Book Briefs: March 4, 1988

“Be Prepared to Cry”

Peace and Hope in the Corner of the Dead, by John Maust (Latin America Mission, 189 pp.; $5.95, paper). Reviewed by Andrés T. Tapia, a Peruvian journalist working in North America, and author of The AIDS Crisis: The Facts and Myths About a Modern Plague, to be published this summer by InterVarsity Press.

Silent, skeptical evangelical leaders sat before Christian journalist Esteban Cuya as he nervously played the first of two cassette tapes smuggled from Ayacucho, the vortex of Peru’s guerrilla violence. Their skepticism soon gave way to grief, however, as they heard the survivors of two separate attacks against believers recount their stories.

One atrocity involved a terrorist grenade and machine-gun attack on a Pentecostal church in Santa Rosa that left six believers dead and fourteen wounded. In another, more serious incident, a navy captain was implicated in the cold-blooded killing of six Presbyterians in Callqui. Despite the poor quality of the tape, the listeners understood enough to know that government soldiers had hauled the men out of a church and shot them dead just 25 feet from the sanctuary.

John Maust’s Peace and Hope in the Corner of the Dead chronicles the impact the Santa Rosa and Callqui killings had on the leadership of Peru’s CONEP (Pern’s equivalent of the National Association of Evangelicals). Before Cuya’s presentation, CONEP had been theologically averse to most social action. But now a grisly four-year-old guerrilla war between the fanatical Khmer Rouge-inspired group called Shining Path and Peru’s brutal armed forces had spilled over into the church. The situation demanded quick action.

Two days after hearing the taped testimonies, CONEP released an unprecedented and courageous statement denouncing both the terrorists and government forces for their indiscriminate use of violence. The next day, on August 24, 1984, CONEP gave birth to a relief group that would provide for the immediate needs of evangelicals caught in the crossfire of Peru’s ugly war.

The group’s president, Presbyterian pastor Pedro Arana, christened the organization Paz y Esperanza (Peace and Hope), based on the promises in Romans 15:13. Arana, former International Fellowship of Evangelical Students general secretary for Latin America and a former member of the body that drafted Peru’s current constitution, immediately went to work. In its first year of operation, Paz y Esperanza directly assisted 634 widows and 1,321 orphans with food, clothing, and/or shelter, helped free from jail several believers wrongly accused of being terrorists, and resettled 25 families from Ayacucho in unoccupied government land far from the violence.

The work proved to be extremely painful. “Be prepared to cry,” a Paz y Esperanza volunteer was told. Among those found in mass graves or decapitated on the roadside were Christians who often encountered no-win situations. Even taking church offerings—considered by the Marxist revolutionaries as “exploitation of the poor”—could be punished with death. Ayacucho had become what its name means in Quechua: “The Corner of the Dead.”

Sick Guerrillas

Independent news reports confirm Maust’s dismal picture. Yet his book is laced with hope. As Maust writes in the book’s preface, “This story transcend[s] man’s suffering and point[s] to hope in a God of peace.” Throughout Peace and Hope, he relates dramatic stories of God’s divine intervention—such as making a band of guerrillas sick or making their guns malfunction at crucial moments.

Maust, editor of the Latin America Evangelist, provides the reader with a better understanding of the political, economic, and racial issues surrounding the rise of Shining Path. While the book accurately describes the Peruvian evangelical response to injustice in the eighties, its most valuable contribution to the U.S. church is its explicit call for North Americans to put themselves in their brothers’ and sisters’ shoes. Maust asks, What if “terrorists or soldiers burst into our church?” “What if we heard about the persecution of Christians the next state over.… Would we help?” The Peruvians in this book wrestled with that question: “The Bible demands more from us because it has given us more,” Paz y Esperanza president Arana explains to Maust.

And for journalist Cuya, the answer is simple but potentially deadly. When advised for his own safety to stop writing about human-rights abuses in Ayacucho, Cuya replied, “I can’t remain indifferent. Out of obedience to the Lord, I have to keep writing.”

“All Have Need Of Tolerance”

Religion & Republic: The American Circumstance, by Martin E. Marty (Beacon Press, 391 pp.; $25.00, cloth). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and a columnist for Copley News Service.

Religion, long dismissed as one of the quieter and safer dimensions of national existence,” writes Martin Marty, a professor of Christian history at the University of Chicago, “has suddenly reappeared as a factor in American political and social dynamism.” Evangelicals, Catholics, and mainstream Protestants have all become politically active; their religious faith has animated a civic consciousness that was largely absent just a decade or two ago. Yet even the passions excited by the presidential aspirations of Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson do not threaten the kind of divisiveness that has beset many other nations—Northern Ireland and Lebanon being extreme examples.

In this we are fortunate. As Marty describes, America’s spiritual tradition is one of tolerance. Most of the nation’s founders were religious, but their individual faiths differed. Not surprisingly, then, they consciously structured the national government so that no one sect could use state power to dominate the others. As the number of denominations multiplied over time, peaceful pluralism became a practical necessity. “If there were but two religions, we should cut each other’s throats,” Congressman John Canfield Spencer explained to Alexis de Tocqueville: “But no sect having the majority, all have need of tolerance.”

In Praise Of Pluralism

Religion & Republic is dedicated to explaining and praising religious diversity in all its forms. “Pluralism, especially religious pluralism, suffers everywhere today,” writes Marty, “but it deserves celebration.”

In fact, the more heterogeneous religious America has become, the happier Marty seems to be. The U.S. “is not the first country to include more than one religious grouping, to be sure,” he observes, “but nowhere before or elsewhere has there been variety on the scale experienced here.”

Yet to believe in the virtue of tolerance—in essence, the willingness to leave the job of perfecting sinful human beings up to God rather than to entrust the task to government—does not mean one should exalt the religious divisions that naturally result.

It is true that in two ways, at least, pluralism has arguably strengthened the body of Christ, encouraging the development of denominations that are both more serious and vibrant. First, experimentalism may have made the church more responsive to moving of the Holy Spirit. “There is always room for testing, for trying again, for changing,” Marty writes.

Another important aspect of America’s tradition cited by Marty is voluntaryism. Because people are not forced to profess a spiritual commitment and support an official church, religion in the U.S. has not turned into the lifeless formalism evident elsewhere.

Hostile Pluralism

However, pluralism is not limited to Christians exploring slightly different paths toward the same goal. The development of religion in the United States has been affected by what Marty refers to as the “American Enlightenment.” Deists like Benjamin Franklin advocated a “Publick Religion,” one that was “grounded in social process, in a reason and nature that were both accessible to all people of thought and good will or good intentions.” This deistic philosophy has overlapped the different Christian faiths, often muting the sharp, uncompromising challenge posed by the gospel.

Moreover, some would say, the tolerant deistic impulses of the past have increasingly given way to a new, hostile religion, “secular humanism.” Preaching pluralism—and not, notably, tolerance—this movement has increasingly used the state to banish Christianity from public discourse. Though Marty does not deal with this phenomenon, it is an integral aspect of modern American pluralism.

If the Inquisition and unending religious warfare in Europe proved anything, it is that imperfect human societies require tolerance. And the U.S. has performed well on this score, involving, in Marty’s words, “the record of a people that has grown ever more pluralist and has still found reasons to develop enough common spirit to have creative arguments—and has survived.” But while Christians should ever promote tolerance, they should never treat the variety of human error they encounter as they struggle to discover and implement God’s truth as anything other than error.

A Highly Religious, Intensely Secular Society

Unsecular America, edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Eerdmans, 160 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, dean and professor of theology and culture, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

This collection of essays moves from a presentation of the overwhelming evidence for an “unsecular America” (for example, 95 percent believe in God; 85 percent pray; 79 percent find strength in religion) to a discussion of the problems of articulating the sacred in a democratic and pluralistic public square.

Arguments are not sustained long enough to prove definitive at any point, but then they are not meant to. Instead, a number of provocative questions are allowed to surface.

Unsecular America asks, for example, can we not value secularization while at the same time opposing secularism? How is America unique in the West because of its continuing belief that it is a highly favored nation? Does America’s high degree of religiosity help or hinder real Christianity? Is our individualized religion not the functional equivalent of European secularization? Why were clergy consistently more conservative than laity in the 1950s, but now are most often found left of their congregations on the political spectrum? Is the discussion today on abortion the latest public expression of a religious awakening (as were controversies over slavery, women’s suffrage, and temperance)? Why did the New Testament writers not see their secular culture as a threat to be challenged?

The book’s general thesis—that America is “a highly religious, intensely secular society”—would be confusing to non-American observers. But no other description can explain our history, our passionate pursuit of both religion and prosperity, our grassroots support of prayer in schools, or our present debate over abortion. According to historian Paul Johnson, it is wrong to see America’s tolerance in faith and voluntaryism as part of a spirit of secularism; rather, it grows out of piety. In America, as Tocqueville observed, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom join.

American Values

In this second volume in Eerdman’s Encounter Series, editor Richard Neuhaus provides four essays and the extended discussion that followed when 27 theologians, ethicists, historians, and sociologists met at the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society in 1985.

The participants were all students of “American values” and advocates in varying degrees of American democracy. The tenor of the discussion reflected the neoconservatism that we have come to identify with Michael Novak, Edward Dobson, Ed Hindson, Peter Berger, and Neuhaus himself. Evangelical historians Mark Noll and George Marsden were among the discussants. Despite this unrepresentative mix, the volume provides a fascinating window into wider American life and religion.

Neuhaus laments “the naked public square,” arguing instead for the “resacralization of democracy.” He desires religious and moral debate to be put again into the center of American life so the nation might act with purpose. Marsden, on the other hand, suggests “the naked public square” is what is right with America. We can have morally informed discussion without the church being at the center where the lure of power is so strong.

The participants wrestled with why America is religious and whether such a situation is desirable. Is America still religious because religion has conformed to the materialistic and individualistic values of society? Is America’s religious core not a constant in its experience? Do not polls measure only a shallow religiosity? Could it not be that America’s secularization has not become a “godless” secularism because church and cleric never ruled here and thus no anti-Christendom sentiment needed to be evidenced as the Enlightenment unfolded? Readers will find the discussion stimulating, even when they disagree.

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