and lawsuits are forthcoming. And the larger Christian community may also have to deal with the lingering effects of Bakker’s downfall.

Ross Rhoads, pastor of the interdenominational Calvary Church in Mecklenburg County, said the PTL scandal has in some ways hurt and in other ways helped the church. The Charlotte Observer, which won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the PTL scandals, has been publishing articles raising questions about Calvary’s construction of a new $35 million building and its capacity to pay back a hefty bank loan.

Rhoads, who is secretary of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, said he believes the size and diversity of Calvary’s programs would have attracted the paper’s attention even had PTL never happened. But he acknowledged the PTL affair has “heightened skepticism in the general public and heightened our accountability,” adding that the scandal “has produced a good and humbling reaction for the church to be more circ*mspect.”

But at the same time, Rhoads said, the scandal has added obstacles to witnessing about Jesus Christ. “There is greater bark to cut into now,” he said, “before we get to the heart of the tree.”

By Kim A. Lawton in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Heavenly Wrestling Match

When we visualize God as being up in heaven, and heaven as being apart from earth, we lose the immediacy of God as part of the story, part of our being, as intimate as was the angel who wrestled all night with Jacob and changed his story forever. God was not something apart from Creation or apart from daily life. God was there, marvelously, terribly there.…

Angels often appear when they are least expected; that’s one of the wonders of angels. But if an angel chooses to wrestle with you, you are going to recognize it, like it or not. And then, perhaps, you may demand a blessing, and receive.

—Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow

Peace Initiative?

Beat your enemies into plowshares.

—Button for sale at Chicago’s Peace Museum

Of Hotdogs And French Cuisine

Just like do’s-and-don’tsism, liturgism comes in two varieties: high and low.… If you’re from Bumpkin Ridge you may need a different strategy than genuflections and incense. It’s the old favorite hymns that make you feel the religion in your heart.… And it’s not the priest crossing himself that makes you feel religious, but the thump of his fist on the pulpit, and the song leader flingin’ his arms every which way. If there isn’t enough arms-flingin’ and Bible-thumping, the Holy Spirit just doesn’t grip on you.… If the high liturgy was a French dinner, this is a hotdog and a co*ke.

—Robert Roberts in the Reformed Journal (Feb. 1987)

Vision Over View

Two men looked out from prison bars.

One saw mud, one saw stars.

In the pursuit of the fullness of human life, everything depends on this frame of reference, this habitual outlook, this basic vision which I have of myself, others, life, the world, and God. What we see is what we get.

—Fr. John Powell in Through Seasons of the Heart

What A Party!

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in The Martyred Christian, by Joan Winmill Brown

God Just Doesn’T Matter

According to the teaching of our Lord, what is wrong with the world is precisely that it does not believe in God. Yet it is clear that the unbelief which he so bitterly deplored was not an intellectual persuasion of God’s-non-existence. Those whom he rebuked for their lack of faith were not men who denied God with the top of their minds, but men who, while apparently incapable of doubting him with the top of their minds, lived as though he did not exist.

—John Baillie in Our Knowledge of God

A PSALM OF PRAISE

Thank You God That You see armies march a sparrow fall hear atom’s blast a baby’s cry smell volcano’s flow a man’s sweat feel contour of mountains a little lump taste ocean’s salt my tears.

—Joseph Bayly in psalms of My Life; calligraphy by Tim Botts

Dangerous Confusion

It sounds terribly spiritual to say “God led me,” but I am always suspicious of a person who implies that he has a personal pipeline to God. When no one else senses that what the person suggests is the will of God, then we had better be careful. God has been blamed for the most outlandish things by people who have confused their own inverted pride with God’s will.

—Paul E. Little in a sermon, “Affirming the Will of God” (Great Sermons of the 20th Century, compiled by Peter F. Gunther)

Masterpieces Don’T Lie

Serious critics sometimes argue that the standards in art are always relative, but all artistic masterpieces give them the lie.

—John Gardner in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

Bad Examples

Today, everybody and his brother (and lover and agent) claim to be Christians. When I was a kid, God may not have gotten the recognition he merits, but today he gets more publicity than he deserves. People used to hide their light under a bushel; today it would be good if some had the sense not to share their testimony.

—Wayne Joosse in The Reformed Journal (April 1989)

I have a confession to make. For years I hated the Book of Psalms. I knew that many Christians looked upon it as their favorite biblical book, that the church had incorporated these poems into public worship, and that overtones from the King James Version of Psalms still reverberated beautifully throughout the language. But, hard as I tried, I could never get excited about actually reading Psalms.

People around me seemed to use the book as a spiritual medicine cabinet: “If you feel depressed, read Psalm 37.” “If your health fails, try Psalm 121.” That approach never worked for me. Instead, I would with uncanny consistency land on a psalm that merely exacerbated, not cured, my problem. Church historian Martin Marty judges about a third of the psalms to be “wintry” in tone, and when feeling down I would accidentally turn to one of the wintriest psalms and end up frostily depressed.

More than anything, Psalms confused me. It seemed to contradict itself violently: psalms of bleak despair abutted psalms of soaring joy, as if the scribes had arranged them with a mockingly dialectical sense of humor. After a few minutes’ reading, though, the poems would begin to sound boring and repetitious, and I wondered why the Bible needed 150 psalms—wouldn’t 15 suffice to cover the basic content?

I tried to address the problem by studying the book systematically. I learned to appreciate the poetic craft involved in Hebrew parallelism, and to recognize the different types of psalms: imprecatory, lament, ascent, royal, thank-offering, and so on. After acquiring all this knowledge, I read the psalms with a heightened sense of comprehension but, alas, with no heightened sense of enjoyment. And so for years I simply avoided the book. You can find a psalm that says anything, I reasoned. Why bother with them?

I now realize how impoverished I was. In my fixation with the details of the psalms—their categories, interpretive meaning, logical consistency, poetic form—I had missed the whole point, which is that Psalms comprises a sampling of spiritual journals. They are personal letters to God. I must read them as an “over-the-shoulder” reader, for the intended audience was not other people, but God. Even the psalms for public use were designed as corporate prayers: God was their primary audience as well.

I suppose I had been unconsciously trying to fit the psalms into the scriptural grid established by the apostle Paul. But these are not pronouncements from on high, delivered with full apostolic authority, on matters of faith and practice. They are personal prayers in the form of poetry, written by a variety of people—peasants, kings, professional musicians, rank amateurs—in wildly fluctuating moods. Sometimes the authors were vindictive, sometimes self-righteous, sometimes paranoid, sometimes petty.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not believe Psalms is any less valuable, or less authoritative, than Paul’s epistles or the Gospels. Nevertheless, the psalms do use an inherently different approach. They are not so much representing God to the people as the people representing themselves to God. Yes, they are part of God’s Word, but in the same way Job or Ecclesiastes is a part of God’s Word. We read the speeches of Job’s friends in a different way than we read the Sermon on the Mount.

Understanding this distinction changed the way I read Psalms. Formerly, I had approached the book as a graduate student might approach a textbook: I skimmed the poetry in search of correct and important concepts that could be noted and neatly classified. Psalms resists such systematization and will, I think, drive mad anyone who tries to wrench from it a rigid organizational schema. I began to approach it in a very different way.

Let me illustrate. I own a worn, black Scofield Reference Bible that belonged to my father. Because he died when I was 13 months old, I have no conscious memories of him. Yet even now I can learn something of his relationship with God by reading the notes in the margins of that Bible, for he used the white space to record a kind of spiritual journal. Certainly, he never had me in mind when he wrote those notes; I did not yet exist. But years later I can be moved, challenged, and convicted as I read about his relationship with God.

The psalms are far more formal than my father’s scribbled notes, of course. They came out of a common context, God’s covenant relationship with Israel, and were expressed in beautiful, sometimes highly structured poetry.

But now, as I read them, I begin by trying to project myself back into the minds of the authors—just as I project myself back into the mind of my father who wrote those fragmentary notes. Could I pray these prayers? I ask myself. Have I felt this peculiar anguish? This outburst of praise? I come to them not primarily as a student wanting to acquire knowledge, but rather as a fellow pilgrim wanting to acquire relationship. The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and all our souls, and all our minds. More than any other book in the Bible, Psalms reveals what a heartfelt, soul-starved, single-minded relationship with God looks like.

Poetry works its magic subtly. In modern times, at least, we rarely seek out poetry in order to learn something. We turn to it because the poet’s shaping of words and images gives us pleasure and moves our emotions. Yet if the poet is successful, we may gain something greater than knowledge; we may gain a transformed vision. And that is the magic the psalms have ultimately worked on me. They have transformed my spiritual vision and my understanding of relationship with God in these three ways:

First, the psalms help me reconcile what I believe about life with what I actually encounter in life.

When I was a child, I learned this mealtime prayer: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for this food.” Its cadence has a certain incantatory charm, and indeed the prayer sounds as if it could have come from Psalms. What could be simpler than that prayer? Two foundational assertions of theology and a spirit of thanksgiving are all expressed in one-syllable words.

Yet praying that simple prayer with honesty and conviction has been for me, at times, an Abrahamic trial of faith. God is great? Why don’t we see more conspicuous evidence? Why is it that the scientists, who make their living studying the wonders of natural creation, are less likely than an illiterate peasant to attribute those wonders to God? Why have more Christians died for their faith in this century than in all others combined?

God is good? Why did my father, a young man with unlimited potential as a missionary, die before reaching the age of 30? Why did all those innocent Jews and Christians die without justice in the Holocaust? Why is the most religious portion of our population, inner-city blacks, the most poverty-stricken and hopeless?

Thank him for this food? I kept up that practice even through smartalecky days of adolescence, when I gave more credit to the abundance of American rivers and the wizardry of farmers. But what of the Christians in Sudan or Ethiopia? How can they thank God while dying for want of food?

If reading the last three paragraphs has made you slightly uncomfortable, perhaps you should read Psalms again. They are journals of people who believe in a loving, gracious, faithful God in a world that keeps falling apart.

The psalmists often expressed variations on the themes that I have mentioned. Why should those nasty Amalekites, Hittites, Philistines, and Canaanites, not to mention the juggernaut empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, take turns crushing God’s chosen people? Why should David, anointed by God to be king, spend a decade hiding out in caves and dodging the spears of Saul, whom God had ordered to step down? How can they be thankful when there seems so little to be thankful for?

Many psalms show their authors fiercely struggling with such questions. Sometimes the psalmists are able to align the emotions of faith with the doctrines of faith in the very course of writing the psalm. But sometimes they cannot, and at this point the seemingly random ordering of the 150 psalms comes into play.

The most startling juxtaposition of psalms occurs early on. Psalm 23, that shepherd song of sweeping promise and consummate comfort, follows on the heels of Psalm 22, which opens with the words Jesus quoted from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Both psalms are attributed to David, but the two could hardly form a more glaring contrast.

True, David does find some sort of resolution in Psalm 22, by looking ahead to a future time when God will rule over the nations and the poor will eat and be satisfied. But he makes clear how he feels at the moment of writing: “I cry out by day, but you do not answer.… I am a worm and not a man.… Roaring lions tearing their prey open their mouths wide against me.… All my bones are out of joint.… My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.” Such sentiments are light years away from “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.… Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.”

Another juxtaposition occurs with Psalms 102 and 103. The first (subtitled “A prayer of an afflicted man. When he is faint and pours out his lament before the LORD.”) eloquently expresses the despair of an aging, weakened man who feels abandoned by all friends, and by God. It reads like a catalog of pain scratched out by a hospital patient in a feverish state. Yet the following psalm is a majestic hymn of praise that includes not one note in the minor key.

I doubt many pastors choose to preach on those two psalms together—one or the other, maybe, but not both. But I have learned to appreciate Psalms simply because it does encompass both points of view, often adjoined with no calming transition. “Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits,” says Psalm 103. The author of its nearest neighbor is trying his best not to forget God’s benefits, but that’s no easy task in his condition, with his bones burning like glowing embers and his diet consisting of ashes and tears.

I, for one, am glad my Bible includes both kinds of psalms. A time may come when I will feel like the author of Psalms 22 or 102, and if that time comes, I will take comfort in the fact that spiritual giants—most notably, Jesus himself—have felt that way too. And although I may groan and cry out and resist the trial that has me in its net, I will also try to remember the wonderful message of Psalms 23 and 103.

Taken together, the 150 psalms are as difficult, disordered, and messy as life itself. Oddly, that fact gives me great comfort.

Primal-scream Prayers

You don’t have to read far in Psalms before encountering some troubling passages—such as vengeful outbursts of fury tucked away in the midst of elegant pastoral poetry. Some seem on the level of “I hope you get hit by a truck!” schoolyard epithets. “Imprecatory psalms,” these are called, or sometimes, “vindictive psalms,” or, more bluntly, “cursing psalms,” because of the curses they rain down on opponents.

What are such outbursts doing in the midst of sacred Scripture? Readers have proposed various explanations.

1. The cursing psalms express an appropriate “righteous anger” over evil.

Prof. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind tells about asking his undergraduate class at the University of Chicago to identify an evil person. Not one student could do so. “Evil” simply did not exist as a category in their minds. Our inability to recognize and identify evil, says Bloom, is a sign of grave danger in our society.

I have received great help on this issue from my wife, who works near an inner-city housing project. She sees pervasive evil every day: the gangs who snipe at sidewalk pedestrians with automatic rifles, the policemen who rough up innocent people because of skin color, the thieves who knock down senior citizens outside the currency exchange where they cash their social security checks.

A few months ago my wife came home boiling with anger. A janitor was tyrannizing the residents of one senior citizens’ building. He would use his master key to enter widows’ apartments, then beat them up and steal their money. Everyone knew the culprit, but because he wore a mask and could not be positively identified, the city housing authority was stalling on his transfer or dismissal.

If Allan Bloom had asked my wife to describe an evil person that day, he would have gotten a vivid description with no hesitation. And precisely that kind of structural evil—corrupt judges, slave owners, robbers, oppressors of the poor, racists, terrorists—was what the psalmists were responding to.

The “righteous anger” explanation may illuminate the motives behind the cursing psalms, but it does not remove all the problems they present. Although furious, Janet did not stalk around the house muttering threats like, “May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes” (Ps. 109:10), or, “Happy is he … who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps. 137:8–9).

2. The cursing psalms express a spiritual immaturity corrected by the New Testament.

C. S. Lewis, who seemed almost embarrassed by the cursing psalms, discussed this approach in his book Reflections on the Psalms. He contrasted the psalmists’ spirit of vengefulness with another spirit (“Love your enemies,” “Forgive them for they know not what they do”) exemplified in the New Testament. “The reaction of the Psalmists to injury, though profoundly natural, is profoundly wrong,” Lewis said.

Having observed nothing comparable to the psalmists’ vengeful spirit in pagan literature, Lewis developed a rather complicated argument related to the election of the Jews. “Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst,” he said. The Jews’ “higher calling” had led to a snobbery and self-righteousness that came out in such inappropriate ways as the cursing psalms. These arguments did not endear Lewis to the Jewish community; a few years ago, the Christian Century published an article by a rabbi taking offense at Lewis’s remarks.

Certainly Jesus introduced a new spirit (“You have heard it said … but I say unto you …”). But as Lewis himself notes, the Bible does not present such a clear-cut progression from the Old Testament to the New. Commands to love your enemies appear in the Old Testament as well. To complicate matters even further, New Testament authors quote approvingly some of the most problematic of the cursing psalms. Psalm 69, for example, is cited repeatedly. Peter applied one of its curses directly to Judas (Acts 1:20); Paul applied another (“May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever,” Rom. 11:9–10) to unbelieving Israel. Cursing psalms are not so easily dismissed.

3. The cursing psalms are best understood as prayers.

The cursing psalms appear in a considerably different light when we remember their literary context: We readers are “overhearing” prayers addressed to God. Seen in this way, the cursing psalms are what I have called “spiritual therapy” taken to its limits.

If a person wrongs me unjustly, I have several options. I can try to wrong him or her back, a response condemned by the Bible. I can deny or suppress my feelings of hurt and anger. Or, I can take those feelings to God, entrusting him with the task of “retributive justice.” The cursing psalms are detailed examples of that last option.

Instinctively, we want to “clean up” our feelings in our prayers, but perhaps we have it all backwards. Perhaps we should strive to take all our worst feelings to God. After all, what would be gossip when addressed to anyone else is petition when addressed to God. What is a vengeful curse when spoken about someone (“Damn those people!”) is a plea of helpless dependence when spoken to God (“It’s up to you to damn those people; only you are a just judge”).

One reason I lean toward this way of understanding the cursing psalms is that I have read the end of the story in the Book of Revelation. In that book we see a preview of a time when the very worst of the cursing psalms will come true. Even the most notorious, Psalm 137, finds fulfillment: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again” (Rev. 18:21). Justice will reign absolutely someday, and accomplishing that will require a time of cataclysmic violence against evil.

I see the cursing psalms as an important model for how to deal with evil and injustice. I should not try to suppress my reaction of horror and outrage at evil. Nor should I, Rambolike, take justice in my own hands. Rather, I should take those feelings, undisguised, to God. As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what is appropriate to say in a prayer. He can “handle” my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need his correction—but only by taking those feelings to him will I have that chance for correction and healing.

By Philip D. Yancey.

Second, the psalms teach me how to praise.

Americans are notoriously bad at adoration and praise. We have not the tradition of British subjects, who curtsy to the queen and wait for her to speak first. We feel more comfortable roasting our politicians in comedy revues than bowing to them.

Frankly, the whole notion of God asking us to sit around saying nice things about him can seem rather alien. Why does he need our praise anyway? As C. S. Lewis said in his Reflections on the Psalms, “I don’t want my dog to bark approval of my books.”

Lewis goes on to suggest that we might best imagine praise by thinking of our instinctive response to a great work of art, or a symphony, or extraordinary beauty in any form. The natural response is, first, to pause and enjoy the surpassing beauty—almost as if kneeling before it—and then to announce it to other human beings. Such a response of shared enjoyment works on many levels: “The Northern Lights were spectacular in the Boundary Waters!” “I wish you could have been with us in Venezuela—we flew up this canyon and suddenly the clouds parted and there was Angel Falls.” “Weren’t the Chicago Bears devastating yesterday?”

Praise takes the instinctive response of shared enjoyment (Ever try keeping a great joke to yourself, or the fact that you just got engaged?) and raises it a few notches. In praise, the creature happily acknowledges that everything good and true and beautiful in the universe comes from the Creator. That acknowledgment expresses our proper position before God. It works on us as well as on God, by reminding us of who we are with respect to him.

According to Psalms, praise need not be sober and reflective. The psalmists praised God with sensuous abandon, with loud musical instruments and dance and incense. Their worship services may well have been closer in tone to a sports pep rally than a sedate symphony concert.

Many of us stumble over how to express praise in a culture in which it seems alien. The wonderful contribution of the psalms is that they solve the problem of praise deficiency. They provide the words; we merely need to enter into them, aligning our inner attitudes with the content of the psalms.

Evidently, when the ancient Hebrews encountered something beautiful or majestic, their typical response was not to contemplate the scene, or to analyze it, but rather to praise God for it. Their fingers itched for the harp, their vocal cords longed for the hymn. For them, praise was joy expressing itself in song and speech, an inner health made audible. And because of them, we too can enter into that health.

Third, the psalms give me a model of spiritual therapy.

Not long ago I wrote a book titled Disappointment with God. The publisher worried over the title. It seemed faintly heretical to introduce a book with a negative title into Christian bookstores filled with books on the marvelous Christian life. But in the process of writing the book, I found that the Bible, and especially Psalms, includes detailed records of people disappointed with God (to put it mildly). Some psalms could be accurately titled “Furious with God,” “Betrayed by God,” “Abandoned by God,” “In Despair about God.”

It may seem strange for sacred writings to include such scenes of spiritual failure, but actually their inclusion expresses an important principle of therapy. A marriage therapist will often warn his or her new clients, “Your relationship may well get worse before it gets better.” Grudges and resentments that have been covered over for years may resurface. Misunderstandings must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.

The 150 psalms present a mosaic of spiritual therapy in process. Doubt, paranoia, giddiness, meanness, delight, hatred, joy, praise, vengefulness, betrayal—you can find them all in Psalms. Such strewing of emotions that I once saw as hopeless disarray, I now see as a sign of great health. From Psalms I have learned that I can rightfully bring to God whatever I feel about him. I need not paper over my failures and try to clean up my own rottenness. It is far better to bring those weaknesses to him, for he alone has the power to heal.

The odd mixture of psalms of cursing, psalms of praise, and psalms of confession no longer jars me as it once did. Instead, I am continually amazed by the spiritual wholeness of the Hebrew poets, who sought to include God in every area of life. They brought to God every emotion experienced in every daily activity. For them, there were no walled-off areas; God could be trusted with reality.

Because many psalms were written by Hebrew leaders (73 are attributed to King David), the book offers a unique behind-the-scenes view of a people’s emotional history. I know of no comparable collection of private reactions to an ancient history. In Psalms we can read what a king prayed after committing adultery and murder, what he prayed after escaping an assassination attempt, and after losing a crucial battle, and after dedicating a new capital city to God.

That process of “letting God in” on every detail of life is one I need to learn from. In the busy, post-Christian, industrialized West, we tend to compartmentalize our lives. We fill our days with activities—getting the car repaired, taking vacations, going to work, mowing the lawn, chauffeuring the kids—and then try to carve out some time for “spiritual” activities such as church, small groups, personal devotions. I see none of that separation in Psalms. Somehow, those people managed to make God the gravitational center of their lives so that everything related to him. To them, worship was the central activity in life, not the thing to get over with to resume activity.

Psalms has become for me a stepping stone in the process of recognizing God’s true place at the gravitational center. I am trying to make the prayers first prayed by the Hebrew poets authentically my prayers. The New Testament writers did this, quoting Psalms more than any other book. And the Son of God on earth did likewise. He too relied on them as the language of relationship between a human being and God.

I am sure that making the psalms my own prayers will require a lifelong commitment. I sense in them an urgency, a desire and hunger for God that makes my own spiritual life look anemic by contrast. The psalmists panted for God with their tongues hanging out, like an exhausted deer pants for water. They lay awake at night dreaming of “the fair beauty of the Lord.” They would rather spend one day in his presence than a thousand years elsewhere. It was the advanced school of faith these poets were enrolled in, and often I feel more like a kindergartner. But now that I’ve started to read the psalms again, maybe some of it will rub off.

PAULA RINEHART¹Paula Rinehart is a former editor with Nav-Press and is currently working on a book on the spiritual disillusionment of the baby boomer generation. She lives with her husband and children in Raleigh, North Carolina.

One muggy Sunday morning last summer as we got our children ready for church, I was struck by a sight so ordinary I almost missed its significance.

There in his driveway next door was my neighbor. Clad in cut-offs and a faded college T-shirt, Jeff was methodically scrubbing the front of his Good Times van, a bucket of soapy water at his feet. Old Stevie Wonder songs blared from a nearby boom box. A likable guy in his early thirties, he seemed barely able to stifle the interjection of a little dance shuffle now and then. Occasionally, he would run over to the screened window to talk with the woman inside—who was not his wife, but someone he had lived with for two years.

Jeff waved as we backed out of the garage, now a little late for church. Though our morals and lifestyles are markedly divergent, I realized that there is an undeniable affinity that binds our two households. We are baby boomers—the churched and the unchurched, the married and the single—part of the 76 million offspring of America’s postwar optimism, a generation whose purchasing patterns, opinions, and mating habits have been variously celebrated or lamented, but rarely ignored.

By its sheer numbers, this herd of humanity has profoundly affected culture at every point of passage in its journey from infancy to middle age. Education, the mass media, health care, and economics have all felt its influence. But what will be this generation’s effect on the church in the nineties? How will the church reach and influence its members as the adults who people our pews—or, as the case may be, who boogie nonchalantly to nostalgic music while they wash cars and watch us leave for church?

As every market researcher knows, boomers have long been the group to watch. And their iconoclastic nature presents no small challenge for the church. In 1986, when Rolling Stone magazine commissioned a wide-ranging survey of Americans aged 18 to 44, 50 percent of the respondents said that “they were less involved in organized religion than they expected they would be when they were younger.” Nearly 60 percent presently attend a religious service less than once a month. As Paul Light, associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, noted in his book Baby Boomers, of all age groups, boomers emerge as the least trusting of almost every institution, whether the military, banks, public schools, Congress, or organized religion.

The encouraging news is that this generation is also showing signs of renewed spiritual interest. Jack Simms, head of Boomers Consulting in Placentia, California, believes that “the quest for spiritual meaning” will be boomers’ greatest concern in the nineties. “They want to get in touch with the supernatural,” he notes, “and they will get in touch with it—somehow.”

Just how remains to be seen, but more than a few are returning to church. George Barna, president of Barna Research Group, says that “having tasted and tried other New Age and materialistic options, a fair number of boomers are returning to the church in search of something real. It’s another stop on their journey but hopefully, it will also be the last.” He suggests that the postwar generation’s need to belong will make them the “most important source of church growth in the coming decade.”

Those born between the years 1946 and 1964 are by no means a monolithic group. Yet the overall evidence suggests that though they are institutionally wary, they are spiritually sensitive and still searching—hungry, in fact, for a reawakening of the idealism of their youth.

A Dance To The Same Music

One key to reaching this pivotal generation is simply having an adequate understanding of what makes it different. For despite their variations as individuals, boomers share a group identity forged from a history of shared experience and common hopes. Due to the universal immediacy of television, they store similar memories—such as Martin Luther King, Jr., sharing his dream or John John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket. They danced to the same music, protested the same war, and later reshaped their global hopes into a personal search for some share of the rapidly evaporating American Dream. Who they are today is largely a function of who they have been.

Without the hardship of a major war or a depression, boomers grew up in the “good times” of the fifties and sixties when men first walked on the moon and anything seemed possible. But the decade of the sixties, with its social and political unrest, brought to the fore ultimate questions about meaning and purpose in life. Especially for the elder boomers (those between the ages of 34 and 43), the sixties gave birth to their loftiest dreams and forged some of their closest relationships.

Josh McDowell, a popular speaker on college campuses then and now, reports that the years 1967–72 were the most intense. “The university was a high news item in the media. Whenever we spoke at a large student gathering,” he recalls, “three news networks would be there. Everyone was focused on the problems of the world; the atmosphere on campus was electric.”

Thousands of boomers who were students then mark this period and the seventies that followed as the beginning of their spiritual odyssey. The answers to life were no longer just “blowin’ in the wind,” they discovered, but were to be found in Christ. The church began to benefit from the resulting influx of creative leadership and enthusiasm.

This was also the group that set out to change the world in their generation, that chose 1980 as the target date for fulfilling the Great Commission. Unfortunately, the depth of that evangelistic fervor was invisibly tied to the intensity of social and political currents around them. After the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate trials’ exposure of the nation’s leaders, campuses became at first cynical, then apathetic, just as they had been volatile and spirited before. McDowell notes that the concern among students and young adults “shifted from the problems of the world to the problems of the individual.”

Idealism went underground, and for many baby boomers, disillusionment turned to self-absorption and skepticism. Capitalism wasn’t so bad after all, some reasoned, and the wheels of power were sure to grind steadily onward anyway. The world did not appear so reachable for Christ.

The vision of this generation therefore narrowed considerably after the sixties. James Engel, professor of communications research at Wheaton College, has observed this generation for 20 years—since his involvement as a faculty intermediary at Ohio State University. He argues, in a self-published monograph cowritten with Single Adult Ministries Newsletter editor Jerry Jones, “Once they realized they weren’t going to change the world as they thought, they downscaled to making the world better where they were and where they lived. Boomers’ concerns became and have remained primarily local ones.”

A Generation warms to Religion

In the 1960s, remembers baby boomer and Vanderbilt Divinity School instructor Renita Weems, “we were not intimidated by anything—neither dogma nor traditions nor gods.… [W]e’d succeeded in almost everything we put our minds to—except in finding peace within. And that we thought we could buy from our therapist or chant our way into.… [Eventually,] I had to confess to myself that I craved something more. I needed to be connected to folks who knew there was something more to life than what they could see, feel, buy, or hoard.… [S]omething was missing—inside.”

Weems’s decision to return to faith was far from a solitary one. There has been a tremendous increase in the number of Americans joining churches, attending services, and taking up public prayer. While Americans’ worship patterns through the decades reveal a remarkable constancy, the statistics on church attendance, when viewed up close, reveal dramatic and distinctive patterns along generational lines. The data show:

• Throughout their lives, Americans born during the Depression have been more faithful than later generations in their church/synagogue attendance.

• “War babies” dropped out of church as they entered their twenties during the turbulent sixties, and stayed away. The twin disillusionments stemming from Vietnam and Watergate made them more suspicious of institutions—the church included. Only recently, as they approach and pass midlife, are they trickling back to church.

• Baby boomers also dropped out of church in their twenties, but now, in their thirties and early forties, they are returning to the ranks of the faithful. The real boom in church attendance is coming from this generation.

David A. Roozen, William McKinney, and Wayne Thompson, a research team at Hartford Seminary, were among the first researchers to detect the postwar generation’s return to church and synagogue. They found that the number of older baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1958) who go to church regularly has risen from 33.5 percent in the early seventies to 42.8 percent in the early eighties—an increase of more than 9 percent. In short, these “prodigal sons and daughters,” as Roozen calls them, have recovered two-thirds of the drop-off of the sixties and seventies. High-income baby boomers (those making more than $30,000 a year) have returned in the greatest numbers.

What accounts for the numbers? In part, Americans are simply reacting to the times. The eighties, after all, have been a relatively stable period, reminiscent in some ways of the fifties. Just as there was a baby boom then, the eighties are seeing a “mini-baby boom” as baby boomers in turn have babies. And children tend to pull their families back to church. Roy Carlisle, West Coast literary agent and father of two, recounts of his San Francisco friends, “The minute they have kids, their relativistic world view collapses. They want to raise children with moral bearings.… [The church or synagogue] is the one place that takes moral values seriously.”

But baby boomers are not returning to the church merely because they are having children. Lee Hennessee, a New York stockbroker, saw his weekly Bible-study group grow from 60 to more than 200 after the October stock market crash in 1987. Hennessee told New York magazine of his colleagues, “When [faith in their careers and Wall Street] was taken away, they had to put their faith in Christ.” Roozen, McKinney, and Thompson found that the return of older boomers to church has been almost “exclusively a matter of renewal” among those who never completely left the faith.

A temporary blip?

The initial signs of what lies immediately ahead are not encouraging for those who would like to see the religious revival continue. Today’s young adults are going to church at an even lesser rate than the baby boomers did at that age. It is not clear whether baby boomers’ children will stick with the church when they reach young adulthood in the next decade or two.

But what difference will the revitalized faith of the baby boomers make in the life of the nation now? Os Guinness, sociologist of religion and director of the Williamsburg Charter Foundation, suggests there are unanswered questions there, too. “Will the churches and synagogues provide the kind of training necessary to keep the faith vital—or will the churches merely mirror the culture?” he asks. “The natural tendency of the baby boomers is to be laissez faire socially. Will their return to faith make any decisive difference in their personal and social ethics, or will their religious commitment be [simply] a variant of their social philosophy?”

It is, of course, too early to know. But answers to questions such as these will determine whether baby boomers’ new-found faith is more than a temporary blip in the statistics.

By Wesley G. Pippert, director of the Washington Graduate Program of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and former senior Middle East correspondent for United Press International.

Great Expectations

More than 40 million of the postwar generation are now facing the midlife challenges of juggling careers and families, of growing older but not necessarily any richer. Victims of their own great expectations, twice as many boomers (as compared to their parents) are disappointed with what they have thus far achieved in life. The gap between their perceived potential and realized achievements is often dishearteningly large.

Rarely an easy passage for anyone, midlife promises to be even more challenging for this generation. Jack Sheen, a licensed psychologist in Baltimore, whose practice consists almost totally of baby boomers, explains why. “While survival issues dominated the lives of their parents,” he says, “this generation has asked for much more from life: fulfillment, intimacy, pleasure—goals that are elusive to define or realize and thus fertile ground for disillusionment.” Studies show that fully three out of four are expected to seek professional counseling at some point in their lives; the rate of depression among this generation is already ten times that of the previous one.

This internal uncertainty helps to explain the enormous popularity of the award-winning television show “thirtysomething.” More than ten million boomers watch this program each week, seeing their own lives reflected in the ambivalent struggles of the characters on the screen. Will Nancy and Elliott reconcile their marriage? Will Hope remain happy to be less than a full-time professional in order to care for her daughter at home? And how about Gary? Will he ever cut that leftover sixties hair, get married to his pregnant girl friend, and grow up?

As this show characterizes them, many of these young adults appear more “together” at first glance than they really are. Just beneath the surface lies considerable personal angst. Their struggles take many forms, but two are especially pressing and common.

First, the problem of tighter purses. The image of the baby boomer as a yuppie in a business suit sprinting up the courthouse steps, briefcase in hand, is largely a creation of the entertainment media. Many barely pay their bills. The Credit Union National Association reports that the majority of boomers earn less at every age than did those preceding them, making them less prone to save or give, and in greater need of help in money matters.

The younger boomer (aged 25–34) has found the economic realities of the eighties particularly harsh. His house payment can be twice the size of his elder boomer brother, his discretionary funds considerably less, and the best jobs gone before he arrives on the scene. He is not surprised by the fact that the average taxi driver in New York City now has at least two years of college to his credit. As a result, the younger boomer tends to be more serious about money and less serious about everything else.

Second, the problem of looser relationships. The gap this generation experiences most keenly is among one another. Jim Dethmer, pastor of Grace Community Church in Baltimore, a church that has experienced 75 percent of its growth from baby boomers, notes that the perennial question of this age group is “How can I build friendships?” He adds, “They are a relationally vacuous generation struggling in their ability to form lasting relationships.” Their lonely statistics speak for themselves. They are 500 times more likely to be single than their parents were, and even half of those who marry will probably divorce.

Michael Morris, curate of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Geneva, Illinois, believes this generation’s relational struggles can be traced to the anonymity of the lives they lead. “Most live in their own isolated boxes in the suburbs, a thousand miles away from family, in communities in which they feel no roots,” he says. “They are plagued by loneliness—yet driven by demanding jobs and competing family needs. Underneath all that activity is a deep longing for a connection with God that seems real and intimate.”

For these reasons, small-group study and support networks flourish in churches ministering to this age group. Morris reports an innovative approach for men at Saint Mark’s. Called the Men’s Fellow Stragglers’ Group, it emphasizes honesty and disclosure. “The idea,” Morris says, “is that we meet to share not so much our triumphs as our trials, and to gain help from each other.”

Julie Gorman, assistant professor of Christian formation and discipleship at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, notes that from her national research on small groups, this generation’s need to belong and build relationships is a major factor pushing small-group activity into the limelight.

But the greatest longing is for meaningful connections at home. James Engel states that for Christian and non-Christian alike, “our data scream with the desire for a satisfactory family life.” Even though the fifties were touted as an era of family togetherness, Engel suggests that was “an image without much substance. Consequently, home and family life have become crucial to this generation.” Aware of this desire, some churches, such as North Coast Presbyterian in Encinitas, California, carefully tailor community-outreach programs to children. “In the fall and spring,” executive director Ken Priddy says, “we sponsor a Sports Fest and a Fun Fest that draw the community’s unchurched families and give us a starting point to follow up on.”

Hula Hoops And Love Beads

But what happens when the Pepsi generation bumps into the Harry Truman generation in the pew? This is one of the hidden challenges facing the church that ministers to this generation, which for good or ill will guide the church beyond the year 2000. In terms of values and orientation to life, rarely has so much diversity existed in the same century.

Almost from the time they traded their hula hoops and coonskin caps for love beads and peace pipes, this generation has been aware of its distinctiveness. Says Walt Harrison, 41, the president of the public-relations company Gehrung Associates, “We consciously think of ourselves as different from those people who came before.”

Some of that dissimilarity is shown in what motivates the baby boomers. Suggesting a course of action because tradition or a sense of duty or a church board advises it usually rouses little enthusiasm among them. Their loyalty to organizations and denominations is markedly weaker than that of their parents, and they do not necessarily choose their place of worship according to the denominational preference of their parental families.

Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in suburban Eden Prairie, Minnesota, observes, “Neither Grandpa nor Grandma can comprehend the lack of institutional loyalty they see in their 34-year-old son and daughter-in-law. Their daughter-in-law started the family attending a big Assemblies of God church just because of a high-powered children’s program.… Grandpa and Grandma have stuck with the Lutheran church through good times and bad. Changing churches or denominations is unthinkable, even if attendance is down and the minister is too liberal.”

What, then, does motivate this generation as it squeezes out of the passage of youth and into maturity? One characteristic this age group instinctively gravitates toward is the opportunity for personal challenge. Having been herded together from their childhood on, boomers are forever searching for the contribution they can make as individuals. This strong sense of personal stewardship is the positive side of their much-lamented emphasis on self. Engel emphasizes, “This isn’t a generation that you can any longer call into a rally to win the world. They’ll say, ‘What do you mean? How do I use my unique gifting for the glory of God?’”

Largely responsible for the 600 percent increase in the number of private business ventures begun in the last 30 years, this age group favors a hands-on, entrepreneurial aproach to meeting needs. They want a stake in the action, preferring to do something about a problem rather than to wade through theological debate and endless speculation. Todd Hunter, pastor of Vineyard Fellowship in Anaheim, California, says, “Projects and causes motivate boomer participation more if it’s their idea and if they have some input and control over it. I think those who are going to inspire this group in the nineties are going to be solid leaders—not managers—who can lead people into goal ownership, allow them freedom, and take advantage of this entrepreneurial spirit among them.”

The Evidence Of Authenticity

The ears of this postwar generation are particularly attuned to the ring of authenticity. Part of the legacy of Vietnam is a tendency to be repulsed by false appearances, inflated body counts, or simplistic solutions to complex problems. Boomers are suspicious of claims based solely on statistics, responding instead to the quieter, but more tangible evidence of changed individual lives. Less impressed with the external trappings of job titles and hierarchy or serving a church structure, they are more motivated by an emphasis on the kingdom of God and how God’s purposes affect them. George Barna notes, “If the church is going to have a lasting impact upon this generation, it can’t be through mirrors and smoke screens and unfounded assumptions. They respond to the message that resonates with truth and credibility.”

The question of relevancy has likewise long been of critical importance to the Now generation. They are drawn to issues that touch the daily concerns of their lives. Says Jim Dethmer, “I find that topics that center on family concerns, relational needs, stress, marketplace issues, and childhood causes are particularly attractive to this generation.” Some churches, such as Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois (see “A Church for Bored Boomers,” p. 25), design a weekly service where the upbeat message, music, and drama expose the unchurched visitor to practical Christianity in a nonthreatening manner. Such services have been especially popular among the 25–45-year-old group.

Local churches stand in a particularly favorable position to benefit from the parochial nature of boomer concerns. “In general,” Engel states, boomers “want to see the action take place in and through their local church, in the communities where they live and work. There is a vestige of idealism and a residue of social concern that can be tapped.”

This means that while the majority of baby boomers prefer causes that combine evangelism with social need, the breadth of their concern is limited. Engel has found that there is a strong tendency to care more about domestic problems rather than, for example, overseas missions. Abortion, the needs of community children, and addictive behaviors are the concerns that rally their support.

A Church for Bored Boomers

Fourteen years ago, when 23-year-old Bill Hybels started Willow Creek Community Church in an affluent suburb of Chicago, he surveyed the neighborhood’s many young professionals. “If you are not involved in a church, what keeps you away?” he asked. Many said the churches they had attended were boring, predictable, and always asked for money. Hybels determined to create a church experience that would offer them something different.

Today, Willow Creek packs more than 12,000 people every week into its 4,650-seat auditorium situated on 120 acres in South Barrington, Illinois. The success has won Willow Creek a reputation as a church that reaches baby boomers and yuppies. While Hybels and staff avoid those labels, they do use marketing terms such as target audience, felt needs, and packaging.

This “packaging” is especially evident during the congregation’s three weekend worship services, which are designed to attract what the church’s leaders call “unchurched Harrys”: 25 to 50-year-old male professionals who have become disgruntled with traditional churches. (Men are targeted, according to associate pastor Don Cousins, only because they are harder to reach. And if a married man decides to come to church, he will bring his family with him. A woman, however, is less likely to convince her unchurched husband to attend.)

Choreographed drama, contemporary music, and multimedia presentations—all supported by professional-quality sound and lighting systems—attempt to break down the barriers that keep the “Harrys” from hearing the gospel. Attendees sit in comfortable, theater-style seats rather than pews.

Willow Creek also tries to encourage newly attracted attendees to become committed followers of Christ. “We’re not just about making converts,” Cousins explains, “we want to make disciples.” That means, among other things, getting people to the Wednesday night service, a less showy presentation aimed at believers and church members. Attendees are also urged to use their gifts and talents in the many ministries of the church, which include programs for children, teenagers, singles, and married couples.

Turning up the thermostat

As the second-largest Protestant congregation in the U.S., Willow Creek has earned accolades from church leaders across the country. But Hybels and his staff have also drawn criticism for what some call their Madison Avenue methodology.

Martin Marty, professor of the history of modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, cautions that the emphasis on “what can help me” can blur a church’s calling to preach the transcendence and holiness of God.

Leaders at Willow Creek appear to be aware of the dangers. Hybels recently has been “turning up the thermostat on what it really means to be a follower of Christ,” Cousins says. And attendance at the Wednesday night service has increased in the last few months by over 30 percent.

Willow Creek’s nontraditional methods have clearly succeeded in attracting thousands of young, unchurched professionals. But, critics ask, “Will those methods keep them there?” And will they convey the gospel in all its fullness—the sacrifice, commitment, and costly grace?

“We definitely cater to a target audience in our method of communication,” Cousins admits. “But do we cater to them in regard to truth? No. We teach the truth, and people have to deal with the truth as it is. I think that is an important distinction. What we don’t want is to create barriers in our programming and our manner of presentation that cause people to never hear the message.”

By Verne Becker, a free-lance writer and former editor of U magazine.

Rediscovering The Dream

But even though this generation’s vision may be narrowed and the scope of its concern appears limited, that is only part of the story. Media-worn images of boomers as navel-gazing couch potatoes overlook a critically important factor: their capacity to dream. This is still a generation whose members’ consciousness has been moved by the search for a compelling moral vision. Their dreams have been dormant—not dead—waiting for the church to be able again to tap into their latent hunger for a sense of meaning and purpose and influence.

In a recent interview with Esquire magazine, veteran political analyst Patrick Caddell told the story of Sen. Joe Biden’s 1984 speech before a group of boomer voters in New Jersey. “Like many of you,” Biden said, “I’m 40 years old … and I was drawn to politics by a black man who had a dream on a mall on a steamy August night in Washington.” Biden continued to reflect on the generation’s earlier ideals and closed by challenging the group to a reawakening of moral courage and values that went beyond personal gain. Caddell then observed, “I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I never saw a reaction like that. These … New Jersey [voters] … stood up and applauded—and then they started crying.” He added that while boomer value systems may be complicated, their original instincts are still very much intact.

Florence Skelly, president of the research firm Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, agrees. “I think that if we turn ideological, or religious or moralistic in the next five to ten years,” she says, “it will be this group that leads us.”

The question is not so much if this generation’s latent idealism can be tapped, but who will first and how. Dan Hays, whose Atlanta-based prayer-renewal ministry has allowed him to influence college students and young professionals for 20 years, says, “I rarely meet someone in my generation who, when you say in some form, ‘Wouldn’t you like to give your life to something that’s bigger than you are?’ hasn’t responded, ‘Absolutely; help me figure out how to do that.’ There are 18–20 years of pent-up desire for impact in this age group.”

Jack Simms agrees: “Underneath those coats and ties, my generation is as radical and idealistic as it ever was. They’re just waiting to rediscover the sense of mission they once had—one that’s never completely gone away.”

The challenge before this generation is to reconcile two conflicting desires: on one hand, the hunger for self-fulfillment, and on the other, the longing for community and a wider impact upon the world around them.

The message of the gospel presents the only real hope for the fulfillment of both desires. It does this by enabling the individual to find meaning and community as he or she participates in the larger purposes of God.

If this generation is able to disconnect its expectations of the American Dream from the promises of God, it may yet redeem the commitments of its youth. What boomers want, deep down, is to leave behind them more than a marble grave marker with two dates. They want to look back on a life that has made a difference. That is exactly what the Christian community can offer them: another chance to change their world for Christ—not in their generation, perhaps, but surely in God’s good time.

Ours is not the first abortion war. Two previous periods saw protracted contests over whether abortion would be accepted or proscribed.

The first was in the early centuries of Christianity, when faith spread within a Greco-Roman culture that considered abortion (and infanticide) routine. The second was in America during the mid-nineteenth century when abortions became widespread, freely advertised in virtually every newspaper.

The third abortion war is now approximately 25 years old and shows no sign of peace. Living in a battle zone, we can easily focus on the tactics of the moment and forget the wider context. The danger in forgetting is that when the situation suddenly shifts, as it did in 1973 with Roe v. Wade and again this year with Webster, we get thrown off. Suddenly the tactics we had honed become irrelevant, and the goals we had set are outdated.

The First War

People commonly suppose that abortion is an invention of modern, technological medicine. In fact, it was well known in Greco-Roman society. Plato’s Republic made abortion or infanticide obligatory if the mother was over 40. In Aristotle’s ideal society, abortion would be compulsory for families that exceeded a certain size.

Aristotle also made a distinction that would develop a life of its own: the “formed” versus the “unformed” fetus. Aristotle believed that human life was present in the fetus when distinct organs were formed, 40 days after conception for males and 90 for females. This was a metaphysical, not a moral, distinction; Aristotle would abort both “formed” and “unformed” fetuses. But some Christians—Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas in particular—would later adopt his distinction. It survived in various forms right down to the arbitrary trimesters of Roe v. Wade.

Both Plato and Aristotle believed that a child had life long before birth; it was just that the welfare of society and family were more important to them than the rights of a child. The Roman empire made the same assessment while adopting the Stoic belief that life begins only at birth. Abortion was common. As Michael Gorman puts it in Abortion and the Early Church, the Roman empire was paradoxically “pro-family but not fundamentally antiabortion.… That the fetus is not a person was fundamental to Roman law. Even when born, the child was valued primarily not for itself but for its usefulness to the father, the family and especially the state.”

Many Romans opposed abortion, but Gorman says, “Pagan antiabortion statements are consistently mindful of the welfare and rights of the state, the father, the family and even occasionally the woman, but never those of the fetus.… Christians discarded all pagan definitions of the fetus as merely part of the mother’s body. To Christians, the fetus was an independent living being.”

From the first, Christians were outspokenly opposed to abortion on the basis of the child’s right to life. The Didach, an early second-century document summarizing Christian belief and practice, declares, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion/destruction.” Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Jerome, Basil the Great, Ambrose—all pronounced against abortion. Tertullian wrote eloquently in his Apology, aimed at non-Christians: “To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.”

That is how Western society came to be antiabortion. Although the church’s antiabortion arguments were consistent and insightful, the change in society was due more to the fact that Christians won the empire to their faith. Not long after Constantine legalized Christianity, it was made illegal for a father to kill his children. Roman abortion laws were never changed, but as the institutional church’s role grew more important, ecclesiastical penalties for abortion—their severity was between those for manslaughter and murder—became meaningful legislation for the entire society.

No one can say to what extent behavior changed. What is sure is that a stable antiabortion consensus, based on Christian values, had been formed. It endured intact throughout the medieval period and into modern times.

Through Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and on to Barth and Bonhoeffer, Christian theologians have condemned abortion in the clearest terms. Aristotle’s distinction between the formed and unformed fetus was carried on by some, for whom abortion was only murder 40 days after conception. (Yet even before then, it was a violation of developing humanity, and thus still wrong.) Therapeutic abortion, in which the life of the unborn can be sacrificed to save the life of a mother, was sometimes allowed. But the values of Greco-Roman society, in which the life of a child had meaning only as state or family granted it meaning, would not resurface for 1,500 years.

The Second War

There were no written laws against the practice of abortion in colonial America; courts operated on the basis of English common law, by which abortion was illegal after “quickening,” the time when a mother could feel the movement of her unborn child in the womb. The “quickening” distinction seems to have been a survival from the Aristotelian idea of a “formed” fetus, as it filtered through centuries of theological discussion.

“Quickening” might not have survived on the strength of its history alone, though; it had practical significance as well. There were no reliable pregnancy tests, and so until quickening, no one could be certain whether a woman was actually pregnant or merely experiencing some kind of menstrual “blockage.” Doctors treated a “blockage” by doing just what they would do to carry out an early abortion. Before quickening, it was impossible to say whether an abortion was intended. There was no point in outlawing behavior that could not be ascertained.

In fact, since “quickening” was generally only known to the woman involved, it was legally difficult to try any kind of abortion case. American courts steered a lenient course with the few cases that came before them. In 1803 Britain passed a strong and clear antiabortion law, but it was not until 1821 that Connecticut passed the first American antiabortion statute. By 1840 most states still had no such law, and those that did rarely enforced them.

A dramatic change began in the decades after 1840: the number of abortions shot up. American conception dropped precipitately: the average American woman bore seven children in 1800, three and a half by 1900. Estimates of abortions ranged between one-fifth and one-third of all pregnancies. Before, abortion had been the refuge of desperate, unmarried women; now most abortions were by married women, using it as birth control. Abortion operations were not regarded as particularly dangerous, and the belief in quickening made them seem innocent as well. This was a period of rapid industrialization, with growing cities and easy transportation by railroad. Along with many aspects of American life, abortion became commercialized.

In 1838 Charles and Anna Lohman, adopting the names of Dr. Mauriceau and Madame Restell, began to advertise extensively in the New York Herald. They were the first to seize an opportunity offered by a new kind of newspaper that sold cheaply, circulated widely, and depended on advertising revenues to make a profit. Madame Restell’s business flourished; she soon opened branch offices in Boston and Philadelphia, and moved into a lavish mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Others imitated her. Soon newspaper ads offered a whole portfolio of potential abortionists. They had the political and economic influence to protect themselves; historian James Mohr notes, in one example, that “between 1849 and 1857 there were only thirty-two trials in Massachusetts [under a new, toughened law] for performing abortions and not a single conviction.” Newspapers avoided the subject. Only one, the sensational National Police Gazette, reported on and crusaded against abortion. (Not coincidentally, it did not take abortion advertising.)

The increase in abortion, however, led to a counterreaction. The most visible group opposing abortion were “regular” doctors. The American Medical Association (AMA), formed in 1847, took up antiabortion as its cause. Though the AMA was a group with insignificant power, and the medical profession was at an all-time low in prestige, “regular” doctors did raise the issue before the legislature.

The religious establishment did not. Protestant clergy had considerable prestige and were important in other reform movements of the time—notably temperance—but to the dismay of doctors, most churches ignored the issue. No one really knows why; perhaps the topic was too delicate. Catholics, mainly immigrants, were not having abortions like Protestants, and Catholic leaders were at that time in no position to exert political influence.

The rising feminist movement was against abortion. Not even the most radical considered abortion to be an instrument of freedom for women; on the contrary, abortion was understood to be an aspect of male domination, whereby (outside marriage) men tried to conceal the results of their seduction, or (inside marriage) women behaved tragically because of the terrible conditions of a home governed by a tyrannical husband.

In 1870, under a new editor, the New York Times began to campaign actively against abortion. Their investigative reports were too sensational for other newspapers to let pass; soon widespread press attention forced prosecutors to act. The more they acted, the more sensational news was available to report (the bodies of young women found dismembered in trunks; numbers of babies found buried in basem*nts). Marvin Olasky notes in The Press and Abortion that Madame Restell became “an object of general hatred in New York City. Occasionally, her carriage would be chased down Fifth Avenue by a volley of rocks, and by shouts of ‘Madame Killer.’ ” In 1878 she was arrested and could not buy her freedom as she had in previous cases. The night before she was to be tried she committed suicide. The Times headlined the news: “End of a Criminal Life.”

Gradually, through the century, laws were toughened. The quickening distinction was dropped. Under the Comstock Act of 1873, abortion advertising became illegal nationally. By the end of the century, abortion was illegal everywhere; and while veiled advertising continued (the Comstock Act was seldom enforced), observers reported that abortions greatly decreased.

The antiabortion crusade was successful despite the fact that only regular physicians publicly worked for it. They were not a particularly influential group, but they did have confident scientific knowledge on their side. Doctors had known since early in the century that the “quickening” distinction was without merit—that the development of the unborn child was gradual from the time of conception.

Some recent histories have commented on the quickening distinction as though it had preserved a right to abortion for women, but that is a classic case of imposing modern thinking on a historical situation. The law and common belief had always held that it was wrong to abort a child once it had life, after quickening. The doctors could presume that society’s moral commitments would lead to the banning of abortion once enough people understood that life was at stake from the beginning.

The Third War

Yet the success of the nineteenth-century crusade was short-lived. The life of an unborn child is easy to ignore—invisible and voiceless. The New York Times, which had led the press crusade to stop abortions in the 1870s, suddenly stopped reporting on it at all in 1896, when Adolph Ochs assumed ownership and introduced two new slogans: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and “It Does Not Soil the Breakfast Cloth.” Abortion news was apparently not fit to print, for it did soil the breakfast cloth.

The National Police Gazette no longer crusaded against abortion either; it now took abortion ads. Other newspapers reported occasionally on lurid abortion cases, but journalism professor Olasky notes a change. In the late nineteenth century, press coverage often referred to abortion as the killing of unborn children. Stories in the twentieth century rarely mentioned the unborn; the focus was exclusively on the dangers of abortion to women.

Doctors also lost interest. By early in the twentieth century the AMA had regulated the irregulars (whose nineteenth-century abortion practices had threatened to take away patients and income from regular doctors) out of business, and had no more need to appeal to the legislature for the control of medical business. Doctors could regulate themselves—but showed little interest in interfering with the practices of their fellow regulars.

There was, therefore, no one to show an interest in the lives of the unborn. The American clergy never had. Sexual behavior grew more promiscuous in the Roaring Twenties, and perhaps the failure of Prohibition made America less interested in moral reform. The Soviet Union legalized and promoted abortion, to the acclaim of some. Population-control groups such as Planned Parenthood began cautiously and privately to favor abortion. So did some doctors, mainly on the basis of their claim to know what was best for the welfare of their patients without governmental interference.

Contrary to popular assertions, the number of women who died from “back-alley abortionists” was small; according to the Kinsey Report, 85 percent of abortions were done by doctors, and the number of annual deaths declined steadily, to an estimated 300 by 1967. The deaths were tragic whatever the number, but far more significant in putting abortion back on the public agenda was doctors’ discomfort with the rigidity of the antiabortion laws.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about the beginning of the third abortion war was that it seemed to be about a relatively small change in the law—“abortion reform,” as it was called. The “right to abortion” was not an issue, at least for women; if anyone’s rights were at stake, they were the doctor’s. In 1959 the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI) published a new “model code” for state legislatures. It would allow a doctor to perform abortions in cases of rape, incest, serious deformity, and whenever the doctor believed there was risk to the mental or physical health to the mother. The word believed was significant, because it meant a doctor was virtually immune from prosecution so long as he would claim, whatever the medical facts, that he had believed them threatening. Few imagined that such terminology could become an open door to abortion on demand.

Protestants, and even many Catholics, had historically recognized the validity of what is called therapeutic abortion. Abortion reform purported to expand the categories of those tragic decisions. Suppose that the birth of a child conceived by rape threatened to destroy the mother’s mental stability; could not an abortion be considered life saving?

Such “hard cases” were real, and proabortionists could expand on them at length. They were received sympathetically in the press, and seemed, in the light of publicity, to be far more numerous than they really were. One well-publicized event brought the abortion issue into public view.

In 1962 an Arizona “Romper Room” TV hostess named Sherri Finkbine learned that a drug she had been taking during pregnancy, thalidomide, had caused numerous birth defects in Europe. She applied for a therapeutic abortion and was granted one by a committee of three doctors. But Finkbine talked to reporters before the scheduled abortion, to warn others about the dangers of thalidomide.

The hospital, wary of public scrutiny, refused to allow the abortion until an advance court judgment was made that the abortion was legal. A judge said that he could make no ruling unless someone had filed a complaint. No one was complaining, but cautious hospital officials were not willing to go ahead without official assurances. The legally complex case was presented in the press as a woman persecuted by an inhumane, hypocritical legal system. Ultimately, Finkbine traveled to Sweden to have an abortion. Her story had a strong emotional hook, enabling many Americans to identify with the plight of a woman who believed she was bearing a deformed child.

In 1967 the AMA voted in favor of legal reform. In the same year the National Organization for Women came out in favor of abortion, and feminists joined the cause. A number of states passed reforming legislation, along the ALI recommended lines, which would give physicians greater latitude in performing therapeutic abortions.

Another issue arose, adding to the apparent urgency: the “population explosion.” In a few short years, experts said, the world would starve to death unless population growth could be stopped. This was one of those crises that rises in a media-saturated society, riveting attention until it mysteriously disintegrates. It made abortion into a strangely conservative cause, and raised a very different set of issues: not abortion as tragic choice, but abortion as crusade to save the world. The campaign for abortion-law reform began to turn into a campaign for abortion-law repeal. In 1969, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was formed. Many denominations—Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians—supported their cause.

But the movement was beginning to outdistance its popular support. The American public was sympathetic to therapeutic abortion, but solidly against abortion on demand. In 1970 New York, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington repealed their abortion laws; by then, 13 other states had passed some form of reform legislation. But after 1970 resistance arose, and only one more state, Florida, passed a reform bill. In several other states, reform or repeal were rebuffed. In New York, the legislature tried to reimpose abortion controls, but these were vetoed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Thus the proabortion movement shifted its energy toward the courts, a tactical shift that was to prove fateful.

Who Was Against?

Press accounts of the late sixties and early seventies gave a clear picture of who stood against abortion: the Roman Catholic Church. This stereotype of antiabortionists was actively encouraged by proabortionists, who believed it would paint the opposition as narrow and sectarian. Actually, in the general public, Protestants were as likely to be against abortion as Catholics. Yet there was some truth to the caricature: Catholics brought determination and national organization to the cause. The bishops could and did draw up a national plan for opposing abortion, while Protestant antiabortionists remained splintered and disorganized.

It is startling to review the change in evangelical feeling as reflected in the pages of this magazine. The November 8, 1968, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY carried several articles on contraception and abortion. One leading biblical scholar wrote, “Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.” A theologian mentioned the ALI reform proposals favorably. The articles concluded with “A Protestant Affirmation,” the consensus of 25 evangelical scholars. On abortion, it read, “Whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circ*mstances we are in accord.” The statement spoke of “a tragic moral choice” and endorsed the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ statement favoring therapeutic abortions for the life and health of the mother, in cases of rape, incest, or deformities.

By the next year, though, red flags had begun to fly. An editorial noted that under a new Maryland law numerous abortions were being approved on the basis of mental health. “No doubt most state abortion laws need revision,” the editorial stated.

Evangelist Francis Schaeffer, who had only recently become well known, was making an impact among evangelicals with his strong warnings against abortion. Harold O.J. Brown, who would soon write strong CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorials against abortion, felt Schaeffer’s influence. So did a Bible college student named Randall Terry, who would become the leading spokesperson for Operation Rescue.

By 1971 there was no more talk in CHRISTIANITY TODAY about therapeutic abortion. The direction reform was leading was clear. “Let it be no great surprise when America is subjected to severe judgment,” an editorial read. In the same year, however, the Southern Baptist Convention “urged Baptists to work for legislation permitting abortion under certain conditions. These include: rape, incest, deformity, emotional health.”

Roe V. Wade

Few anticipated the complete victory that Roe v. Wade gave to proabortionists in 1973. Though the Supreme Court claimed to offer no opinion about when human life began, it implicitly set the time at birth; and though the new law divided pregnancy into equal trimesters, allowing that the fetus might receive some protection in the last three months before birth, in practical terms—because it stipulated that abortions could be done at any time if the mother’s mental health was believed to be in danger—the Court assured that an abortion could be done up until the very moment of birth.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY greeted Roe v. Wade with a firestorm of criticism. “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God.” That was a revolutionary thought to most evangelicals.

But CT was ahead of many evangelicals. In its news report on Roe v. Wade, it quoted prominent Southern Baptist pastor W. A. Criswell: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” (He has since repudiated this position.) It would be years before such a statement from an evangelical leader would be unthinkable. According to Brown, evangelicals simply could not imagine themselves lining up with Roman Catholics, nor could they imagine that the Supreme Court of their beloved nation (which they thought of as Protestant) would support a cause directly opposed to Christian values.

Few in the press seemed to understand how radical the justices’ decision had been. Time gave it two pages in the back of the magazine; Newsweek gave it one. An editorial in the Christian Century proclaimed that “this is a beautifully accurate balancing of individual vs. social rights.… It is a decision both proabortionists and antiabortionists can live with.”

Roe v. Wade demonstrates that fundamental moral conflicts should not be decided by fiat. The absolute polarization we currently experience is directly traceable to the Supreme Court’s decision to take abortion out of politics and declare it a settled question. Those who opposed abortion had suddenly no recourse except radical action. The discussion had been about where to draw the line among tragic choices; the justices erased the line completely and said there was no room for further discussion.

Antiabortionists may someday have reason to remember this lesson, if they gain the power to stop abortion by fiat. As we have seen, restricting abortion works best when it is based on a wider consensus about the value of life. The first centuries of the church gained this consensus through centuries of witness. They spoke passionately against abortion as a part of their faith; they also suffered for their faith. Ultimately, their faith triumphed, and legal changes followed.

By contrast, the nineteenth century, though it passed antiabortion laws, seems not to have built a strong, public consciousness of the humanity of a fetus.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas touches on this issue when he notes the frustration of antiabortionists who fail to convince their opponents that a fetus is a human being. He says that more than logic is needed. “Christian arguments about abortion … have not merely failed to convince: they have failed to suggest the kind of ‘reorientation’ necessary if we are to be the kind of people and society that make abortion unthinkable.… Even if [we succeed politically], our success may still be a form of failure if we ‘win’ without changing the presuppositions of the debate.”

That is what Christians in the first three centuries managed to do. They changed the world, not just the law.

Now that the networks have fired their censors, it is up to the public to fight bad taste and impropriety on TV.

Our family does not watch network television much, but the other evening we stumbled upon a tidbit from one of the Big Three. There, smaller than life, stood an actress dressed, so to speak, in a garter belt and little more, who displayed ventral and dorsal views of her anatomy before succumbing to the charms of a bearded male. Since it was a tad past 8:00, one can only assume this was intended for family viewing.

And since it is reasonable for parents to expect better television, we support those who urge citizens to express displeasure to sponsors who pay for the visual bologna sandwiched between the advertisem*nts.

Here’s a quick rundown of heroes and villains:

In the black hats are the network executives who have steadily trimmed their departments of “standards and practices” (popularly called “censors”). According to a report in Channels, last season NBC was down to four functioning editors (two on each coast) to review all the scripts and the finished products for more than 2,000 hours of programming. These “cost-cutting” measures have given program-department executives—the people who must deliver better ratings—the job of determining what’s tasteful. To compete with cable television and video rentals, these executives have begun delivering the bad taste and impropriety heretofore available only on videotape and cable.

But in an economy in which “market share” is the name of the game, conservative viewers do have a voice. As one departing NBC standards and practices executive said, “What it all means depends on whether the public really cares. I guess we’ll find out.”

Enter the white hats. Last year, Terry Rakolta, Michigan housewife extraordinaire, complained to sponsors about the content of Fox Broadcasting’s “Married … With Children.” In response, she got an actual cancellation of commercials from Tambrands, makers of Tampax, and a meek reply and a free case of Coca-Cola Classic from Coca-Cola. Rakolta is a wealthy socialite who sits on half a dozen boards of trustees for cultural and charitable institutions. She knew she had clout, and she didn’t hesitate to use it.

However, the rest of us, who are not so well connected, can also ride with the good guys. The posse is being formed by a coalition of approximately 1,600 Christian leaders known as CLEAR-TV (for Christian Leaders for Responsible Television). The organization notified sponsors that they would be monitoring network TV during a specified period and that a boycott could result. Over a three-year period, they corresponded with Clorox and Mennen, sponsors of the most offensive programming. Despite warnings, both companies continued to sponsor objectionable material.

CLEAR-TV’s chairman, Billy Melvin, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), clearly means business. The boycott against Clorox and Mennen “must succeed,” says NAE’s Washington Insight newsletter. “If not, Americans can expect worse and worse fare from emboldened advertisers who care only about the bottom line.” The NAE has produced a three-by-five card blacklisting products such as Liquid-Plumr and Speed-Stick deodorant, making it easier for concerned viewers to buy alternative items until the boycott ends in July 1990.

And, oh yes, there are more white hats: they belong to Hyundai Motors of America and Visa USA, the sponsors whose programs showed the lowest levels of sex, violence, and profanity during the monitoring period.

By David Neff.

Say witch and most people think of bubbling cauldrons and evil potions. But a recent decision from a Rhode Island governmental agency may begin to change that. Tax administrator R. Gary Clark has ruled that a coven of witches deserves tax-exempt status as a legitimate religious group.

“With this ruling,” said the coven’s high priestess, “we witches will definitely be able to come out of the closet and take our place in society.” The coven has 30 to 40 members in Rhode Island and meets about three times a month. Members pay homage to a deity with male and female attributes, whose “psychic energy” they believe can be tapped. While the power can be used for good or ill, the witches claim they do not use it for destructive purposes. The coven is allowed by the state to officiate over marriages and burials.

In allowing the coven the sales-tax exemption, Clark said the group proved on appeal that it met the guidelines for legitimate church groups as set out by a 1986 Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling. The connotation of the word witch may have made it more difficult for the state to reach its decision, he admitted.

We are glad it did. Witches have been at pains in recent years to overhaul their image as Satan-worshiping hags. Some “Wiccan” groups portray their practices and beliefs as part of New Age “consciousness,” where “white” magic is linked with goddess worship, environmental concern, and feminist issues. And if these New Age witches avoid illegal activities and hold sincere beliefs, tax officials find it increasingly difficult to deny legal recognition.

But Christians should still feel uneasy. We may not try to translate every biblical prohibition (such as the searing condemnations of witchcraft and sorcery) into civil law. And our government and legal system, by design, is not structured to determine what constitutes orthodoxy. But we do have an obligation to keep our culture from forgetting that some things—like witchcraft—are evil and just plain bad for people. The complexities of bearing witness in a pluralistic, often confused, culture will never exempt us from that.

By Timothy K. Jones.

Solomon would have been challenged. Seven racist and violent men needed to be sentenced in a civil suit stemming from a KKK attack on a civil-rights march in 1979 in Decatur, Georgia. During the mêlée, two marchers and two Klansmen were shot and five police officers were injured.

How do you design a sentence that will not only fulfill the requirements of justice but also attempt to change an evil and pernicious ideology?

Well, the U.S. District Court in Huntsville, Alabama, made a Solomonic attempt. In addition to fines, a pledge to refrain temporarily from participating in white-supremacy groups, and a promise not to harass blacks, the court decided the Klansmen also needed some schooling. They are to attend a class taught by black civil-rights activists that will meet for two one-hour sessions. Joseph Lowery, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference president and organizer of the 1979 march, will be one of the instructors. He said that the purpose is “not to denigrate or humiliate but to redeem” the men. “This is the first time that a settlement in a civil rights suit has directed those guilty of racial violence to sit down with their victims and be taught lessons of brotherhood,” he said.

Two hours seem a hopelessly short time to change deep-seated attitudes—especially with hostile pupils. One of the sentenced men has called the plan both “cruel and unusual punishment” and an opportunity to study “the enemy” up close. Syndicated columnist Les Payne calls the whole idea naïve.

Naïve or not, the sentence recognizes that long-term solutions to racism will only become possible as hearts are changed. Let’s experiment with reeducating adults; let’s institute antiracism programs for young people. The future for their attitudes is now.

By Michael G. Maudlin.

Last year, the United States government spent one trillion dollars. That’s 12 zeroes to the right of the 1. We pick up the tab for most of that through taxes. But actually we give away a whole lot beyond what we channel through the IRS: $104.3 billion was donated by the private sector in 1988, according to the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel. And of that amount, $48.2 billion comes through religious organizations, nearly all of it from individual pockets.

Skeptics might point to cathedrals, fancy cars, and high ministry salaries, but nearly half the money ($22 billion) given to churches goes to social programs: soup kitchens, hospitals, facilities for the aged.

The obvious implication from these figures is that Americans are generous. Private citizens gave more ($82.6 billion) to worthy causes than the entire federal budget, excluding defense goods and services. Americans are apparently doing what two Republican administrations have urged throughout the eighties. That puts the ball back into the federal court. The private sector is doing its fair share and we still have serious social needs. Maybe it is time this administration takes a hard look at the policies—as well as the waste and duplication—that help sustain poverty, the infamous drug war, lousy schools, a massive health-care crisis, and other problems.

Religious organizations and their critics should take note of the dollars that go beyond the church and synagogue walls. To the faithful goes a well-deserved bouquet. Giving is basic to both Jewish and Christian teaching, and it is comforting to see it practiced.

But to those who repeatedly bash the church for poking its nose into society’s business, we say, “Read our ledger sheets!” Society’s business is our business, and we have every right to supplement our giving with other efforts to make this a better place to live.

By Lyn Cryderman.

In my younger days I played football—as a defensive halfback. Sometimes, misled by the clever ball handling of the opposing quarterback, I pulled in too quickly. I never accused the quarterback of lying—I blamed my bad judgment. During a football game, no one expects to trust the other side.

But when people we believe we are supposed to trust mislead us, what are we to think? In recent years Gary Hart, Jim Bakker, John Poindexter, and Oliver North all told huge lies. And as this column is going off to the typesetter, Bakker is having his day in court. In response to the perfidy of these public figures, Time magazine asked if we are not a nation of liars. I worry: Since two of these four are professed evangelicals, are evangelicals in danger of becoming known as a body of liars?

Our society has trivialized lying. But the slide into acceptable deceit has a long history. Some lies, it is argued, are justified. Thomas Aquinas, for example, divided lies into three categories—jokes, helpful lies, and malicious lies. Although the first two are sins, only the last is a mortal sin.

In our own day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us: “It is only the cynic who claims ‘to speak the truth’ at all times and in all places to all men in the same way.… It is very difficult … to say what actually constitutes a lie.”

This attitude toward lying developed into the biggest “red herring” of all: that lies for a good purpose are morally acceptable. Oliver North undoubtedly convinced himself he was lying for the good of the nation. In his own defense North admitted that “Lying isn’t nice,” but he added: “Sometimes you must weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies.”

I admire Oliver North’s patriotism, but I believe that he was seriously mistaken. Immanuel Kant once said, “Lying violates the source of law and destroys the very foundation of our social and political relationships.” What North may well have meant for the good of his country represents a serious blow to the mutual trust and integrity that is essential to the life of a nation.

It is true that we must be careful how we define a lie. We cannot condemn as a lie every statement of what is not so. A lie differs from a simple mistake or even a faked pass on the gridiron. Likewise, jokes are not lies. Jokes are momentary deceptions for mutual enjoyment.

Most of us think that in acknowledged warfare, the rules of warfare—like a game—are sufficient warning. All should expect deception; no one is morally bound to tell the enemy the truth.

A lie is a statement or sign intended to lead another to believe what we ourselves do not really believe, except when it is mutually understood that our words are not to be trusted.

Given this definition, there is a tradition absolutely against lying that is every bit as strong as the Aquinas-Bonhoeffer-North quibbling. The Bible unequivocally denounces lies and liars. The sixth of the ten great commandments declares: “Thou shalt not bear false witness …” (Deut. 5:20). The apostle Paul writes: “Put away lying, speak the truth” (Eph. 4:24). And the Book of Revelation sets forth repeatedly the awful reminder that “no one who practices lying” shall ever have any part in the new heavens and the new earth. God “hates” liars (Mal. 3:5).

The greatest Christian philosopher-theologian of the early church, Augustine, argued for an absolutist position. No Christian should ever tell a lie. Some lies are worse than others—lies intended to hurt. Some lies are understandable, and he was loath to condemn those who would lie to save a life. Yet all lies are wrong. John Wesley agreed with Augustine’s absolutist position: “I would not tell one lie to save the souls of all the world.”

I must side with Augustine and Wesley. As the ancient theologian said: “One never errs more safely than when one errs by too much loving the truth.”

I do not know what I would do if I had to choose between lying or losing my life. But from the safe confines of my office, I would rather face my Lord after telling the truth than stand before him and have to explain why I had lied because the truth cost too much.

On the day the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Webster case, jubilation reigned among American evangelicals. It appeared to them that the Court was beginning to dismantle the structure of legalized abortion, that it would be only a matter of time until Roe v. Wade would be overturned and the slaughter of the unborn halted.

But perhaps evangelical activists cheered too quickly. Polls continue to show that only about half the populace approves of a limited ban on abortions, and many fewer support total abolition. In other words, the prolife movement has failed to accomplish the most important thing needed for its success: persuading the great majority of the American people that abortion is not only a matter of morality (considered by most to be a private realm), but something that must be stamped out for the good of society (something we agree can harm us all).

The activists try to shore up the seemingly soft social foundation of their arguments by appealing to history. They assiduously identify their cause with the nineteenth-century campaign to abolish slavery and the more recent civil-rights movement. They claim continuity with these heroic efforts, portraying their crusade as yet one more mighty work of God in history.

I would suggest instead that they scrutinize the campaign against alcoholic beverages that finally achieved National Prohibition in 1920. If any historic parallel can provide lessons for strategy, it is this.

First, temperance advocates promoted their cause as a moral crusade. They did not focus sufficiently on the social implications of the unrestrained use of beverage alcohol and on developing convincing arguments that it should be banned for the good of the nation.

Second, the temperance movement was simplistic in approach. It assumed that if saloons were closed and distilleries and breweries torn down, happiness would reign. Alcohol was painted in stark, black-and-white terms, and preachers portrayed its users (of any amount) as on the road to hell.

The simplistic answers and sloganizing of Prohibition unfortunately find a counterpart in prolife efforts, where well-articulated responses to the problems of when life begins or questions about the emotional impact of abortion on women too often are lacking.

Third, Prohibition was achieved through pressure tactics that focused on alcohol as a single issue. Similarly, the prolife movement today does not want to deal with “distractions” such as nuclear war, environmental destruction, racism, poverty, and tobacco usage. This only gives fuel to critics who accuse evangelicals of holding that “the right to life ends at birth.”

Finally, Prohibition was a middle-class effort. It shut down the saloons (the “poor men’s country clubs”) so that the newer immigrants and working classes would become sober and more industrious, but did little to keep the well-to-do from imbibing.

So with abortion: Those with means too often simply send their daughters, wives, and girl friends with unwanted pregnancies to other states or countries to obtain safe abortions, while the poor will resort to back-alley abortionists or have babies they cannot support.

Although Prohibition did contribute to a sharp drop in liquor consumption, it was accompanied by a wave of lawlessness that eroded popular respect for the law. Would new, tougher abortion legislation have the same result? Opponents of abortion will have to provide convincing arguments that abortion is a social evil, promote programs that will deter unwanted pregnancies, and assist mothers in caring for their unplanned children. Otherwise, they may lose the war. The eventual repeal of Prohibition reminds us that the staying power of a national consensus is vital.

Richard V. Pierard is professor of history at Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Biblical Silence?

Your candor in approaching the issue of hom*osexuality is to be commended [“Ex-Gay: Can hom*osexuals Really Change?” Aug. 18]. How the church views its hom*osexual brothers and sisters is a vital item on the evangelical agenda. One thing puzzles some of us, however. Why the silence on the biblical position? Stanton Jones [“hom*osexuality According to Science”] mentions the church’s “historic stance,” but there is no defense or articulation of that stance anywhere in your cluster of articles. And if you think the average layperson has a working understanding of the texts (and contexts) involved, then you might be in for a shock!

Rev. Gary McCary

Point Loma Seventh-day Adventist Church

San Diego, Calif.

Jones’s article was depressing. Surely CT can find an author willing to read a little more broadly in the scientific literature. Where were the references to physiology, animal behavior, neurochemistry, and sociology? This narrow reading by the author leaves the reader convinced that hom*osexuality might just be what the progay faction claims it to be—a fixed, integral part of a person’s identity. Good physiologists like Masters and Johnson have shown this to be false.

Jones says hom*osexuality is no worse than other sins. For the sinner, that may be true; but for the teacher who fails to teach about this activity, the guilt is more.

P. M. Webster, M.D.

Sunnybrook Hospital

Toronto, Ont., Canada

If gay people are largely not responsible for being gay, and have little or no hope of ever being other than gay, then the church is in serious error if it continues to sit in judgment of their romantic feelings toward their partners. I think it is the height of chauvinistic cruelty for those that have theirs and have it sanctioned by church, culture, and society to deny my right to enjoy the same. As long as it is within the confines of a loving, caring, committed, and monogamous relationship, my experience of God’s love, grace, and forgiveness is as valid as that of all the Cooks and Comiskys.

P. Thomas Cahill

San Francisco, Calif.

Ralph Blair has the strange notion that genital sex outside of marriage is moral as long as the sex is unnatural, and as long as one does not have what he nebulously calls “the gift of celibacy.” What a convenient rationalization!

Apparently Blair does not approve of adultery and fornication—just promiscuity for gays. No wonder he is a popular counselor with them.

Dan Lyons

Catholic Communications

Bloomsbury, N.J.

Kevin Pope’s cover illustration beautifully summarized all three articles: Yes, hom*osexuals can change, but with difficulty. I noticed something else very significant about the picture. There were few people in it. Perhaps if more Christians dared to get involved, the task of ex-gay ministry would be greatly expedited.

Arthur Roberts

Novato, Calif.

Your cover story avoids the real issue, namely: Can God change hom*osexuals? If not, we worship a cruel God indeed, who commands moral behavior without providing the power to practice it.

Rev. Gordon Dalbey

Torrance, Calif.

Not only are these articles untruthful, misleading, and unscientific, they are poor psychology and bad theology. Gay and lesbian people are neither introduced nor are playing a third-gender role. Gay and lesbian Christians are simply human persons with erotic and loving preferences for same-sex relationships. There is no need for Exodus, Harvest, Vineyard, or Quest Learning centers. What is needed are open and affirming churches, nonjudging counseling, and holy unions celebrated to end the antigay hom*ophobia rampant in today’s society.

Rev. Timm Peterson

Reconciling People

Chicago, Ill.

All of us are still in kindergarten when it comes to understanding the phenomenon of hom*osexuality. But there is another phenomenon, the existence of which none of us can deny, that may point to the ultimate solution: agape.

There is a relationship between agape and hom*osexuality. If “God is agape,” and if he created us male and female, it follows that agape is essentially heterosexual when it is manifested in humanity. The verb agapaō is used in the command, “Husbands, love your wives.” When heterosexual love goes awry, agape makes possible the path of duty and fidelity by creating the miracle of self-denial; and feelings of infidelity that are otherwise impossible to change are changed.

No philosopher or psychologist can account for the origin of agape except for a lonely cross on a hill outside Jerusalem. For us sinful human beings to experience it is as naturally “impossible” as it seems for sexual orientation to be changed. In the horror of the experience of God-forsakenness that Christ tasted on his cross when he exercised his choice to remain faithful in spite of those pressures not to, he forged out of that darkness what we call the miracle of the atonement—a reconciliation of irreconcilables.

In a true heart appreciation of Christ’s atonement, the “impossibly” alienated human soul is changed. “He who abides in agape abides in God, and God in him.” This is how faith works.

Robert J. Wieland

Meadow Vista, Calif.

Celibacy is not a gift, it is a discipline.

Richard H. Parvin

Woodland Hills, Calif.

How We Handled Hand Raising

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. But who would have expected it from mild-mannered, rational, Jim Moseley, one of our leading laymen? The guy raised not one arm but two during the first hymn.

Now Jim always sits close to the front, so there was no hiding it. And we’re not talkin’ one of those half-hearted palms-up-at-the-waist-to-humor-the-song-leader efforts you see at big rallies. No sir, those arms went all the way up.

Mabel Zwimmer, who sits behind and to the left of the Moseleys, wobbled a bit, grabbed the pew in front of her, then finally had to sit down. Jim’s teenage son buried his face even deeper than usual into his hymnal, while his sister turned to friends with one of those “who is this guy?” looks. And our song leader fell two measures behind before he was able to collect himself.

After church, our pastor called an emergency meeting of the deacons. “I’m sure you all noticed Jim’s, uh, expression of praise this morning,” he began. “And I’m not suggesting what he did was out of place. But I thought we should at least discuss it, in case any of you think we have a problem here.”

One of the deacons said it didn’t really bother him, but he wondered what visitors might think. Another deacon allowed how he once felt like raising his hands, but decided not to. No one came right out and said anything against raising hands, but one of the deacons said we at least ought to appoint a committee to establish some guidelines for this and other examples of “spiritual exuberance.”

The pastor asked for a show of hands from anyone who would like to serve on such a committee. Too bad Jim’s not a deacon.

Not a hand was lifted.

EUTYCHUS

No Absolute Monarchy

In his “Senior Editors” column of August 18, George Brushaber reveals the terrible power of a fundamentally faulty root metaphor in the understanding of Christian faith. He tells about a pleasant encounter with the benign and essentially powerless monarch of Sweden, then proceeds to contrast that current style of kingship with that of the Bible. Real kings, he says, were absolute, and God is like that only more so. The ancient earthly tyrant is the model for the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

But the whole thrust of the Bible is a polemic against absolute monarchy, beginning with Samuel’s effort to keep kings out of Israel entirely. The kings of the Bible are virtually all horrible examples of the evils of concentrated and unchecked power. Jesus nailed absolute power to the wall when he said, “It shall not be so among you; the greatest among you shall be servants.”

Surely in the serving and suffering Christ we see a symbol of the divine and the true power of deity far more authentic than any Ahab or Nebuchadnezzar—or even David or Solomon as seen through the mists of idealizing Hebrew chauvinism.

David M. Stowe

Tenafly, N.J.

World Evangelization

Thank you for the coverage of the Lausanne II Congress in Manila [News, Aug. 18], We are hoping this “global camp meeting” will result in hard and effective thinking, planning, and evangelizing together.

I would like to amplify several statements I made to CT at the end of the congress.

First, [though] we may have misjudged in asking Jack Hayford to lead the closing commitment time after he and J. I. Packer had spoken from different perspectives on the Holy Spirit, I would like to make it clear that his leadership in worship and at other sessions was a blessing to many of the folks there, including myself.

Second, with regard to balance in plenary speakers, the program committee did a tremendous job under real time constraints in choosing speakers [representing a wide spectrum]. There were a few lacks in representation, but overall, it was magnificent.

Third, though the A.D. 2000 conference held last January was not sponsored by Lausanne, we do encourage all groups that are committed to biblical evangelization. The prominent inclusion of A.D. 2000 at Manila shows this.

It is my prayer that the Manila congress will lead to bold action for world evangelization in the years ahead.

Leighton Ford

Chairman

Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization

If ever CT “damned with faint praise,” it was its totally inadequate article describing Lausanne II. Had the headline been describing Pentecost, it might have read, “Small City Revival Meeting.” The subtitle, “The whole gospel poses tough questions for participants,” misleads as if no solutions were considered. They were; in 44 “tracks,” 4,000 people spent an average of 10 hours each during the 10 days. Basic, strategic issues in contemporary world evangelization were seriously tackled by well-prepared leaders and participants.

The participants from 180-plus countries made this probably the most representative gathering of Christian leaders in church history. Scores came from what were “unreached people groups” at Lausanne I in 1974.

Also, Ray Bakke was either misquoted or in error when he said, “In 1974 we almost had to sneak in the message of social ministry.” But plenary speakers and small groups dealt with it significantly then, though not as frequently as at Manila; 1974 also produced a second, little-noticed statement, “The Radical Discipleship Statement,” which voiced significant social concerns.

Finally, younger leaders were there in greater force and percentage than at any similar congress. Flaps and flaws there were at Lausanne II, but CT’s short summary was not worthy of Lausanne II.

Donald E. Hoke

Treasurer, LCWE

Knoxville, Tenn.

Prayers For China

After reading the editorial “Please Remember China” [by David Adeney, Aug. 18], I felt there were two gaps. First, my issue did not have a China update article in the News section, although the editorial encouraged me to see it.

Second, I was disappointed that Adeney did not call for prayers for the leaders of the Christian community in China who, several years ago, helped Ruth Bell Graham visit the land of her birth. Some, particularly Bishops K. H. Ting, Sun Yanlee, and Shen Yifan, welcomed Billy Graham and opened their pulpits to him in Beijing, Shanghai, and other places.

Marvin D. Hoff

President, Western Theological Seminary

Holland, Mich.

We regret the fact that the China update news article had to be bumped to the September 8 issue for lack of space.

—Eds.

The Ewci And Lesbianism

Your reporter made an untrue statement about the Evangelical Women’s Caucus [News, Aug 18]. EWCI at its 1986 conference did not “endorse lesbianism,” as the writer says. Rather, a majority of the members at the conference approved a resolution to take “a firm stand in favor of civil rights protection for hom*osexual persons”—a resolution far from endorsing lesbianism.

Gertrude Beversluis

Ada, Mich.

One writer we know dropped out of journalism school in order to take a degree in history. “I knew how to write,” he said. “But I desperately needed something to write about.” Researching the story, getting the “something to write about,” is the hard work of magazine journalism. And for this issue, two staff writers paid their dues—one with the books, another on the scene.

For “The Abortion Wars” (p. 16), Tim Stafford read everything available on the history of conflict over abortion. But he also talked to former CT editors from the period in which evangelicals caught the vision of the moral horror of abortion. It was a strange feeling to read Tim’s initial draft and find how the history of this magazine intertwines with the history of the abortion debate.

Meanwhile, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Kim Lawton was trying to attend the trial of televangelist Jim Bakker. Knowing how second-hand information can be distorted, CT wanted its own eyes and ears in the cramped courtroom—so small that only 14 journalists were allowed in the first day. And since seats were on a first-come, first-served basis, Kim showed up at 6:00 A M. There she found paid stand-ins for the network superstars. She got in, but the next day the rules changed, and Kim’s number wasn’t drawn in the lottery. Day three found her again on the inside for the most bizarre happenings: the fainting of a key witness and Bakker’s last appearance before his nervous breakdown.

DAVID NEFF, Senior Associate Editor