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So I began my life's work. I have now spent my career at Focus on the Family under the leadership of James Dobson, whose conviction, winsomeness, and clarity of vision initially attracted my attention and have continued to command my respect. Now "Doc" has turned over the leadership of this organization to a new generation, represented in our new president, Jim Daly. These days I find myself reflecting on how well contemporary evangelicalism is suited to its mission of incarnating the gospel in public life. "Doc" represents a generation that took fundamentalism beyond its cultural isolation and engaged many sectors of culture: politics, academia, industry, the arts, law, and entertainment. His generation was willing to innovate while remaining faithful to the past. What is the next generation called to do?

Here is my proposal: Just as I had to go "upstream" from the issue of abortion to the family, I propose that we need to go upstream again, this time from the family to humanity itself.

What if there were a movement dedicated to the question, What does it mean to be human?

Asking such a question would lead us to explore and demonstrate what it means to live, to feel, to hope, to love, to give, to receive, to be wounded, and to be healed. It would lead us to explore why our families' failures and rejections hurt us so much and why we desperately need others. It would drive us to ask what dignity means and what its enemies are. Ultimately, it would lead us to ask, What does it really mean to have life abundantly? These are not narrow, issue-based questions. They are not questions for the pro-family movement alone. They are human questions.

I hasten to add that moving upstream does not mean leaving family matters behind. Rather, focusing our attention on the meaning of being human will powerfully illuminate why everything else downstream matters. The pro-family movement is a critical subset of the pro-human movement. But our work needs the context provided by realizing that we have just left the most technologically advanced, but still humanly impoverished, century in history. We must weep at the human death, pain, and alienation caused by genocide, war, global poverty, substance abuse, fatherlessness, aids, and cancer, as well as pornography, human trafficking, child abandonment, commercialization, and radical individualism. Perhaps most of all, we must confront the fact that our knowledge of how to stop many of these scourges has never been greater. We just lack the wisdom and the will.

We must become students of humanity. We must become humanists: people who are unreservedly committed to human life at its fullest, and people deeply pained by human life at its worst. Yes, someone from the Religious Right said we must become humanists.

I don't primarily mean that the suffering of the modern era should drive us to humanism. As Christ said, the poor will always be among us. Human suffering in all its forms is a tragic reminder of the reality of the Fall. We will only be free when Christ's redemption is complete. However, we must become serious students of humanity because just as the Fall is real, so too is the Incarnation. The Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity—the Son of God leaving his eternal and divine communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit to become flesh and dwell among us—this is what should draw us to the question of what it means to be human in these inhumane times.

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April 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4