Videodrome

Written and directed by David Cronenberg; a Universal release.

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the television arena—the videodrome,” says Brian O’Blivion, a bizarre and McLuhanesque character in Videodrome, a compelling and disturbing film about the effects of TV.

The film follows the adventures of Max Renn (James Woods), owner of a sex-oriented cable station, who eloquently defends its fare on psychological (“a harmless outlet for people’s fantasies and frustrations”), sociological (“better on the screen than on the streets”), and economic grounds (“We’re small, and in order to survive we have to give people something they can’t get anywhere else.”).

Max cannot, however, defend himself from “Videodrome,” a sadomasochistic show that catches his darkened eyes. “Torture, murder, mutilation,” says Max, glowing. “Brilliant, absolutely brilliant! And almost no production costs.… I think it’s what’s next.”

What’s next for Max, though, is trouble, as the show attacks his mind and body. He loses touch with reality, sees his body disfigure, watches his television come alive, pairs sex with violence in his own life, murders his business partners, and finally takes his own life, intoning, “Death to Videodrome; long live the new flesh.”

The film, which begins as an intriguing examination of the fruits of perverse entertainment, degenerates into the type of sick fare it seems to condemn. Blood gushes, entrails sail, and the viewer is never far from the sight or sound of women being brutalized.

Such should be expected from David Cronenberg, who has turned a pretty profit with a string of films (They Came from Within, 1975; Rabid, 1977; The Brood, 1979; and Scanners, 1981) all packed with sex, horror, and stomach-wrenching special effects.

Cronenberg got his professional start with Cinepix, a Canadian purveyor of sex flicks; and like Max Renn, he defends his films on the loftiest of grounds, calling them “films of confrontation,” “art,” and “catharsis.”

But like Renn, Cronenberg may be unleashing unseen demons as he philosophizes all the way to the bank.

Reviewed by Steve Rabey, a writer living in Dayton, Ohio.

Three opposing positions that also exist among evangelicals.

Three vocal groups in the international ecumenical movement may enter into open conflict at the Vancouver assembly of the World Council of Churches when it meets on July 24.

According to a veteran observer, each group has a different conception of Christian unity. The first, in which the Eastern Orthodox play a prominent role, thinks of unity primarily in doctrinal terms. The second, stimulated by Third World sensitivities, insists that true unity can be realized only in a community in which individuals and groups are granted political and economic equality. The third emphasizes a theme popular among North American and Western European feminists: the transformation of the church into a mutually supportive “community of women and men.”

This brief survey has implications for the evangelical community. For one thing, many evangelicals are surprised that a concern for “sound doctrine” is a vital presence in the mainstream ecumenical movement. Last year I completed a three-year stint as a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches. Several of us came from evangelical denominations. (The commission regularly appoints representatives from nonmember churches.) The presence of evangelicals (including some from NCC member denominations), Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and persons loyal to other confessional traditions resulted in some interesting and often high-level theological discussion.

My friend’s analysis suggests that there is no unified “liberation” program in the ecumenical movement. Evangelicals often tend to classify the women’s movement, North American minority groups, and Third World movements under a single “liberation” rubric. But this hardly does justice to the complex realities of the situation.

The most significant difference is the one between North American and European feminism, and Third World and North American minority movements. Many in the Third World see feminism as yet another attempt to impose a “Northern” agenda on the worldwide church. Feminists see Third World and minority movements as often characterized by an oppressive patriarchalism.

It would be unfortunate if evangelicals were gleeful about these tensions in the ecumenical movement. Similar debates have taken place at many of our national and international gatherings. Even when the tensions are not officially acknowledged, they exist on our campuses and in our churches. None of us can hide from the issues raised by struggles among the defenders of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and (forgive me) orthosexy.

This conflict can be read as a challenge to the Christian community to integrate a concern for sound doctrine, the healing of personal relationships (one dimension of the feminist program), and the struggle for economic and political justice. Each emphasis has a long history as a proposed basis for Christian unity. In various Christian traditions, doctrinal tests for unity have played an important role. In reaction against the “dead orthodoxy” that these tests sometimes produce, various groups have attempted to reorganize the Christian community in terms of “loving fellowship” or “true brotherhood.” Others have challenged both doctrinalism and communalism by calling for the establishment of a “community of goods” in which Christians would model egalitarianism.

If my friend’s predictions are correct, then, the tensions that will surface in Vancouver will not be new. Nor can they be dismissed as peculiar to the atmosphere of an “anything goes” ecumenical movement.

The banner of the Vancouver Assembly is “Jesus Christ—The Life of the World.” This “logo” could be the basis for dealing with the three competing models of Christian unity. It is, properly understood, an appropriate starting point for integrating doctrinal soundness, the healing of relationships, and the work of justice.

In Colossians 1 Paul describes Jesus Christ as the one who gives life to the world: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” But then he observes that Christ is “the head of the body, the church.” If we understand who Jesus Christ is, we will see that the unity of the world, the cosmos, is closely tied to the unity of the church. The one who gives life to the world vivifies the church.

Evangelicals believe true unity cannot be achieved apart from a “high Christology.” But we have a lot of work to do if we are to understand the implications of our Christology for the issues to be debated in Vancouver. The heaven-sent Son of God has given us a Word that applies to all of life—to the life of the whole world. Our orthodox professions must attempt to build a worldwide community of healing relationships, a community that is committed to the work of justice, of peace, and of righteousness.

The task of integrating the various essential elements of a unified church is not an easy one. But neither are we called to initiate that task from scratch. The life-giving Lamb of God has already initiated a redemptive program in which truth, healing, and liberation dwell together in perfect unity.

RICHARD J. MOUW¹Dr. Mouw is professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

New Bible Translations: Confusion Or Clarification?

Two bibles published in 1982, the New King James Version and the Reader’s Digest Bible, have created a national interest.

The “Dedication” at the beginning of the New King James Version (NKJV) reveals that “over one hundred scholars representing the majority of English-speaking nations” labored for seven years to produce this revision and updating of the venerable “Authorized” Version of 1611.

Hailed as the “fifth major edition” since 1611 (the editors reject the idea that the Revised Standard Version is one), the NKJV attempts to update the language of the King James Version (KJV) for today “while preserving the majesty and rhythm of the respected giant among all Bibles.” Four major and numerous minor earlier revisions of the KJV have been published, the one most Christians are familiar with today published as far back as 1769.

How successful has the NKJV revision been? A comparison of familiar sections reveals that differences are minimal. In Genesis 1, for example, God is said to create the “heavens” (KJV “heaven”), darkness was “on” (KJV “upon”) the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God “was hovering over” (KJV “moved upon”) the face of the waters.

In place of “thou” and “thy” the NKJV has “You” and “Your.” Quotation marks are used to enclose what people say. And modern punctuation has replaced the now unusual punctuation of the KJV.

If changes are minimal, why has controversy surrounded the publication of the NKJV? First, have enough changes been made to make this translation a good twentieth-century translation? Many scholars feel that the NKJV does not speak twentieth-century English and that a twentieth-century Bible should.

Second, will those who have through the years of new Bible translations clung to the KJV accept the NKJV, or will they reject it because it has too many changes? The publishers are clearly expecting them to adopt the NKJV, and they may be right in their expectations.

A more serious cause for controversy centers on the reliability of the Greek text on which the KJV of 1611 was based. The details of the argument become extremely complex and technical. In its simplest terms, most scholars today argue that the best Greek text of the New Testament is the so-called eclectic text British scholars Westcott and Hort published in 1882. This text is basically that found in two groups of manuscripts dating from the fourth century.

These texts were not known in 1611. The translators of the KJV had to depend on a later group of Greek manuscripts. This group, called the Textus Receptus or “Received Text,” includes many verses in the New Testament that are not contained in the Westcott-Hort tradition. For example, John 5:4 in the KJV and NKJV says an angel went down into the waters of the “Pool of Bethesda” at a certain time and stirred them up. Most of the newer translations, based on Westcott-Hort, omit this verse as a late addition to the New Testament and so not part of the inspired text.

Those responsible for the publication of the NKJV insist, however, that the manuscripts of the Textus Receptus may be more accurate and ancient than most scholars will admit. As the Preface of the NKJV says, “A growing number of scholars now regard the Received Text as far more reliable than previously thought.”

Most of the scholars we contacted do not agree and note that the vast majority of New Testament scholars support the eclectic Greek text.

At issue are certain portions of the Bible, such as Matthew 6:13b; Mark 16:9–20; Luke 23:34a; John 5:3b–4; John 7:53–8:11; Acts 8:37, and 1 John 5:7–8. The Textus Receptus includes these portions while the eclectic text generally does not. Ultimately, which are included determines what is in the inspired Word of God.

The Reader’s Digest Bible (RDB) has already been the subject of an equal amount of controversy, but for a different reason. It claims to be “the only true condensation of the Bible,” as opposed to an abridgment. That means instead of omitting entire passages and even books as abridgments do, the RDB has shortened the Bible by about 40 percent by eliminating words, phrases, verses, and short blocks of text it deemed extraneous to the basic message. The Old Testament has been shortened by half, the New Testament by a quarter. The method is the one Reader’s Digest has perfected over half a century with other books. Seven editors worked three years to complete the condensation.

As the editors point out in the preface, people in ancient times were far more enamored of repetition than we are. General editor Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary assures the reader that “nothing has been changed, nothing added to or removed from the text that in any way diminished its spirit, its teachings, or the familiar ring of its language.” He also insists that the work contains no bias toward or against any particular set of beliefs, though some evangelicals have objected to some of the introductions that precede each book. Would it not have been more politic and irenic to recognize that a substantial number of evangelical scholars reject the theory that post-Mosaic sources contributed to Genesis? Many evangelical scholars also reject a postexilic date for Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon; a later date for the latter part of Isaiah; and a Maccabean date (about 165 B.C.) for Daniel.

In his field of greatest expertise, the New Testament, Metzger’s introductions are less at odds with the views of most evangelicals. Though he mentions that some scholars hold that John’s teachings “may have been edited by another,” he also mentions the tradition that the aged apostle John wrote them near the close of the first century. There is not even a hint of the view that II Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians may not have been by Paul, as some German and American scholars argue. The position that the Pastoral Letters may have “expanded several previously unpublished messages of Paul” is accepted also by a number of evangelical scholars, though they would not be happy about the idea that the author may have lived a generation after Paul’s death.

Traditional and critical views of the authorship of I Peter are given, but Metzger notes that “most modern scholars” feel II Peter “was drawn up in Peter’s name sometime between A.D. 100 and 150.” No connection is made between the “Christian prophet named John” who wrote Revelation and the disciple of Jesus named John.

The Reader’s Digest Bible is explicitly intended for the general reader who is discouraged from reading the Bible by its “formidable length, complexity, or obscurity.” It is not intended for the person who reads the Bible regularly. If evangelicals recognize that the RDB was not in any way intended to replace the full Bible but rather to serve as an introduction to it, they will respond from a more balanced perspective.

Few, if any, of the favorite Bible sections have been touched. Some condensations will be obvious to anyone who knows his Bible well—1 Chronicles 1–9, for instance (the whole of I Chronicles has been condensed to nine pages). A number of psalms have been omitted entirely, as was the last half of Daniel. Wherever Hebrew parallelism occurs, the condensers have tended to eliminate it; for example, Proverbs 1:9 becomes simply, “they are a fair garland for your head,” omitting “and pendants for your neck.”

The editorial team did its work with great skill. Without making a verse-by-verse comparison, most Bible readers will have a difficult time finding what has been omitted.

It is most unfortunate, however, that the editors had to spoil a useful work for a general audience with introductory materials unacceptable to so many evangelicals.

Three Guides To Bible Translation

We are faced with so many translations today that we need authoritative works to guide us in evaluating them. Among the books on the Bible now available are several that review some of the leading Bible translations and suggest their strengths and weaknesses. At an even more basic level, there are books that discuss what makes a good translation, a subject evangelical Christians can debate with the same fervor and intensity of disagreement some people devote to fad diets.

Even the person who has been fortunate enough to take college or seminary Bible courses has selections to challenge his more refined theological interests.

Both Jack P. Lewis’s The English Bible; from KJV to NIV; A History and Evaluation (Baker, 1981) and The Word of God: A Guide to English Versions of the Bible (John Knox, 1982), edited by Lloyd R. Bailey, review the more popular Bible translations on the market today. Lewis’s volume is an amazingly thorough, in-depth survey of 12 translations currently in use. In meticulous detail Lewis analyzes translations and evaluates thousands of specific words and phrases. In addition, he has chapters on the Bible in history and the early English Bible. In a third chapter he grapples magisterially with “Doctrinal Problems in the King James Version.” An evangelical with doctorates from both Harvard and Hebrew Union College, Lewis has written an outstanding analysis of today’s major Bible translations.

The Word of God analyzes nine Bible translations, including the New Jewish Version. It is an expansion of articles that originally appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of the Duke Divinity School Review. Nine different authors write evaluations, and Eugene Nida and Robert Bratcher introduce and conclude the book. Of interest is the inclusion at the end of each article, where available, of the names of the participants in the various translation projects. Many of the authors would not be considered evangelical Christians, and considerable hostility is expressed to the New American Standard Bible. But the New International Version receives a relatively favorable review, and the volume is a helpful addition to Bible translation evaluation.

The Translation Debate: What Makes a Translation Good? by Eugene H. Glassman (IVP, 1981) is a different kind of book. Instead of evaluating individual translations, it reflects on the nature of translations. Glassman, a missionary translator and translations adviser to the United Bible Societies, traces the history of Bible translation (which he calls “the thankless task”!). He also discusses the differences between translating, interpreting, and paraphrasing. Two ways of translating, form oriented and content oriented, are compared. The author, who has graduate degrees from Dallas, Northwestern, and Wheaton, clearly favors the latter, now called “dynamic equivalence.” He concludes with five guidelines to a good translation; it avoids meaninglessness; ambiguity; misleading translation; complicated, heavy, or obscure renderings; and unnaturalness.

The reader who wonders why people argue so much over translations will find The Translation Debate a sound guide to the issues.

A Scholarly Tool

What about that person who wants to dig more deeply into the Greek text? Thomas Nelson Publishers offers him The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (1982), edited by Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, both associated with Dallas Theological Seminary.

In addition to a clear Greek text with modern English punctuation and headings, the editors provide the reader with detailed manuscript footnotes. They also include an introduction in which the Westcott-Hort tradition of manuscripts is attacked and the superiority of the “Majority Text” defended.

This Greek Testament should receive much use in seminaries and Bible colleges that accept the editors’ textual presuppositions. The majority of schools are more likely, however, to use Greek Testaments based on the Westcott-Hort tradition.

LESLIE R. KEYLOCK¹Mr. Keylock is president of Keylock Editorial Services in Elgin, Illinois.

Did she betray society, or did it betray her?

Frances is a crucifixion story without Easter, the true tale of a gifted woman kissed by society, then cruelly betrayed. This film biography of actress Frances Farmer is, indeed, Shakespearean in the scope of its tragedy.

Like Lear howling in the storm, Farmer raged against the crushing Pharisaic morality of her day—and lost. But far beyond the psychological and spiritual violation of one individual, Frances is a harrowing indictment of any society that victimizes, with the bludgeon of cultural fascism, its own nonconformists and dissenters. During the 1930s and 1940s, Frances Farmer was a prisoner in an American gulag. In 1983, the big question is: Who occupies the gulag now—and who holds the key?

The film opens as 16-year-old Frances pens an adolescent essay on the meaninglessness of God. The touchingly naïve paper wins both a local writing contest and the wrath of her home state of Washington. In the darkness of a neighborhood theater, the young girl seems pleased by her self-made controversy, smiling as an irate governor posturing for the newsreel camera denounces her atheistic stance. Frances has learned all too quickly to view society as an adversary bent on flattening her creative highs and subduing her complex personality.

Unwilling to compromise, unable to bend, her subsequent professional career as a highly publicized movie actress begins to suffer. In desperation, she retreats to New York and the integrity of the legitimate theater. Following a disastrous affair with playwright Clifford Odets, however, Frances is forced to return to Hollywood where studio executives are determined to break her proud, uncooperative spirit. The situation deteriorates until the frustrated, distraught woman is arrested for assault.

It is at this point that Frances Farmer’s waking nightmare begins. Released from jail and committed by her mother to a sinister rest home, she begins her Kafkaesque journey from one insane asylum to another. Drugged, shocked, raped, and (allegedly) lobotomized, the unstable fire that burned within this emotionally crippled woman is cooled and finally extinguished. All that remains at the end of the film is a placid shell walking the mean streets of the city that destroyed her.

In a Christian context, it would be easy to pin all of Miss Farmer’s misfortunes on her original denial of God. Such a simplistic analysis would explain everything yet never answer the challenge of this penetrating film. Nor would it be a compassionate response to Frances Farmer’s terrible ordeal. Her behavior was, without question, neurotic. Many of her equally idealistic contemporaries managed to lead lives of personal integrity without encountering severe persecution. While they maintained their separate peace, Frances waged full-scale war with a self-destructive zeal. Her aberrant actions were often the moral and social equivalent of spitting into the wind.

First and foremost, however, Miss Farmer was guilty of being a deviant in a corporate society. She was hounded into psychic oblivion because she didn’t care whether the ink on the balance sheets was black or red. She played by her own rules, never realizing until it was too late that everyone else was playing an entirely different game. Criminally betrayed by her mother, her lover, her society, Frances Farmer ended up on an operating table with an ice pick in her frontal lobe simply and precisely because she was different—and neither she nor anyone else was equipped to deal with it. And every Samaritan on the road that day simply found the nearest off ramp.

If it is true that “all the world’s a stage,” it is also an unfortunate fact that many people are forced, unwillingly, to take a part in someone else’s play. Like a theater critic, however, a modern prophet must stand without the proscenium to best criticize the social drama. It is our deviants, therefore, who are often the conscience of our culture—from Elijah bellowing in the wilderness to Frances Farmer straining against the cruel straps of her straitjacket.

HARRY M. CHENEY¹Mr. Cheney is a film sound editor and free-lance writer living in Southern California.

His influence cripples the mission to the Hindus.

Though nearly a full generation has passed since the death of Gandhi, his spiritual and political legacy continues to exert a telling force upon the Christian mission to Hindu India. In a speech made 50 years ago to Christians at Leonard Theological College, Jabalpur, Gandhi laid out the terms under which they might assist his movement.

Gandhi said that Christian missionaries could work to help eradicate the caste system that reduced the lowest strata of the Indian population to “untouchability,” but Christians should not try to convert Hindus. Gandi warned: “If you believe that Hinduism is a gift, not of God but of Satan, quite clearly you cannot accept my terms.”

Because Western missionaries in India did not accept those terms, and continued to work for the religious conversions so abhorred by Gandhi, they now face extinction. While old career missionaries (mostly dating from the last great influx into India about 30 years ago) usually are able to secure a “no objection to return” endorsement upon their passports before coming home on furlough, young replacements do not often gain entrance into India. After filling out visa applications, the prospective stateside missionary must wait two to three months while his forms are sent to India for review. Granted visas are so rare that The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) has placed only one North American couple on the Indian field in the last 18 years. Entirely in keeping with Gandhian philosophy, the foreign missionary movement has been strangled slowly and nonviolently in the coils of bureaucratic red tape. However, some missionaries from British Commonwealth countries still trickle in, as well as other Western Christians who come in on student visas or to pursue “tentmaker” occupations for which no Indian national is qualified.

Most converts to Christianity have come from the lower castes of India’s vast (presently 83 percent) Hindu population. Often, masses of dispossessed Harijans (untouchables) converted in the hope of gaining social or political benefits. Consequently, Christianity was stigmatized in the eyes of upper-caste Hindus, as witnessed by the scarcity of Brahmin converts today. Rising Hindu caste discrimination over the last several years has led to increasing numbers of Harijan converts and a reactionary zeal among right-wing Hindu groups to reclaim them. Sometimes, Harijans dissatisfied with their gains under Christianity, convert to Islam or back to Hinduism. The evangelism of the Indian church is often preoccupied with keeping nominal converts in the fold. Overall, relatively few Hindus are being added to the percentage of India’s 684 million population that calls itself Christian (2.6 percent are Christian, and two-thirds of them are Catholic or Orthodox).

Hindu pressure against mission work in India escalated in 1979 when the Freedom of Religions Bill was introduced before the Indian Parliament. This bill sought to “prohibit all conversions from one religion to another by the use of force or inducement or by fraudulent means,” as well as conversion of any person under 18. Because of its excessively broad definitions of force, fraud, and inducement, the bill threatened to outlaw all Christian evangelism and charitable work in India.

The bill was scuttled in 1980 in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s return to power, but similar strictures stand as law in the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh. In this last state, officially sanctioned persecutions of Christians belie fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian constitution of freedom to practice, preach, and propagate religious belief.

The temper of Hindu society militates against Western crusade-style evangelistic campaigns. High regard by individuals for their families, which would incur disgrace by conversion of a member to Christianity, precludes anything more than a polite hearing of the gospel. Mahendra Singhal, at present a Christian educator in the U.S., recalls that after his conversion in 1963 he was advised to change his name. Hindu evangelist Rabindranath Maharaj claims that after checking every nearby fellowship in the aftermath of a crusade in a large Indian city that drew thousands nightly, he found only one new convert actually added to a church.

Hindu philosophical difficulties with Christianity are epitomized by Gandhi’s query: “Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity and vice versa? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or a godly man?” Maharaj says he meets the same response today when he presents the claims of Christ to his people. “Hindus will agree with all you have to say until you preach the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Then you lose them. They cannot conceive that there is only one way to God.” According to Singhal, Hindus are spiritually very aware but never define God concretely. They must be shown that Jesus Christ is the true embodiment of their divine abstraction.

The caste system is as integral to Hinduism as the first chapter of its sacred Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna aquaints the man Arjuna with his caste obligations. Even Gandhi wrote in 1935: “It is a conviction daily growing upon me that the great and rich Christian missions will render true service to India if they can persuade themselves to confine their activities to humanitarian service without the ulterior motive of converting India, or at least her unsophisticated villagers, to Christianity, and destroying their social superstructure, which, notwithstanding its many defects, has stood now from time immemorial.…”

“India’s real problem is a spiritual one, not a physical one as propagated by the media. The Hindu religion perpetuates a mindset that makes people accept the lot their gods have given them,” observes Paul Windsor, a New Zealander raised in India.

Recent positive developments in indigenous Indian evangelism include the fruitful penetration of many Hindu villages by evangelists from the Friends’ Missionary Prayer Band and the 1982 release of the New Hindi Bible, which compares to the Old Hindi version much as the NIV compares to the KJV. In addition, there is a new array of social action programs aimed at aiding oppressed members of the lower castes. The 1979 Madras “Declaration of Evangelical Social Action” shaped a comprehensive new commitment by the Indian church to social justice and material relief alongside evangelism and education as means of spreading the gospel.

One of the most remarkable examples of contextualization of the Christian mission to Hindu India is the growth of Christian ashrams (numbered at about 40 in 1973). Following the ideal of ancient and modern Hindu discipleship communities such as that of Gandhi at Sevagram, these ashrams provide a contemplative atmosphere conducive to communion with God. For example, the Aashiana community in New Delhi has about 25 members committed to a life of prayer, mutual support, and service to marginal people living in the city. Upper-caste Hindu youths who drop out of their society hippie-style are sometimes drawn to Aashiana alongside spiritual pilgrims from the West.

In the light of Christianity’s historical impact upon Hinduism, it is ironic that some nominal Christians in the West are turning eastward to embrace one of a plethora of cults spawned in India. Danish Lutheran scholar Johannes Aagaard has documented the activities of the Visva Hindu Parished (VHP), the international missionary council of Hinduism that promoted a 60,000-strong world Hindu conference in Allahabad in 1979. The VHP’s avowed goals are to consolidate and strengthen Hindu society and to establish a mission for disseminating a dynamic Hinduism worldwide. Many of the guru associations operating in the West, such as Hare Krishna, function in cooperation with the VHP. Aagaard’s research has convinced him that Indian Hinduism is carrying on a vigorous mission program both at home and abroad, and that the strategies and goals of the VHP are the starting point for many of the new religious movements in the West.

Already, many Westerners whose religious convictions have been relativized can say with Gandhi: “For me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore they are equally true.…” Rabi Maharaj is unequivocal about the recent momentum that Gandhi’s religious ideas have gained. “The film Gandhi presents a major stumbling block to evangelism both in the West and in India,” he declares. Maharaj fears that the West is being deluded into universalism and that the East is being reinforced in that ancient lie. “Many Indians have asked me, ‘Why should I look to Christ for the answer when so many of your Western Christians are looking to Hinduism for the answer?’ ”

What can the Christian mission to Hindu learn from Gandhi and his religion? According to the Lausanne-sponsored report on Christian witness to Hindus, essential qualities for a spiritual leader in Hindu society are the very Gandhi-like qualities of being willing to wait, self-mortification of both body and desires, voluntary suffering of pain and fasting. “Christian leaders with this type of spiritual qualification are a powerful means of communication,” concludes the report.

Of necessity, the classic Western mission program of mass evangelism, medical work, and education must become more and more “Indianized,” both in terms of personnel and methodology. Inevitably, the work of such stalwarts as the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship (BMMF), the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the International Christian Fellowship, and others must pass into indigenous hands and take on indigenous ways. What will be the best strategy for an effective Christian witness to Hindu India? Says Paul Windsor, who combines BMMF upbringing with research in missions, “If Christian missionaries would only present the poor, humble Jesus of the New Testament to the Hindu masses, rather than Jesus in the image of an English bishop or an American evangelist, then surely those masses would follow Christ just as they followed Gandhi.”

A tribe of Guatemala Indians, fleeing guerrilla and government warfare in their homeland, has taken cover in a surprising location: downtown Los Angeles. After visiting three Christian members of the K’anjobal tribe in their little apartment, missionary Jim McKelvey discovered that there are hundreds more in the city. Many other Guatemalan believers are being uprooted, according to CAM International missionary Edward Sywulka. Two thousand left the town of Nenton, some are going to Mexico, and some to other parts of Guatemala. One CAM-related church housed 65 people from nine families until other arrangements could be made. The main translator of the New Testament into the Mam Indian language was killed in the fighting.

Drought is afflicting wide areas of northern Africa again this year. In northern Ethiopia some 450,000 people need assistance, and a dozen relief camps and emergency food stations have drawn thousands from areas without water. In Chad, a United Nations relief official says at least 300,000 people are suffering from malnutrition so severe that thousands may die.

“We know and understand that we have sinned, that we have abused power,” said Guatemala’s President Efraín Ríos Montt last month of excesses by the military. He then announced the exchange of the state of siege for a somewhat less restrictive “State of Alert-A,” and a second amnesty for guerrillas. He warned, however, that people who continued to harm the population would be punished. A wave of criticism followed his government’s execution of six guerrillas just prior to Pope John Paul II’s visit to Guatemala.

Three mission agencies have decided on a joint effort to evangelize the Miguindanao people, a Muslim tribe on the island of Mindanao, Philippines. The three—Overseas Missionary Fellowship, SEND International, and International Christian Fellowship—are developing a strategy for using a contextual Muslim approach.”

The Latin American Bishops Conference, opened by the Pope in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on the last leg of his visit, zeroed in on rapid evangelical growth as a major concern. The conference was expected to order a study of the fast-growing denominations to help it work out a strategy to counter their inroads. A Central American bishop said the purpose would not be to enter into polemics, but “to study why the sects appeal to people and learn from this.” Likely elements of a Roman Catholic response: more aggressive use of radio and television, more use of the Bible in teaching, and more singing (and clapping) in services.

North American Scene

Two Franciscan nuns and seven others have been found innocent of disorderly conduct on charges stemming from the jailing and transfer of Eddie Carthan. They had been charged with disturbing the peace during a protest of the transfer of Carthan to the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. Carthan, the first black mayor of Tchula, Mississippi, was jailed on a simple assault charge. Several groups contend he is a victim of racism (CT, Jan. 7, p. 46).

For the eighth time, the New York City Council has rejected a proposed gay-rights bill. Both Edward Koch, the mayor, and Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, lobbied for the measure’s passage. But fundamentalist Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics, all of whom opposed the measure, won out. Following the vote, Mayor Koch promised the bill would be back.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyers were denied permission to question New Jersey legislators who voted for a law requiring schools to observe a minute of silence each day. The ACLU has filed a suit against the law and is trying to prove that the purpose of the law is to reintroduce prayer into public schools.

The antipornography Chicago Statement Foundation recently held a demonstration to praise General Motors, which, the foundation says, does not advertise in pornographic magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse. The demonstration was carried out by the foundation’s New York affiliate. The foundation praises advertisers who do not put their money into pornography outlets instead of criticizing those who do.

Abortion foes and many other residents of Madison, Wisconsin, are upset at six live-birth abortions in the last 10 months in Madison. All six babies died within 27 hours after they were aborted. All the pregnancies were in the second three months of development, a time during which few infants survive natural delivery. Madison General Hospital has barred all abortions after 18 weeks unless the woman’s life is in danger. The University of Wisconsin Hospital now requires an ultrasound test for women whose pregnancies are more than 20 weeks old. Ultrasound is the most accurate way to determine fetal age.

Correction

An article about armed forces chaplains (CT, Feb. 18, p. 24) mistakenly said that Navy Commander George E. Dobes conducted liturgical and nonliturgical Protestant services. Dobes, a Catholic priest, explains, “As senior chaplain (aboard an aircraft carrier), I was responsible for the religious needs of all who were stationed on board, but I did not conduct Protestant services. We had two Protestant chaplains who took responsibility for that.” CT regrets the error.

Wilbur Patterson is general secretary of a small organization called the Commission on Voluntary Service and Action (CVSA). Its main reason for being is the yearly publication of a guide for people who want to volunteer for charitable work. The guide, Invest Yourself, has been published every year since 1946 and circulates mainly to colleges and churches.

Most of the 180 listings in the guide are themselves connected with mainline Protestant churches, but 38 of them, with names such as the California Homemakers Association and the Eastern Farmworkers Association, are not. Patterson began to suspect that something in his guidebook was amiss when he began receiving complaints from volunteers that some of the organizations listed in it were fronts for a clandestine political group. It seemed that the CVSA had been infiltrated by, of all things, a Marxist revolutionary party.

The puzzle fell together for Patterson late in 1981 when he received a letter from Jeff Whitnack, who had been drawn into the Marxist party after offering himself as a volunteer to the San Francisco Homemakers Association. Whitnack told Patterson that the goal of this party, ridiculous as it seems, is to carry out a Marxist revolution in the United States by 1984. Patterson agonized over the implications of what he was learning. In a confidential memo to others on his executive board, Patterson asked, “What are we allowing CVSA to become, wittingly or unwittingly?”

Patterson’s memo wasn’t confidential enough. The chairman of the board, a woman named Diane Ramirez, turned out to be one of the leaders of the Marxist band. According to former members, the party has several names, the most common being the “Perente party” after its mysterious leader, Eugenio Perente. Whitnack says that Perente is actually a Marysville, California born radical named Jerri Doeden. The party began in the early 1970s and is headquartered in Brooklyn. It is said to have several hundred members.

Its political indoctrination consists of heavy reading in the classic Marxist revolutionary canon, supplemented by large doses of Stalin’s works. Members are expected to work long hours with few days off. They work hard at raising money, primarily by door-to-door canvassing, bake sales at shopping centers, and telephone pitches to small businesses and churches. The party is reportedly obsessed with secrecy. One view of the Perente party is that it is part of a police intelligence plot to discredit the American Left. Whitnack says the group is no more Marxist than the Unification church is Christian. He regards it as a cult, claiming that people in the midst of life crises are likely candidates for recruits. Detailed information about the party is hard to come by because its leaders refuse to return phone calls.

What is clear is that sometime before 1978 members of the party began moving in on Patterson and his volunteer agency. In 1978, Invest Yourself was in financial trouble and Diane Ramirez and several of her associates offered to take over the publication. Patterson eagerly accepted. Since then, Invest Yourself has been edited by a woman named Susan Angus, under the sponsorship of something called the National Foundation for Alternative Resources (NFAR), apparently another Perente party front group.

Patterson became more and more concerned about the reports he was hearing of a secret organization behind some of the groups listed in his publication, and he realized he actually did not know by whom, or even where, Invest Yourself was being printed.

As he put it to other worried members of his executive committee, whoever is behind these groups “now controls [Invest Yourself] 100 percent and therefore controls 90 percent of the reputation of CVSA. And we really do not know that organization.”

Patterson confronted Angus and Ramirez at the executive committee meeting last March. They denied they were part of a subversive group. At the next meeting in July, Ramirez proposed that Angus and two other associates be added to the executive committee and that Patterson be dropped. That was beaten back, but Patterson’s motion to cancel the 1983 edition of Invest Yourself was also defeated, when Ramirez broke a tie by voting to publish (some of Patterson’s supporters on the board had to leave early because of other commitments). After the July meeting, several denominations—including United Methodists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians—withdrew their listings.

Finally, at the September meeting, Patterson and his colleagues acted together. They replaced Ramirez as chairman, added several new committee members to shore up CVSA’s ties to mainstream groups, and resolved to try to reclaim Invest Yourself from its infiltrators.

Patterson is not sure if there will be a 1983 edition of Invest Yourself. He contends that a legal contract with the printers requires that the draft of the publication be submitted to and approved by an editorial review board. But Patterson does not expect the NFAR to honor the contract. If Invest Yourself is published in 1983, the CVSA committee may take the matter to court. Patterson is convinced the CVSA could win, but he is not sure it can afford court costs. “We have no angels to bail us out,” he said. Meanwhile, the NFAR is threatening to take Patterson and the CVSA to court to challenge Ramirez’s removal.

For Patterson and other concerned members of the CVSA, the experience has been a painful one. But he takes consolation in the fact that even if it takes the destruction of the CVSA to expose the Perente party, in this the CVSA will have performed one of the more important community services of its long and creditable career.

The prolife movement is broadening.

For years, the prolife movement was stereotyped as a Catholic endeavor. Now that it is recognized as spanning all faiths, there are efforts to put it into political, instead of religious, pigeonholes.

The media, as well as proabortion leaders, consistently portray the movement as a New Right road show, relegated to the far fringes of political life. But from its beginning more than a decade ago, the prolife movement has included articulate spokesmen from the Left—pacifists, antinuclear activists, and minority leaders. Often, this is not known.

Many prolifers at the liberal end of the spectrum are frustrated—shunned by the Left, they are reticent about risking full identification with conservatives. In many cases, they have formed groups that maintain a separate identity while cooperating in broader prolife coalitions. At the January 22 March for Life each year, their presence is fleetingly seen in stray banners announcing Feminists for Life, Socialists for Life, and even Atheists for Life.

Pat Goltz, founder of Feminists for Life (FFL), was ousted from membership in the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1975 because she spoke out publicly against abortion. Her group is a network of a few thousand women who favor adding both the Equal Rights Amendment and the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

FFL President Mary Ledbetter explains that equality for women is a priority they cannot separate from their concern for the unborn. “The inequalities women experience in society are factors in their seeking abortion,” Ledbetter says. With some notable exceptions, “right-to-life groups have sadly neglected women who get abortions,” she believes. “You have to change the hearts and minds of women. You can’t put a 24-hour guard on them.”

Her perspective differs substantially from conservative groups that tend to emphasize only the unborn child’s right to exist. Feminists are troubled by the blame some prolifers affix to women. At the 1982 March for Life, for instance, one poster held aloft said “Wanted for Murder: 1.5 million women who had abortions last year.”

Women’s rights supporters in the prolife ranks see abortion as a crime with two victims, not one, so they are active in counseling, educational efforts, and other alternative services. One group, Women Exploited, is a support group patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous for women who have had abortions and deeply regret it. FFL’s Milwaukee chapter runs a home for women and infants up to age one, and helps find housing for unwed mothers to share. Ledbetter praised Christian Action Council, a Protestant prolife group, for its crisis pregnancy centers.

Other rationales for their opposition to abortion include what liberal groups call “consistency”—opposing nuclear war and capital punishment as well as abortion. Black prolife support arises out of an uneasy suspicion that abortion is a thinly disguised means of ridding society of unwanted minority members. Some black leaders flatly call it “genocide.” Concerns about the profit motive fueling abortion clinics and society’s oppression of its weaker members lead others to view abortion as a betrayal of true liberalism.

Speaking at the National Right to Life Committee’s annual meeting last summer, Lutheran clergyman Richard John Neuhaus said, “It really matters little whether we call ourselves liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. What matters is that we are radical. This movement is radical not by virtue of how far out it is but by virtue of how deep and central is the question it raises. That question, which is the beginning of all moral judgment and all just law, is simply this: ‘Who then is my neighbor?’ ”

Liberals on the whole appear to be profoundly divided on abortion. When The Progressive ran an articulate prolife article by writer Mary Meehan, the editor was surprised to see that the letters pouring in split almost 50–50. At the same time, many conservative prolifers are increasingly aware of the need to give themselves, as one leader put it, “an image transplant.” Even the most ideologically committed New Rightists agree. Paul Weyrich says being yoked with left-leaning groups for the sake of the unborn is a necessity. “Some see that as being in league with the Devil,” he says. “I’ve told these people, ‘God forbid that right-to-life should become strictly a New Right issue.’ Then it would be relegated to a small minority within a minority.”

Juli Loesch, president of antinuclear Prolifers for Survival, sees a growing compatibility between left-wing peace movements and the prolife position. She credits the Catholic bishops for this: “In a large, institutional way, they have pointed the way toward being prolife and liberal” due to their anticipated support for a nuclear freeze.

Among black leaders, Jesse Jackson, who directs Operation PUSH in Chicago, is perhaps the most outspoken. He has written, “How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the overriding moral issue not of the black race but of the human race.… In my mind serious moral questions arise when politicians are willing to pay welfare mothers between $300 and $1,000 to have an abortion, but will not pay $30 for a hot school-lunch program to the already-born children of these same mothers.”

Many prolifers have adopted the mindset of abolitionists from the mid-1800s, who protested the legal (at the time) definition of blacks as three-fifths human, to be managed at the discretion of their owners. The arguments for slavery and “choice” are surprisingly parallel. Proponents of slavery told abolitionists to mind their own business, and not impose “personal morality” on the property rights of others.

As spiritual descendents of the antislavery movement, moderate and liberal prolifers protest what they perceive as hypocrisy on the part of other liberals. Neuhaus calls the unborn child “the ultimate immigrant,” and has reminded fellow liberals that “the humanity of a nation is measured not by the respect it shows the strong and successful but by the care it demonstrates toward the weak and the failing.”

Besides clergymen such as Neuhaus and Jackson, and authors such as Bernard Nathanson (Aborting America) and Jeremy Rifkin, left-leaning prolifers lack prominent leadership, especially among politicians. Their Senate hero, Mark Hatfield, is taking a back seat during the current session’s abortion debate. Only one of the Democratic presidential contenders for 1984 is prolife—former Gov. Reubin Askew of Florida. Yet even he has relegated the cause to the back seat so far.

On the plus side, however, prolifers believe medical advances will help persuade their proabortion colleagues to rethink the issue. Surgeons have operated successfully on unborn children; and the rate of survival among premature babies is increasing.

Public opinion on abortion remains uncertain: polls show people are as likely to support “the right to life” as they are “the mother’s right to choose,” depending on how the question is worded. Efforts to educate people out of their apathy are, fortunately, coming from all sides, not just the right wing. That may spur opinion to shift more readily.

BETH SPRING

Author Catherine Marshall Dies

Catherine Marshall LeSourd cultivated a lifelong habit of meeting God at every turn and documenting the results in her best-selling inspirational books. At the final turn in the road on March 18, she peacefully “slept her way into heaven,” a family friend said, following heart failure at a hospital in Boynton Beach, Florida. The LeSourds maintained a residence there as well as a farm in Lincoln, Virginia.

Known professionally as Catherine Marshall, she was 68 and had suffered from a respiratory ailment that required intensive care for a month last year and again just before her death. Louis Evans, Jr., pastor of National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., said, “Christendom has suffered the loss of a perceptive and powerful writer.”

Evans, along with Marshall’s son Peter John Marshall, officiated at her March 22 funeral service in Washington. She was buried next to her first husband, Peter Marshall, in Brentwood, Maryland. Since 1959, she had been married to Leonard E. LeSourd, editor of Guide-posts magazine for 28 years and currently associate publisher at Chosen Books. LeSourd encouraged her to keep her first married surname.

It was Peter Marshall’s ministry and sudden death in 1949 that led Marshall to realize her girlhood dream of becoming an author. Widowed at 35, she edited a collection of her late husband’s sermons called Mr. Jones, Meet the Master and wrote his biography, A Man Called Peter. The anthology sold out before its publication date, and the story of Peter’s life was a New York Times best seller for more than 50 consecutive weeks. In 1955, Twentieth Century-Fox made it into a movie, which became a tremendous box-office hit, detailing Peter Marshall’s two years as U.S. Senate chaplain and his previous pastoral work.

The Senate’s current chaplain, Richard C. Halverson, knew the Marshalls well. He recalls that “Peter was the preeminent preacher in the Presbyterian church in my seminary days. The influence of Peter’s life was magnified thousands and thousands of times because of her writings,” which, he says, “were a tremendous comfort to me personally.”

Comfort and inspiration flowed from Marshall’s pen, but her presence evoked challenge and exhilaration. Evans’s memory of her is one of “intellectual intensity and spiritual vitality.” He likened her to a thoroughbred: “strong and powerful, yet highly sensitive to the reins of God’s control.”

For the past 23 years, second husband Leonard LeSourd helped harness her talent, and together they produced 16 books, two of which are scheduled for future publication. Her novel Christy has sold 8 million copies, endearing her to readers whose letters she answered personally. LeSourd says “it was a rare opportunity and privilege to have those 23 years.” He warmly reminisced about conversations they shared: “We would talk about characters and plot. We’d argue and struggle. I loved it; she was so intense, always testing our beliefs and convictions.”

Another pet project was The Intercessors, part of a nonprofit corporation the LeSourds founded. The Intercessors include about 800 people who simply covenant to pray for others. The initiative began three years ago, LeSourd explained, when Marshall said the Lord “made it clear to me I’m to learn more about intercessory prayer and do something about it.” He watched her dig into mountains of material on prayer and conduct intensive Scripture searches.

The legacy of her Bible study and spiritual growth is left to readers of her works, in which she “made Jesus very real to people,” LeSourd said. The two shared a thirst for fuller knowledge and experience of the Holy Spirit, and helped encourage the renewal movement in contemporary Christian faith.

Her best-known nonfiction works include To Live Again, Beyond Ourselves, Something More, and The Helper. Her autobiography, Meeting God at Every Turn, was published by Chosen Books in 1980. A new novel, Watershed, will be published by McGraw-Hill in 1984. Set in the 1930s, it is a fictionalized account of her preacher-father’s life and tells the story of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of that era.

As a child, Marshall puzzled over the words of the Westminster Confession telling her that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” From the age of nine, when she received Christ at a church service conducted by her father, she centered her life in him. In her autobiography, she reflected on what she had learned:

“Even though I’m now a grandmother I know more clearly than ever that I’m still as needy and dependent on the Lord’s help as when I was a child, first hearing his voice. He has allowed me to go off on selfish tangents and wander down wrong paths, but always he meets me at every turn and brings me back to him.”

BETH SPRING

Ambitious evangelical planners hope that next month’s National Day of Prayer, to be held May 5, not only will help reestablish a long-neglected observance, but will launch a new mass movement of continual prayer for the revival of the nation and evangelization of the world.

President Reagan has called for “every citizen of this great nation to gather together on that day in homes and places of worship to pray, each after his or her manner, for unity of the hearts of all mankind.”

The National Prayer Committee (NPC), responsible for overseeing the event, is determined to see that unified national prayer lasts longer than a day. The committee’s David Bryant, a missions specialist with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, is spearheading a drive for a national prayer network designed to pick up where National Prayer Day leaves off.

Bryant and the NPC are seeking to initiate local “concerts of prayer” (a term borrowed from the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century) throughout the nation. To achieve this aim, the NPC has sought the support of more than 20 evangelical organizations including the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Campus Crusade, and Inter-Varsity. The committee has planned seminars in which to train leaders for prayer concerts scheduled in 250 cities for the big day in May. The NPC’s main goal is to maintain the spirit and direction of these concerts long after the sun sets on prayer day.

The NPC is encouraging prayer for spiritual revival in the nation and for world evangelization. Organizers are also hoping to promote a greater world awareness among United States Christians. The committee is calling for gubernatorial and mayoral proclamations in addition to the President’s. It has called also for the tolling of bells in churches and public buildings at noon on May 5. With the slogan “Take five at 12,” the committee will summon citizens to five minutes of unified prayer for the nation.

President Reagan has proclaimed National Prayer Day well in advance of its date. This, according to the NPC, is to avoid catching citizens unawares, and to keep the event from being ignored by the media and neglected by churches.

Jewish believers are especially vulnerable.

Once upon a time deprogramming entrepreneurs like Ted Patrick were regarded as heroes of a sort. It used to be that only Moonies and adherents of other offbeat cults got deprogrammed. But now it’s happening to Christians.

Last December, 21-year-old Betsy and 18-year-old Whitney Chase flew to suburban Detroit for a brief holiday visit with their mother. On the second day of their visit they thought they were going shopping. They were taken instead to an unfamiliar house to talk to deprogrammers hired by their mother. The house was guarded. The girls were separated and not permitted to make phone calls. They were shown films about the Moonies and Jim Jones. All this because the girls are members of an Assembly of God church. Their mother is worried that the girls’ personalities have changed and that they now believe in faith healing. In this case, mother, stepfather, and eight others were arrested for kidnaping.

Eyebrows are raising now that Christians have become fair game in the deprogrammers’ market. Recently Ted Patrick asserted that Jerry Falwell has more people under mind control than [Sun Myung] Moon and that “Falwell leads the biggest cult in the nation.”

The incident in Detroit is not the only one. Christians who belong to the San Francisco-based Jews for Jesus are sometimes victims. This year there have been at least four incidents in which Jews for Jesus street missionaries in New York City have been assaulted by the militant Jewish Defense League. In 1981, a Soviet Jew from Chicago who had become a Christian was kidnaped and taken to New York for deprogramming. The boy, a teen-ager, eventually committed suicide.

Deprogramming has also plagued Maranatha Campus Ministries, a charismatic ministry represented on more than 60 college campuses in 32 states. Maranatha’s director of missions, Ted Doss, knows of at least 10 incidents of attempted deprogramming of students belonging to Maranatha.

Typically, these students are called home by their parents on some pretext, then coerced or strongly urged to view anticult films and talk to deprogrammers. Most do not return to Maranatha. But some have played along with the deprogrammers until they have an opportunity to flee.

“These deprogramming attempts are a violation of privacy and religious freedom,” Doss says. “Our greatest concern is that these new Christians are being deprived of opportunities for fellowship.”

Moishe Rosen, founder and president of Jews for Jesus, says that Jewish Christians are likely candidates for deprogramming because many Jewish parents regard Christianity as a cult. He notes that the New York Jewish Community Relations Council has a task force on missionary and cult activities. In a recent Jews for Jesus publication on Christian growth being offered free to new Jewish believers, an entire chapter is devoted to instruction in handling kidnap and deprogramming attempts.

Rosen and his organization have opposed deprogramming from the start, and not just because of fears that it would someday invade Christianity. Rosen says, “If you’ve got enough money, you can deprogram anyone from anything.” Rosen emphasized that a Christian can not be deprogrammed from genuine faith. But he maintains a Christian’s witness can be rendered confused and ineffective. “I know of nobody who has been able to live a normal Christian life after being deprogrammed,” he said.

Ron DeWolf, son of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, also questions the ethics of deprogramming. Despite a painful experience in Scientology and an equally painful period of withdrawal that lasted for years, DeWolf believes that religious reorientation should be personal and voluntary.

Rosen is concerned that, as a business, deprogramming is becoming respectable. Efforts of deprogrammers are now backed by established attorneys and psychiatrists. “It would not be difficult,” says Rosen, “for a Jewish psychiatrist to believe that a Jewish person has been psychologically coerced if that person said he believes Jesus was the Son of God and Savior of the world.”

Rosen contends there is a key difference in the coercive attempts of cults and deprogrammers and the efforts of those who witness for Christ. “Deprogramming,” he says, “presumes that there is no such thing as free will, that all choices are conditioned choices. As Christians, we believe God gives man a choice to trust him or to defy him. The difference,” Rosen concludes, “is that a Christian honors a person’s right to decide for himself.” Rosen says, “You always let them walk away when they want to walk away.”