Headlines in 2025 worry about loneliness, but Americans also seemed to be facing an epidemic of loneliness in 1978. One in four people told pollsters they had felt isolated and cut off from others in the previous week. Psychologists were taking note, and so was CT.
The prevalence of loneliness in modern America suggests the need to look also at some social conditions that are a part of the backdrop of our life. …
The desire to increase production and profit has motivated the development of an impersonal technology and a commodity-orientation. The individual has become a means to an end, a production tool. Although this orientation is not new in our society, we have done something new with it: we have taken it into our personal lives.
The technological emphasis on efficiency—on maximum output at minimum time and cost—has been extended to human interaction. When efficiency and the accompanying goals of convenience and comfort become internalized as guiding values, human relationships become more superficial. Deep, satisfying relationships take time, effort, and sometimes pain to develop; the process may at times be inconvenient, uncomfortable, inefficient. …
Television, too, enhances separation. … Urbanization is another heavy contributor to society-wide loneliness. …
The removal of God as the center of human relationship was the precursor of today’s secularization. In order to cope with sin without repenting, modern man has attempted to get rid of God by pronouncing him dead. But this attempt plunges man deeper into the depths of loneliness and despair without remedy.
Instead of turning to God in repentance and having life’s most fundamental relationship restored, the secular person casts about for substitutes that will allow him to retain his narcissism but overcome his loneliness and alienation. Drugs, alcohol, sex, and marathon encounter experiences become part of the search, as do … countless other semireligious, semi-psychological trips.
The sound of some of that modern alienation, coming from urban clubs and teenage stereos, had a name: punk music. CT said punk could be traced back to “the darker side of rock,” specifically the Rolling Stones.
The Beatles were the fun-loving, mop-topped entertainers, but the Stones are everything parents least want their children to emulate. As the “bad boys of rock n’ roll” the Stones attracted the attention of millions of young people who identified with that image and that music and who felt that the group sang what they felt inside. A newspaper account reported that “The Stones are perverted, outrageous, violent, repulsive, ugly, tasteless, incoherent. A travesty. That’s what’s so good about them.” In a generation seeking to break with the past into an era of personal freedom the Stones provided the stance and the music to fuel the effort. …
Stones concerts work the fans into a frenzied, ecstatic capitulation to the music. The driving beat and the stage antics of [Mick] Jagger result in a communal release of frustration and energy. As one of the songs says, “We gotta vent our frustration, before we blow a 50 amp fuse.”
Some popular music was growing curiously Christian in 1978. CT reviewed Bruce Cockburn’s music, caught up with Neal Paul Stookey of the chart-topping folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, and heard of his conversion.
A young man about ten years younger than Stookey, who was then thirty, asked if he could talk with him. Stookey, who thought he looked a little depressed, said sure, after the show. When the concert ended he looked for the boy and asked what he wanted to talk to him about. The boy replied, “I want to talk to you about the Lord.”
As Stookey describes it, “An adrenalin change took place and my heart just started beating fast and I felt like this was it—whatever it was. I didn’t know where it was going to lead. But I don’t think I would have felt that way unless what he was saying was true. He told me how he had been converted. And he said that God had put a burden on his heart to talk with me.” …
The two of them went off to Stookey’s hotel room. Although they rode over in a pick-up truck driven by a third person, Stookey doesn’t remember seeing or talking to anyone else. He asked the boy if he believed in reincarnation. The boy replied that there were more important things to talk about. “That was the heaviest thing I had metaphysicked into, but something inside me said ‘he knows more than you do and what he knows you should know.’”
When they reached the hotel, Stookey tried to be a good host, but the boy wanted to pray. As the young Christian prayed, Stookey learned that not only had he somehow avoided the guards to get backstage but he had had no ticket to the concert. After thanking God for his help, the boy said, “Now I think Paul wants to talk to you.” All Noel could say was, “I’m sorry.” “I started crying,” he says. “Later I realized what I was saying I was sorry for, which was for not thinking that God was alive, and for all those ways in which I had used things to get between me and people.”
Stookey believes that God loves a contrite spirit, and that night he had finally reached a state of contrition. He was sorry that he had abused other people and himself. He confessed things that he had done wrong, though he didn’t itemize them. “I was washed, cleansed—I couldn’t believe it. It was like I had this incredibly cantilevered balance. Or that I was two interwoven mobiles. Suddenly when I had admitted that I was sorry for the life I had led without God, everything collapsed and I was perfectly balanced. I had been given day one again.”
Other prominent figures in American life also spoke out about their Christian faith in 1978. CT interviewed a convicted Ku Klux Klan terrorist, whose conversion led him to denounce “the religion of Americanism,” and the chief surgeon of a children’s hospital, who spoke about medical ethics and the sanctity of life.
Q: What should you tell a woman who is contemplating abortion?
A: She should be shown photographs of exactly what she is aborting. She also needs some spiritual guidance. Many women early on in pregnancy go through a time of depression when they do not want the child. If they have only one kind of counseling available—to abort—women may live to regret it.Q: What about an unmarried, pregnant Christian?
A: That’s where we Christians are reprehensible. I’ve been involved for a long time and was instrumental in founding the Evangelical Child and Family service in Philadelphia largely because of my concern for Christian unwed mothers. One would expect that evangelical Christians, having understood the grace of God, would be most gracious under these circumstances. They are not. They are judgmental and it’s to our detriment that this can be said of us.
Church attendance seemed to be growing. In the summer, CT reported that congregations in Texas, California, and Washington State set records for single-day offerings.
Armored trucks may one day replace the traditional offering plate if the string of record Sunday offerings continues.
Television pastor Robert H. Schuller of the 9,000-member Garden Grove Community Church in Anaheim, California, reported a record single-Sunday collection of $1,251,356 to help build his church’s Crystal Cathedral. … After checks in the next day’s mail from nonattenders were counted, the total reached $1,421,000.
One week later, on June 25, the 1,700-member independent Overlake Christian Church in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland received $1.65 million in cash and pledges toward a $1.8 million building project. The donations included seven diamond rings, several motor vehicles, and some newly borrowed money, according to pastor Bob Moore.
A new modern-language Bible translation dropped in 1978. CT asked a Wheaton College English professor to assess the literary merits of the New International Version. He liked some things and not others.
The prime literary virtue of the NIV is clarity. For example, “Sheol” is translated as “the grave,” and the statement “he will not let your foot slip” conveys the realism of the journey to Jerusalem better than saying that God will not let one’s foot “be moved” (KJV, RSV). The sixth and ninth commandments of the Decalogue are rendered “you shall not murder” and “you shall not give false testimony.” “Dishonest scales” and “accurate weights” are an improvement over “false balance” and “just weight” (KJV, RSV). The lover in the Song of Solomon is “faint with love,” not “sick of love” (KJV) or “sick with love” (RSV). And I hope it will dispel some follies to read that “it is good for a man not to marry” instead of “not to touch a woman” (KJV).
The NIV fares less well in the area of diction. Given the time-honored scale of high, middle, and low styles, the NIV tends toward the low or ordinary. … With this inclination toward an everyday idiom, the NIV loses the exaltation and grandeur and eloquence that the King James possesses in such abundance. Gone from the NIV are the “behold” and “lo” and “yea” and “even” constructions that give the King James and Revised Standard such power. Psalm 27:14, which is enlivened in the KJV with “wait, I say, on the Lord” and in the RSV with “yea, wait for the Lord!” is tamed down in the NIV to “wait on the Lord.”
The biggest political issue dividing American evangelicals was peace in the Middle East. As President Jimmy Carter brought Israel and Egypt together for the Camp David Accords, CT invited a range of writers to weigh in on how Christians should view Israel and Palestine. The founder of the Institute of Holy Land Studies (now Jerusalem University College) argued Bible-believers should back Israel.
Let me set down a double-barreled assertion: God still has a part for ethnic Israel to play in the drama of redemption, and the modern political state of Israel could be act one in the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies. Both of these assertions have been strongly challenged.
Some people maintain that modern Israel cannot be the Israel that God predicted would return to the land, for, they claim, if God’s hand were in this return to the land and in the setting up of the present Israeli government, all the war and bloodshed we see and read about would not be taking place. The claim, however, that a warlike Israel cannot be the special focus of God’s purpose will not stand up in the light of God’s pronouncements during the immigration under Joshua. …
Although it is for another time to judge the outcome, what may be seen in embryo in Israel today holds high promise. It is written: “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2:3). The Lord will once again bless the world out of Zion.
Columnist Elisabeth Elliott, on the other side, expressed sympathy for Palestinians and said she had grave moral concerns about the new Jewish state.
I saw the joy of the Israelis in their victory in [the Six-Day War]. It was hysterical. Many, from rabbis to military men, spoke of it as a miracle. Others resented any suggestion that the miracle might have been divine. Israel had done it—why say it was God? … “We are gods!” a Jewish girl said to me. “We will work things out. We will fulfill prophecy.” …
An Arab woman, sitting in a chilly living room from which most of the rugs and furniture had been removed lest it be confiscated, said to me, “Of course there are some who see in this victory the hand of God, and there are many Christians who are sure he is responsible for it, but what am I, an Arab and a Christian, to make of it?”
This is a question not sufficiently considered by many Christians whose views on the Arab-Israeli situation are a farrago of superficially interpreted Old Testament prophecy, glibly accepted propaganda, and uncritically indulged sentimentality.
Before we can conclude that the nation of Israel is a literal fulfillment of prophecy, that present-day tensions between Arabs and Jews are just another episode in an ancient history of unmitigated hostility to each other, before we conclude that there is no question about the morality of providing a homeland for a persecuted people by persecuting another people who are already there, we need to probe a little deeper.
CT’s outgoing editor in chief, Harold Lindsell, signed his name to a statement of “Evangelicals’ Concern for Israel,” published as a full-page ad in The New York Times and Washington Post. A follow-up editorial explained the magazine’s position:
As we understand Scripture, God has an interest in all peoples, yet he has a distinguishable interest in the people of Israel. Moreover, the tragic history of the suffering of the children of Israel, most of it in recent centuries and inflicted by those who claim to be the followers of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ, warrants our support of a homeland for the Israelis. There is no better place for such a state than on Palestinian soil. Obviously, if the Jews are to have a homeland it must be located somewhere. …
Even if the Arab nations cannot acknowledge biblical grounds for doing so, we think that they should recognize Israel as a sovereign state. … Recognition of the sovereignty of Israel and its borders ought not to depend on Israel’s acceptance of a [Palestinian Liberation Organization]-run neighboring state. Such a condition is not placed on other nations.
CT’s new editor in chief, Kenneth Kantzer, answered questions from more than a dozen religious leaders, setting out his vision for the future of the 22-year-old magazine.
A weather vane is turned by every breath of wind, but a sign faithfully directing travelers to the next town does not. … All human beings and human institutions must stand under the judgment of Scripture. Christianity Today in faithfulness to God needs to critically evaluate the establishment, including what is sometimes called the evangelical establishment. At times, no doubt, it must rebuke and condemn. But whether it is the evangelical, liberal, or secular establishment, let us seek to understand before we rebuke, so that we shall rebuke in love, seeking one another’s mutual good.
