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This year, CT is posing a single big question—How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?—to leaders inside and outside evangelical Christianity. Glenn T. Stanton is one of the insiders: He serves one of evangelicalism's iconic institutions, Focus on the Family, as director of global insights and trends, and lives in Colorado Springs, a center of conservative Christianity. But Glenn is often found outside these familiar environments. He has debated the issue of gay marriage with activists on college campuses across the country, participating in exchanges that model both civility and principled disagreement. He had a major role in the 1997 PBS documentary Affluenza, documenting the creeping influence of consumer culture on American families. While one of his recent books is an unflinching defense of biblical norms of marriage (Marriage on Trial, InterVarsity Press), another is a celebration of the foibles of My Crazy, Imperfect Christian Family (NavPress). So it's not surprising that his answer to our question embraces one of conservative Christianity's least favorite words—humanism.

I have been a lifelong enlistee in the curious thing called the culture war. Both my convictions and my life's work have planted me squarely in the so-called Religious Right. But only recently have I begun to think of myself as a humanist.

My teen years spanned the turbulent and uncertain 1970s. It was during those years that my mother started volunteering for one of the first crisis pregnancy centers in the country. The literature she brought home, as they say, rocked my world. No one needed to explain to me what I saw in the images there or what I should think about it.

I was haunted by the images of mutilated babies—just as horrified as I had been as a child by documentary footage of black Americans being hosed down in the streets and city parks of Bull Connor's Birmingham, as well as by pictures of emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood in the camps of Hitler's Germany. I remember innocently asking my parents if these human horrors I saw on television were real or just melodramatic Hollywood creations. They were real, my parents confirmed, but safely in the past. However, the abortion holocaust was not past history, but present reality. This human injustice was going on today in my generation, in my neighborhood, under a thin rationale supposedly found in my nation's Constitution. This was not the kind of world I could bear to live in. I had to act; I was elected president of my local Right to Life chapter at the age of 20.

Around the same time, I swapped books with a friend: I gave him the conspiracy book de jour by a leading evangelical writer in exchange for a slim volume by a little man sporting long hair, a goatee, and knickers. I was drawn to the book by the man's funky appearance. I stayed for the substance of his thoughts and the truth and compassion in his words. I read Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto in one sitting, and over the coming years, he reshaped the way I thought and the way I lived. In his book True Spirituality, Schaeffer insisted that Christians could not settle for verbal proclamation. We had to be people of demonstrated, incarnate love.

These two experiences shattered my latent Gnosticism. I could no longer settle for concerning myself only with the eternal destiny or moral behavior of my neighbors. I realized I was called to work for the good of their full humanity: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. The first experience drafted me into the rough-and-tumble of the culture war, and the second prepared me for it. Schaeffer's writing in particular led me upstream from the abortion issue to the larger pro-family movement, by teaching me to see abortion as a tragic symptom—along with many others—of family disintegration and a sexual revolution that left no winners.

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April 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4