But no sides are taken at NAE’s annual convention.

Members of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) awoke on March 9 to find a report of their forty-first annual convention leading the front page of the New York Times after President Ronald Reagan appealed to the group to oppose a nuclear freeze. A day later at the Orlando, Florida, meeting, they heard theologians Ronald Sider and Harold O. J. Brown present different biblical positions on nuclear arms. Press attention and timely issues contributed to a sense of heightened visibility and leadership. These are traits NAE members say they want from the organization but which have eluded it in the past.

The nuclear issue also gave NAE officials a welcome chance to articulate their centrist position—not sold out to the profreeze Left nor aligned with the Religious Right, which backs administration defense policies. The 3.5 million-member group includes pacifist churches such as Mennonites and Brethren in its fold and remains committed to operating by consensus.

Because of this, NAE has no designs on becoming a political power bloc. Instead it emphasizes “an individualized involvement in politics rather than an institutionalized involvement,” according to Washington office director Robert P. Dugan, Jr. The primary focus is unity and fellowship in the body of Christ.

At Orlando, rethinking of the nuclear issue among evangelicals was evident. This has been spearheaded within NAE by its Evangelical Social Action Commission and elsewhere by leaders including John Stott, Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, Ted Engstrom, and Richard Halverson, NAE president Arthur E. Gay, Jr., credits Billy Graham with beginning the process. “When he had the courage to be a leader and take flak,” Gay says, “that’s when people began to listen.”

Aware of the rumblings, Reagan made a forthright pitch for evangelical allegiance. “I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority,” the President said. “I ask you to resist the attempts of those who would have you withhold your support for this administration’s efforts to keep America strong and free, while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals.”

Applause from the enthusiastic audience interrupted Reagan about 18 times during his 32-minute address, which touched on abortion, school prayer, tuition tax credits, and parental notifications for teen contraceptive users, NAE neutrality was clearly telegraphed by Gay. Seated onstage while Reagan spoke, Gay did not applaud the freeze remarks. He estimates that no less than one-quarter of NAE’S members are total pacifists or nuclear pacifists, and says “even if it were only 10 percent, we would have no right to quash that important corrective.”

Pressure to address the issue has been building on both the Right and Left. For evangelicals, Reagan is probably the most compelling voice on the Right, and a majority of NAE’S constituents would support him. He appealed to the crowd in familiar terms of sin and salvation, good and evil, calling Soviet totalitarianism “the focus of evil in the modern world” and saying, “Let us pray for the salvation of all those who live in that totalitarian darkness.”

Reagan left the podium to the drumbeat of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” played and sung at the insistent request of presidential staff aides, NAE organizers, concerned about perpetuating a militant stereotype, chafed about the choice.

Reagan’s most avid supporters among the religious community include Jerry Falwell and others affiliated with right-wing groups. Falwell recently mailed a fund-raising letter on Moral Majority stationery requesting help to oppose the “freeze-niks” in Washington.

More temperate “peace-through-strength” spokesmen include Brown, Carl F. H. Henry, and Francis Schaeffer. Brown, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, drew a distinction between consistent pacifists who oppose all conflict, and nuclear pacifists, who he said base their inconsistent position on fear of the consequences. Brown told the NAE members that a freeze could create unintended circumstances that would irrevocably endanger the United States. A freeze that turns out to be unilateral, he said, “promises effectively to dismantle our entire defense.…”

He defended the administration’s policy of deterrence, which justifies nuclear build-up by asserting that a credible threat will prevent actual use of the weapons. Sider counters that it is just as immoral to threaten to use the weapons as it would be to actually deploy them.

Sider, who teaches at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is president of Evangelicals for Social Action (not related to NAE), focused his remarks on the just-war theory, used through history to determine acceptable moral parameters for war. Sider believes the magnitude of nuclear holocaust renders the just-war theory useless.

NAE will wade deeper into the waters of nuclear debate in May, by cosponsoring a conference in Pasadena. Its involvement with “The Church and Peacemaking in the Nuclear Age” has caused some internal consternation because conference planners have had trouble attracting peace-through-strength spokesmen. Brown, Schaeffer, and Henry, as well as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all turned down invitations. Brown said he was concerned that the meeting may tilt to the Left.

Both Brown and Sider welcomed the “point-counterpoint” forum NAE provided in Orlando. Brown credits the group with “taking a sober and solid position, not allowing themselves to be stampeded” by either side. Sider believes consciousness raising among evangelicals will lead to growing profreeze consensus. He is less than satisfied with NAE’S leadership role on the issue. By not taking a position, he says, “it means the most prominent evangelical organization in America is going to stay neutral on our most important societal issue.” If present policies are wrong, he said, “then we are very, very wrong on something that matters more than anything else, except salvation.” He would like to see NAE “take several years to examine it and argue it theologically, with the same sophistication the Catholic bishops have.”

NAE’S constituents—like most Amerricans—have been caught off guard by the sudden intensity of the debate. Thomas A. Zimmerman, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God—NAE’S largest member denomination—says it is not a priority issue for them, and he bristles at press reports that characterize the Assemblies as “hawkish.”

“We did not gain our position in church growth by picking up issues on which logical disagreement could be occasioned,” Zimmerman said. “Our people are totally sold on the primacy of evangelization.” A recent study shows that the Assemblies of God denomination is the fastest-growing body in the country, (CT, Jan. 7, p. 28).

The nuclear debate probably will take a distant back seat to other concerns for nae in 1983, but it provided a valuable moment of national attention and initiated discussions that may be carried home to member churches. Washington office researcher Richard Cizik said, “We’re hoping that out of our new visibility we’re going to be able to effect constructive change in society.” But nae wants it known that their definition of constructive change still begins with individual commitments to Christ.

BETH SPRINGin Orlando

Reagan Appoints An Ardent Prolifer To A Cabinet Position

Margaret M. Heckler, new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is a Reagan booster who was warmly endorsed by liberal Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy. She is deeply committed to the prolife movement, yet Sen. Jesse Helms was one of only three senators to vote against her appointment.

Heckler, often willing to buck the Republican party line during her eight terms in the U.S. Congress, is a bundle of contradictions to some. Others sincerely welcome her moderate image, providing a chance to raise consciousness about how broad the support for abortion alternatives and family values really is.

At HHS, she will administer a budget that is the third largest in the world, behind the total U.S. budget and that of the Soviet Union. Under President Reagan, those funds have been sharply rechanneled into alignment with conservative goals. Pilot programs for adolescents emphasize sexual abstinence for adolescents rather than simply distributing contraceptives to them. A controversial new regulation would require telling parents when minors receive prescription contraceptives. That one is now held up in court.

These new directions also include budget cuts that slash at the heart of social welfare programs, which were advocated and developed primarily by moderates and liberals. Appointing Heckler may be Reagan’s way of signaling increased willingness for bipartisan cooperation in these areas, as well as a means to shore up support among women.

As a Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, Heckler gained a proconsumer, prowomen’s rights reputation. She helped organize the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues and fought unsuccessfully to retain support for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980 Republican party platform. Kennedy said her record is one of “very considerable ability” and “follows a very proud tradition of our state of bipartisan public service.”

Like Kennedy, Heckler is an Irish Catholic, but unlike her senator, she favors antiabortion legislation. Under intense questioning by the Senate’s Finance Committee, she spelled out her views: “I am prolife. I sincerely believe in that position.… When faced with a major question on the issue, my own strong conviction on the right to life will dominate my own thinking.”

Her views on abortion did not hinder swift Senate confirmation by an 84–3 vote March 4. Opposition came from North Carolina conservatives Jesse Helms and John P. East, who object to her House voting record on how government money is spent. A Helms staff aide said the senator “doesn’t feel her fiscal philosophy is sufficiently conservative.” He said Helms’s vote “had nothing to do with her personally or her position on abortion.”

The third negative vote was from Bob Packwood (R-Oreg.), the Senate’s most vocal proponent of abortion. Heckler replaces Richard S. Schweiker, who joined an insurance industry association after resigning his cabinet post.

While her prolife views square with Reagan’s, Heckler has parted company with him many times in the past. As a congresswoman last year, she fought against HHS’S parental notification regulation. Now, if it is salvaged on appeal of court injunction against its use, Heckler will be in charge of enforcing it. She told the senators at her confirmation hearing, “My own views were personal views. I am now playing a different role, and since this policy has the President’s stamp of approval, I will support it.”

Falwell Drops Out Of Financial Accountability Organization

Jerry Falwell’s organizations are no longer members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, an organization Falwell helped start in 1979.

Disagreements on how to interpret the council’s rules on fund raising apparently led to Falwell and his board deciding recently not to renew the membership of Thomas Road Baptist Church and its related ministries. That includes Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour” television program, and his fund-raising operation. It does not include Moral Majority, which is not a religious organization. The ECFA has 231 members encompassing 350 evangelical ministries. All of them must renew memberships each year by reapplying from scratch and providing audits, ECFA is a voluntary association for the selfregulation of its members’ financial and management responsibilities.

Art Borden, executive director of the ECFA, did not elaborate on the reasons for the disagreement with Falwell, although he said the discussions were friendly and open. Here are excerpts from a statement released by the “Old Time Gospel Hour”:

“It was the unanimous feeling of the board that the very controversial and high-profile nature of Dr. Jerry Falwell’s ministry created a limitless assault upon the ministry from various and sundry organizations who oppose our position on moral and traditional values.

“The ‘Old Time Gospel Hour’ (OTGH) believes in total compliance with all of the standards and requirements of ECFA and will continue to support it and its purpose.…

“While the OTGH leadership deeply appreciates the relationship we have had with ECFA … we felt it was in the best interests of all concerned to abide by the desires of the board and not renew membership at this time.…

“We shall continue to support ECFA in every way possible and pray God’s blessing on the purposes for which it was founded. Likewise, the OTGH will continue to make its needs known to its public, with total integrity, so that we may secure support for all of its ministries of teaching, preaching, and evangelism.”

A spokesman for OTGH declined to elaborate on the statement.

He stresses peace, Mary, and loyalty to Catholicism

Calling himself a pilgrim of faith and hope, love and peace, Pope John Paul II came to a Central America convulsed by violence, and to a divided church eroded by the growth of evangelical groups. The first Pope ever to visit this traditionally Catholic area of the world was greeted by fireworks, flags, and enthusiastic crowds throughout his eight-day, eight-nation tour, which included Belize and Haiti.

Security was tight throughout last month’s trip. It was reported that John Paul had been concerned enough about his safety to rewrite his will just before leaving, but there were no major incidents. Guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala declared a cease-fire, though some fighting continued.

The Pope stressed four major themes throughout the trip: (1) a call for peace based on justice, respect for the rights of all people, and love, especially toward the poor and downtrodden; (2) insistence on loyalty and adherence to the holy mother church, unity, and submission to the hierarchy and to himself as successor of Peter and vicar of Christ; (3) a warning against violence and against being used by extremist ideologies, and against political involvement by the clergy; and (4) an appeal for devotion to the Virgin Mary.

The thorniest country was undoubtedly Nicaragua. Its Catholics are badly split between the hierarchy led by Archbishop Obando y Bravo, which at first supported the revolution but since has parted ways, and the “popular church” made up of ardent Sandinistas, including many priests and nuns. (There are five priests in high government posts, contrary to direct papal orders, though they have temporarily given up their sacerdotal functions.)

Ever since the Pope’s visit was announced, it had been a political football. The hierarchy and government tussled over who would control the event, which the former wanted to turn into an anti-Sandinista demonstration. The Sandinistas finally won the power struggle by threatening not to let the pontiff come except on their terms. Church officials complained the government had censored all information about the forthcoming visit.

During the Pope’s 10-hour stay in the country, the Sandinistas tried to make as much political hay as possible. Comandante Daniel Ortega bitterly attacked the U.S. in his speech, while the backdrop for the papal mass in Managua was a large mural picturing the leaders of the revolution.

When the Pope, who had criticized Marxist education earlier, urged submission to the hierarchy and spoke against political involvement, leftist groups began chanting Sandinista slogans. They almost drowned out the pontiff, forcing him at one point to shout for silence. The Vatican later protested vigorously, claiming the Pope had been insulted and his microphones deliberately turned off so the majority of the crowd could not hear him. There were also claims the mass had been desecrated. Those who support the Sandinistas were bitter because the Pope did not praise their overthrow of the corrupt Somoza regime. They had reason for disappointment, since the revolution was energized by the social concern raised during the Second Vatican Council.

Guatemala presented two special challenges to the Pope. One was the alleged repression by the government, including charges that thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in the fight against the guerrillas. This was exacerbated by the execution of six convicted terrorists on the eve of the pontiff’s arrival, despite papal appeals for clemency. A last-minute appeal to the supreme court had delayed the executions by 30 days, leading to the unfortunate coincidence in timing.

The second challenge was the large and growing evangelical church, estimated at 22 percent of the population and including the president, General Efraín Ríos Montt. The president, who has been campaigning for morality and responsibility in society and especially in government, welcomed the Pope as not only a fellow head of state but also as a messenger of good tidings.

In a mass at the large Campo Marte sports arena, the pontiff told a crowd estimated at 1 million that faith must be accompanied by works of love and justice, and that violation of rights—especially the right to life—torture, and kidnappings are a “very grave offense against God.” He also said, in words apparently aimed at the evangelicals, who celebrated their centennial on the same site last November with a crowd almost as large, that “faith must extend to the church. The church Christ builds upon the rock of Peter, of whom I am the humble successor … and which has received the power to forgive sins.”

Although the Pope did not specifically refer to evangelicals in Guatemala (he did criticize “aggressive proselytism” by Protestant “sects” during his short stop in Belize), local Catholic officials there kept up a barrage of attacks in the media prior to the visit, at least partially in response to some perhaps overly zealous local preachers. Evangelical leaders on the whole were silent.

Any progress at wooing evangelicals back to the fold was probably undone by John Paul II’s devotion to, and emphasis on, the Virgin. Signs everywhere proclaimed his motto, totus tuus (wholly yours), addressed to Mary. The Pope dedicated an entire homily to the theme. Speaking at the Basilica of the Virgin of Suyapa, Honduras’s patron saint, just outside the capital city of Tegucigalpa, he said that the presence of Mary, our mother and model, is necessary in every church. In a closing prayer, he asked Mary to put Central America under her special protection.

The Pope’s charisma and the importance placed on his person were evident everywhere. Posters with pictures of the pontiff blossomed all over, with slogans such as “thou art Peter,” “where Peter is, there is Christ—where the Pope is, there is Christ,” and the famous totus tuus. Crowds chanted “John Paul II, everyone loves you,” and “John Paul, friend, Guatemala (Costa Rica, etc.) is with you.”

Says Emilio Antonio Nuñez of the Central American Theological Seminary in Guatemala City, “The image is of a preconciliar church. It is just like Vatican II and Medellín had never taken place.”

What lasting impact will Pope John Paul II’s visit make? He himself admitted, as he left Guatemala, that he brought no ready-made solution to the complex problems of the area. It is easier to speak of peace, justice, and love than to change men’s hearts. Even the most rabid anti-Catholic would have to agree with the words of President Rios Montt as the Pope departed: “If the love of Jesus Christ, our Lord, of which you have spoken, is practiced by every Guatemalan, Guatemala will be a wonderful example to the world.”

STEPHEN SYWULKAin Guatemala

Aníbal Guzmán was installed as rector of the Latin American Biblical Seminary in San José, Costa Rica. Guzmán, a Bolivian Methodist, has studied at the University of Chile and Drew Methodist Seminary, and has been a pastor in five Central and South American nations. He was a member of the evaluation committee appointed by the seminary two years ago that recommended that the institution take a “radical evangelical” posture.

Edward Elliot has been named executive director of Evangelical Literature Overseas (ELO), succeeding Jim Johnson, who will continue in an advisory role. Elliot, now president of Domain Communications, has worked with Tyndale House Publishers and Living Bibles International, ELO helps missions and churches develop publishing houses, and bookstores.

Elton Dresselhaus, 50, area foreign secretary for the Latin America field of TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission), responsible for the supervision of 200 missionaries in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, Peru, Trinidad, and Venezuela; March 4, in Winfield, Illinois, of a heart attack.

The revolution turned against capitalism but not Christianity, posing new questions for religion and politics.

Pablo Santiago Picado Medina sits at lunch in a dark restaurant in Leon, Nicaragua. It is a tired old city of peeling paint and poverty, a place that swings from its last, rusty hinge.

But Pablo is a man with a mission. His church has learned to reach out to the poor, to help them procure food, shelter, and education, all the bricks and mortar of a dignified life. In its enterprise, Pablo’s church is in lockstep with the Sandinista revolutionary governmment, which also wishes to supply these things to the campesinos.

One detects here the strains of liberation theology—the unyoking of oppression as a counterfeit form of salvation. In his church, Pablo is president of the social welfare committee. Suspicion confirmed.

But liberation theology is a term Pablo cannot explain, for he has not heard much about it. His church is the Assembly of God, not exactly known to be a revolutionary brigade. Pablo is a diesel mechanic, unschooled in liberation literature.

There are evangelical Christians like Pablo all across Nicaragua. Their churches thrive in a country 95 percent Catholic. Like conservative churches in the United States, evangelicals here preach the historic gospel and freely evangelize. Since the Sandinistas took power in 1979, distribution of Bibles has increased fivefold, distribution of New Testaments ninefold. Hundreds of thousands now clamoring for the Word learned to read in the literacy campaign the revolutionaries conducted after their accession.

There is an anomaly here, then. Socialist governments are not supposed to tolerate these things. What brought this strange situation to pass? Exactly one earthquake and one revolution.

Two days before Christmas in 1972, a half hour after midnight, the capital city of Managua shuddered under a massive earthquake, then crumpled. Nearly 10,000 died; a quarter of a million were instantly homeless. At the time, the country was ruled by the monstrously corrupt Anastasio Somoza and his personal police force, the National Guard. After the earthquake struck, many of the guardsmen began deserting or looting. The city was prostrate.

Even darker days lay ahead. A year after the earthquake, after nearly $200 million in foreign aid had been rushed to the government, the city was still rubble, its people badly cared for. Some of the money was sponged up by Somoza’s construction companies, some of it purchased rebuilding sites from Somoza’s friends and family at bloated prices, some of it actually bought relief for the victims.

The injustices shot adrenaline into the small revolutionary movement that bore the name of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the mountain brigand of the 1920s who battled against the occupation of the country by U.S. Marines. It was the American government that installed Somoza’s father in 1937 and trained and equipped the police force with which the Somozas suppressed political opposition. By the 1970s Nicaragua was still so dominated by the United States that the American ambassador’s picture appeared with Somoza’s on the Nicaraguan 20-cordoba bill. By then, the Somoza oligarchy had grown fat. The family owned the national airline and steamship line, two-thirds of the commercial fishing industry, half the sugar mills, and one-third of all the country’s tillable land. Its wealth was estimated at half a billion dollars.

Yet at the same time, most of the populace was neglected. In the 1970s, the infant mortality rate was nine times that of the U.S., 80 percent of Managuans had no running water, and there were 20,000 cases of advanced tuberculosis at one point. More than half the people were illiterate, and life expectancy was about 50 years. Only 5 percent of the people completed elementary school. Because of these circumstances, the rage rose and rose until the dam burst in rivers of blood. The Nicaraguan civil war in the seventies was so ferocious that by the summer of 1979, when Somoza fled for his life to Miami, 50,000 people had died, five times the number killed in the earthquake.

How A Priest Became A Revolutionary

Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, explains in an interview how the poverty and the killing in Nicaragua changed his faith and led him to participate in the Sandinista revolution, against the wishes of his bishop.

It came to me one day as we were preparing for Lent.… Everyone had left and I’m alone in my office and I’m saying, “Well, another Lent. And it’s the same old mediocre me. You say you’re not going to eat hot dogs or you’re not going to eat something else, and that doesn’t help anyone. And so what am I going to do for this Lent?” As a result of that meditation … a prayer was formulated. That prayer was, “Lord, help me to understand the mystery of your cross. Help me to love the cross, and give me the guts to embrace it in whatever shape or form it comes.” And I thank God it became a habit. Everything began to become different.… The cross … became a symbol of life. The beginning of life. And I began to see it inseparable and indistinguishable from resurrection. Why? Because we come to understand in John that life is love. We come to understand that greater love has no man than to give his life. The cross is the greatest act of love, therefore the greatest manifestation of life. We weren’t leading, we weren’t leading, at least the Catholic church was not leading the people in an analysis of this system of capitalism [under Somoza] … and this systematic development of selfishness.… We were not showing them more ideal Christian ways, by our example, to resist the cancer of oppression and exploitation.…

Comandante [Daniel] Ortega … publicly has said, “I went to the revolutionary struggle because I understood what was demanded of me if I was to be faithful to Christ.” He was only 14 years old when he first was in jail. You know Thomas [the apostle]. Most people are like Thomas. They don’t just accept that the Lord resurrected. So the Lord said, “You come and put your finger in my wounds.” Christ wanted to show his credentials because Thomas demanded to inspect the credentials. We preach the message of our Lord, but the people want credentials. Where are the wounds?… You know who in Nicaragua was showing those wounds? Daniel was only 14. He had great big wounds to show. Our bishops didn’t have them.…

Eight years before the insurrection, after the earthquake, I remember talking to the archbishop … and I was saying, “Don’t you see, this is going to explode.…” I said, “Why don’t we go into the streets? You lead us—you are the bishop—armed with the rosary in our hands and prayers on our lips, in repudiation for what is being done to our people.” And I said the worst that can happen to us is the best, to share with Christ the cross if they shoot us. It won’t happen because we don’t deserve that. That is the grace that God reserves for the very privileged. But if it happens, well, blessed be the Lord … and if it happens there will be a consciousness aroused internationally … and maybe the people of the United States will pressure their government so they won’t support Somoza as much as they do. The archbishop said, “No, Miguel … this [violence] is not going to happen.” Then when the revolution happened, they [the bishops] were insisting on nonviolence.

That earthquake not only demolished the capital city, it demolished complacency in the hearts of many evangelicals. For the first time, the Protestants began working together. Evangelical pastors in the city organized 1,100 volunteers who cooked 30,000 hot breakfasts in the days following the calamity. The pastors surprised themselves at what they could accomplish together.

This was the beginning of CEPAD—the Evangelical Committee for Aid and Development—a nationwide alliance of Protestant churches. It is led by a devout American Baptist physician, Gustavo Parajon, who took medical degrees at Case Western Reserve and Harvard. Under his leadership, CEPAD has grown to be the largest nongovernmental relief agency in the country, with projects in 400 communities reaching 100,000 people across the country.

In 1974, 300 Protestant pastors gathered at a retreat, to reflect on what they had accomplished after the earthquake, and what their Christianity should mean to them in the black days ahead. During their meditation, pastor after pastor swallowed hard on the parable of the Good Samaritan. This outcast had not only salved his brother’s wounds, but he willingly bore the cost of the convalescence. Deep within themselves, the pastors recognized that the young Sandinista revolutionaries, full of Marxist idealism though they be, were excelling the Christians—the spiritual heirs of the Samaritan—in healing wounds of injustice. These evangelicals could never become revolutionaries themselves, as had some Catholic priests, but how long could they ignore the Somoza system and preach only about the next life?

“As Christians, we were surrounded by wounded people, injured people,” said Rodolfo Fonseca, a Church of God pastor in Managua, as he recalled that time. “It is not revolution that should teach us social responsibility; it is the Bible.… How [could] we Christians be preaching only the spiritual part and let the so-called Marxists and atheists do what we were supposed to be doing? It was that kind of Christianity [emphasizing only spiritual matters] that our missionaries with blond hair and blue eyes and the fragrance of heaven taught us. If we preach only the spiritual side, then [the revolutionaries] are showing themselves to be more Christian than are we who claim to be Christian.”

Fonseca was one of about 20 pastors who gathered several months ago to explain themselves to a group of visiting North American evangelicals. There was misunderstanding in the North because the CEPAD evangelicals were working shoulder to shoulder with the revolutionary government on a variety of social projects. During the meeting, the skepticism of a few of the Americans strained the patience of one of the pastors, Nicanor Mairena. He had this to say:

“I was educated under the control of the North Americans. They prohibited us from politics. I accepted that. But after three years of the revolution, I have become convinced of the opposite. North Americans don’t suffer lack. Your main necessity is that of the soul, and your culture was transmitted to us. In the first place, it is necessary for the soul to be saved. In the second place, it is necessary for the body to be saved—from illness, from malnutrition, from illiteracy. How can someone serve the Lord well if he is undernourished?”

Not all Protestants talk this way. A large group, perhaps a slight majority, do not emphasize social concerns. But most of the others, particularly the younger ones, have become sensitized by the deprivation. CEPAD represents about 80 percent of the 400,000 Protestants in Nicaragua, an Iowa-sized nation of 2.8 million people.

Although many evangelicals in Nicaragua claim no alliance with liberation theology (to them it is a Catholic issue), it did play a part in the Sandinista liberation. The Second Vatican Council (1961–65) raised the Catholic conscience about the tribulation of the world’s poor. In 1968, Latin American bishops meeting in Medellín, Colombia, put their imprimatur on the liberation movement. The lot of the poor, as a special concern of Christ, began to be emphasized in Latin American Catholic schools. In Nicaragua, Catholic high school students became sensitized to the injustices of the poor, and many students threw in with the Sandinistas, swelling their ranks in the early 1970s. (From this student group emerged the present leader of the armed forces, as well as the head of the government, 37-year-old Daniel Ortega.) Encouraged by Vatican II, the Nicaraguan church began training lay ministers, called delegates of the Word, while other Catholics, under Jesuit tutelage, worked on agrarian reform. These movements provided more radicals for the revolution. Today, a few evangelicals in Nicaragua have become enamored by liberation theology as well.

The Catholic influence has lent the revolutionary government a humanitarian cast. One of the first acts of the Sandinista junta following the triumph of 1979 was the abolition of the death penalty. Tomás Borge, a hero of the revolution and now the country’s minister of the interior, caused an uproar in 1979 after the victory. He strode into the prison where he had suffered for years and spotted his former torturer behind bars. Borge forgave the man and freed him.

Five Catholic priests hold important positions in the Sandinista government, a nettlesome problem for Pope John Paul II during his trip to Central America last month. The Pope has forbidden priests from holding political positions.

One of the priests is Miguel D’Escoto, born in Hollywood of Nicaraguan parents and educated in the United States. He is the foreign minister. An other is Ernesto Cardenal, who entered the Trappist monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky, in 1956 to study under Thomas Merton. Cardenal founded a community of poets in Nicaragua and is now the cultural minister. His brother, also a priest, ran the national literacy campaign and is now a member of the Sandinista assembly. Edgar Parrales is ambassador to the Organization of American States, and Jesuit Alvaro Arquello is a member of the Council of State.

All this humanitarianism did not prevent the Sandinistas from committing their most spectacular blunder in the realm of human rights—the forced march of the Miskito Indians. That single incident turned much of the Western world against the Sandinistas.

Moravians had converted the dark-skinned Indians to their Protestant faith in the last century. The Miskitos inhabit the remote northwestern Atlantic coastal area, and they developed an animosity for the Catholic “Spaniard” majority inhabiting the Pacific coastal lowlands beyond the mountains, which bisect the country.

This cultural and geographical isolation caused Somoza to leave the Miskitos alone, but the Sandinistas tried to organize them. When they discovered the Indian leader, Steadman Fagoth, to be consorting with the political opposition, they arrested him and the entire Indian leadership as well. Four gunwielding soldiers entered a Moravian church on a February evening in 1981, in the middle of a service, to arrest one of the Indians. They began shooting. Four Indians died, and all four soldiers were battered to death. Some Indians fled into Honduras. Others launched a peaceful protest in a church building, and the soldiers pushed them out. Fagoth was released from jail, and promptly fled into Honduras where he joined the anti-Sandinista guerrillas. Fighting grew, and the government marched the entire Miskito population inland to clear the hot spot, burning villages and killing cattle lest they be used by the counterrevolutionaries. Thousands of Miskitos went to Honduras.

Despite their proclamation of religious freedom, the Sandinistas mistrusted and misunderstood the country’s Protestant minority. Some of the denominations were closely tied to United States churches, and the U.S. government was barely concealing its secret efforts to topple the revolution. In the spring of 1982, opposition leaders preached that the harsh spring floods that year were God’s judgment on the regime. Faith-healing, charismatic pastors urged followers to ignore the government’s vaccination program, and Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to honor the flag or pledge allegiance to the government. The Sandinistas suspected CIA subversion behind all this activity, and the official newspaper carried an inflammatory article headlined “The Invasion of the Sects.” to arouse hate.

CEPAD immediately protested, and the protest was heard. Its letter explaining the nature of Protestantism was published in the Sandinista paper, and one of the leaders, Rene Nuñez, apologized, but tensions did not cease immediately. Protestant churches were taken over, but almost immediately returned, after CEPAD again protested. This time CEPAD arranged an assembly of pastors at which Ortega himself, the chief of the government, spoke. He admitted the mistakes and once again affirmed religious freedom. Since then there has been calm, although the uncooperative Jehovah’s Witnesses were ordered out of the country.

The future of Sandinista Nicaragua seems grim. Its economy is moribund, its currency virtually worthless on foreign exchanges. The country’s opposition newspaper is heavily censored and the presence of hundreds of Cuban teachers and technicians makes Americans nervous. Firefights with anti-Sandinista guerrillas along the Honduran border, widely believed to be financed by the CIA, sap what little vitality does exist. The country seems to be sliding into a socialist orbit, although the hard-line Marxist-Leninists in the government are not in clear control. The Catholic majority is deeply cleft between the traditionalist hierarchy on one side and the pro-Sandinista “popular churches,” which are springing up in the barrios.

Despite Nicaragua’s sharp list to the political Left, even a skeptic such as the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua does not believe the Christian faith is in jeopardy as long as the Sandinistas hold the government.

And that gives evangelicals reason to pause. For the soil that allows the gospel to grow in Nicaragua has killed off the politics of Western capitalism. Many North American Christians have believed that without that system, the faith cannot flourish. In a time of escalating debate in this country over the relationship of Christianity to politics, this small Central American country is testing some cherished convictions.

TOM MINNERYin Nicaragua

I shook it. I knocked it gently, sideways on the top of the desk. I licked a piece of paper and wrote carefully in the moisture (I can’t tell you why this works, but it usually does). I repeated each procedure without results. Then I carried the pen to the sink, took it apart, and carefully flushed out the point. Refilling it, I sat down to write.

How like me, I thought with exasperation.

I have mugs full of pens on my desk: ballpoints, felt tips, ink pens—even pencils. But for very fine writing, such as notes in the margin of my Bible, I need a Rapidograph pen. This pen has a needle-fine point and uses India ink, which will not seep through or smear on the thin India paper.

How often when God has needed me I have been clogged up (too busy or inundated with things, the necessary giving way to the unnecessary). Or I’ve gone dry.

When that happens I need a “shaking up”; or I need special cleansing. And I need to be filled and refilled and filled again.

There are times God has patiently and carefully done just that. There are other times when he has had to pass me over and pick up a pen that was usable.

But unlike a pen, I do have a choice. I can decide whether or not I remain usable.

In offering a clear alternative, a counterculture pushes society to self-examination, self-criticism, and often self-defense.

Listen carefully, and you will hear today the muffled cry and sigh for community. Many people, Christians as well as nonbelievers, long for more intimate and meaningful relationships. Young adults especially seem attuned to the question and quest of community. People want to find a group whose meaning and mission transcend the daily grind, a level of sharing and common life that goes beyond what they have known.

Crisis Of Community In Society

Many social indicators point to a breakdown of community today—in the home, the school, the neighborhood, the church. This goes hand in hand with an advancing technological society that focuses on either the individual or the mass, speeding the disintegration of small groupings. The illusion of total, unrestricted individual freedom in fact leads to totalitarian mass society in which close-knit intermediate communities of meaning—the glue of society—are dissolved. People fail to perceive that the freedom offered is the freedom to do what someone else wants. “Have it your way” really means “Do it our way—and feel good about it!”

Technological materialism is only part of the problem, however. Other forces are also at work to undermine community, both in society and in the church. But let’s play a little game. How would one go about intentionally undermining community, isolating people from one another and from a shared life?

First, fragment family life. Since the family is the primary form of human community, undermining community begins with undermining the family by drawing off its members in different directions and into different worlds.

Next, move people away from the neighborhoods where they grew up rather than allow them to live near relatives and friends and among familiar landmarks. Then separate the places people work from where they live: divide their lives into as many worlds as possible. And gradually move people farther and farther apart through ever-larger yards, bigger houses, or through walls, fences, and “apartments.”

Then, bring television into the home. It is perhaps the modern world’s most effective communication blocker. Use the automobile to extend the process further, allowing people to travel separately to stores, schools, and places of employment or entertainment. Add a second or third car to hasten the process.

Finally, reduce family size. Where there are one or no children in the home in the circumstances described, real community life expires.

We must not underestimate the role of the visual media, especially television, in this disintegrative process. Passive rather than participatory, these media block communication and push values to the sensate level. They function ever less at the level of ideas and concepts, and more at the emotional and sensual levels. The less viewers think, the more they respond like conditioned animals.

In such a world, the question of the role of the church is crucial. Undermining community in the church destroys the best hope for community in the world, the best chance for rebuilding community in society. When the church is a genuine community experiencing real koinonia, it is the most potent source of community in the world.

Crisis Of Community In The Church

We face a crisis of community in the church today. The Western church finds itself in a world where Christian consensus has broken down. Western society was shaped and largely influenced by Christian values. In the U.S., these values permeated the culture, giving a strong sense of the worth of the individual. Today, however, respect for life is fast disappearing along with other Christian values. Increase in violent and senseless crime, casual acceptance of abortion and mercy killing, and general indifference toward the fate of others are all part of the picture. Christian consensus is gone.

Growing up in North America instills a person with neither a Christian world view nor a Christian set of values. Someone entering the church from such a background begins almost at point zero in Christian life and understanding. The church must therefore increasingly take seriously its true nature as a community and counterculture that reinforces and perpetuates its own values. To do otherwise is simply to accommodate to the culture. This is the crisis the church faces.

The church must be a community with the social strength to incarnate values that are antagonistic at key points to the world around us. But merely accepting such a viewpoint will mean nothing. The church must in fact be a community that experiences and reinforces biblical values. No group with values that differ significantly from society can endure long in that society unless the group is a countercommunity. Christians cannot maintain Christian values in society unless they are part of a community that reinforces those values.

I believe this is a crucial point. The relation of Christian community not only to kingdom living but even to doctrinal integrity will increasingly have to be examined. Orthodoxy is no defense. If Christians cease to act like Christians, sooner or later they will stop believing like Christians. So community is a crucial concern.

The New Testament Community

The New Testament pictures the church as the community gathered around Jesus. Matthew 18:20 is perhaps the most compact definition of the church in Scripture: “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” One person is not enough. Church is a community of people gathered around Jesus, committed to him, worshiping him, and ready to serve his kingdom in the world. People gathered around Jesus is the irreducible minimum of the church. Then arise questions of preaching, sacraments, liturgy, ordination, doctrine, church government, and the many other things that separate Christians into denominational families.

The church was born in first-century Jewish society. Born in a culture with a strong sense of community and an ethos of peoplehood, it drew some of its strength from these roots. Jews in Jesus’ day knew they were a covenant people; they existed as a nation because God had acted in history. The new reality believers discovered in Jesus Christ was built on this foundation of community and peoplehood.

Though the church outgrew its Jewish character, it brought over understandings, concepts, practices, and even structures from the Jewish community, which became basic to the Christian church. For example, the church initially built its worship on the synagogue model; churches were at first largely Christian synagogues.

From the beginning, however, the church was more than simply a Jewish sect because it was the community of Jesus’ disciples. Jesus was the incarnate Son of God announcing a new order and kingdom. The impressive thing about Jesus’ three years with his disciples is the embryonic community that he himself formed. Tracing the word disciple through the Gospel of Luke reveals a community of several concentric circles of disciples, beginning with the Twelve.

The church of the Acts and the Epistles was based on the community Jesus had formed. After Pentecost the disciples simply repeated what Jesus had done with them. The first several chapters in Acts show the pattern. Jesus had provided for the many converts of Pentecost by preparing a community of people—not a disconnected corps of experts. How different it was from today’s missionary and evangelistic methods!

Put yourself in the picture. Your small church suddenly gains 3,000 converts, and a few days later, several thousand more. And you don’t even have a board, an organizational manual, a budget, a doctrinal statement, committees, or buildings. Can you survive?

From our perspective, the church at Pentecost was hopelessly handicapped. But Jesus worked at a more fundamental level. He gathered a community of believers, working intensively with them so that they would understand who he was and why he had come. They could handle problems as they came, guided by the Holy Spirit and following Jesus’ teaching and example.

Here is a vital lesson about church life and structure. At Pentecost the disciples clearly got a taste of new wine. But Jesus provided also the basis for new wineskins, created from patterns, customs, and understandings derived from centuries of God’s acts in history. He drew on millennia of God’s work in forming his new community—and then baptized the group with his Spirit.

As Jesus had met with the first disciples in small groups, and as they had met together outdoors and in homes, so did the first Christians. The life of the early church was nourished in homes. First, it was built through normal family life. Second, it was fed through koinonia groups, cells of people who met together for prayer, worship, and the Eucharist, and who passed on Jesus’ teaching by word of mouth.

The church’s experience of community was complemented by its sense of being a distinct people. The Epistles reveal a strong countercultural consciousness, which developed and deepened as the church spread across the empire. As it expanded, it learned that God’s plan was not just for the Jews, but for all peoples, nations, and classes. It began to develop a people consciousness.

This consciousness dawned gradually. The Holy Spirit was poured out equally on Jew and Gentile (Acts 10:44–47; 11:15–18; 19:5–6). Christians began to think of themselves as a third race: neither Jew nor Gentile, but something new transcending both. Christians were “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” but “all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28; note also 1 Cor. 12:13; Eph. 2:14; Col. 3:11). This was not merely spiritual renewal; it was social revolution.

The modern tragedy is that this consciousness has all but evaporated from the church, especially in North America. A sad symptom of the loss of true community is the way Christians easily accept massive gaps between rich and poor in the church as normal, or at least as not a pressing Christian concern. The early Christians took steps so that “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34), but few Christians today are so moved.

In North America, most of the Christian church is a subculture rather than a counterculture. When the church fails to oppose the dominant culture at those points where the culture pays allegiance to alien gods, it functions as a subculture, not as a counterculture.

The Church As Countercultural Community

But should the church be a counterculture? Some say no, wanting to preserve its vital, transforming link to society. But understood biblically, the model of the church as countercultural community is both dynamic and missiologically faithful.

As applied to the church, the term counterculture is both a positive and a negative concept. Perhaps the negative side is more obvious: As a counterculture the church takes its stand against surrounding culture. The Christian community must be in some sense “other than” the world around it, maintaining fundamental points of antithesis.

But counterculture is also positive, offering a genuine alternative to the dominant culture. In fundamental ways, the counterculture claims to be better than the world’s culture. In offering a clearly delineated, visible alternative, the counterculture pushes society to self-examination, self-criticism, and often self-defense. In this way the counterculture has a significant social impact, good or bad. Conversely, the counterculture is influenced by its contact with the larger culture and often defines itself in reaction to the prevailing view. If “straight” culture wears suits, ties, and carefully manicured hair, for instance, the counterculture may sport jeans, beads, and beards. Of course, with time the countercultural trends may be popularized and exploited by the dominant culture.

In what sense should the church be a counterculture? Five portions of Scripture help to provide the biblical image of the church.

John 15:18–19: In the World, Not of It. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world” (NIV; compare also John 17:14–16).

We see that Jesus’ disciples must maintain a critical tension: in the world but not of it. Christians are neither to withdraw from the world nor to become one with it. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), but he made it plain that it is in the world (Luke 17:21). Jesus plants us in a place of tension. We are to maintain that tension against the strong pull to a more comfortable position either out of the world or totally of the world. This tension of incarnation requires the church to be in some sense a counterculture.

Romans 12:2: Conformed to Christ, Not the World. “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” With this we may compare Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” The church is to avoid conformity to the world by being conformed to Jesus Christ through the renewing work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus as “the firstborn among many brothers” suggests that the church is a brotherhood, a family, a community.

Luke 12:29–32: The Flock of the Kingdom. “Do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” What a contrast of weakness and strength—a flock and a kingdom! You are a little flock, Jesus says, but in your very weakness and dependence on me you will inherit the kingdom of God (compare 2 Cor. 12:9).

Having traded the values of the present world for the truth of the kingdom, the church is a counterculture. It pledges its allegiance to a sovereign different from that of the citizens of this world kingdom.

This adds two more elements: the church’s distinctness from the world is not merely a difference, it is a warfare, a battle raging between the kingdom of God and the powers of the Enemy. In this warfare the church must be faithful to its King and Lord, to the new covenant. It has pledged itself to live by the values of the kingdom of God and to renounce the values of the world’s culture.

John 17:18: Sent into the World. In his prayer Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” In other words, the church is to be engaged aggressively with the world in winning the allegiance of increasing numbers of people to Jesus as Lord and King. We are called to make disciples of the kingdom, not just of the church.

Revelation 21:23–27: Contributing to Culture. The holy city is described: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

As a Christian counterculture, the church can legitimately be engaged in cultural works that add beauty and harmony to the world. This also is kingdom work. It includes all good work in the world that holds potential for glorifying God.

The Kingdom Community

The danger of a countercultural model is that it may lead inward, away from engagement with the world. The antidote is a deep consciousness that the church exists for the kingdom. The model of countercultural community is essentially negative, despite its positive possibilities. But it is an important perspective. The church can be free for the kingdom only if it is sufficiently detached and distinct from the world’s culture to maintain obedience for the kingdom.

Often the church’s notion of community is shockingly shallow. It fails to see how radical it is to build a community for the kingdom. It misses the deeply social, economic, and political dimensions of New Testament koinonia.

Individual Christians are seldom persecuted. Christian communities that dare to follow an alternative, Christian sociopolitical life together constitute a political challenge to the status quo and are always in danger of persecution or extermination.

The church for the kingdom is inevitably political, social, and economic. Political, because it deals with ultimate meaning and allegiance and aims to change the present order. Social, because it forms people into close-knit, intense social groups organized around questions of values and life meaning, not just around secondary tasks. Economic, because it involves the stewardship of money and resources and some level of mutual economic sharing and liability. If the church poses no threat to the Enemy in these areas, its allegiance to Jesus Christ must be seriously questioned.

Jesus also makes the point that where your security is, there your heart is. The question is basic loyalties. Do we find our fundamental meaning and security in the kingdom community or in material and economic resources? It is a choice between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world.

Building Community Today

The church has redemptive significance only when it is an empirical fact, a social and historical reality. The community model is helpful only if it serves to build authentic community in the church. Building genuine Christian community means applying basic biblical principles of church life, and it involves the following aspects.

Commitment and Covenant. Christian community starts at the point of commitment and covenant. Whether this commitment is formal or informal is secondary. The point is, Christian community cannot exist without commitment to Jesus as Lord and to one another. It must be specific and explicit, involving our time, energy, and resources.

Shared Life. The church exists in time and space and so must come together in time and space. Real community means shared time, shared meals, shared priorities, and some level of economic sharing. Specific patterns may vary, but New Testament koinonia does not exist without this shared life.

The Dimension of Transcendence. The church transcends mere human community when the horizontal, human dimension is married to the vertical dimension through Jesus Christ. This dimension of transcendence constitutes the church and builds it into a true community of the Spirit. It causes the Christian community to look not just inward or outward, but also upward to God and ahead to the promised kingdom.

The first priority of the church is always worship. If community itself, or the church’s witness in the world, takes the place of worship, the dimension of transcendence may be lost, and the church may forfeit both its unique character and its power.

Service In Community Building

Servanthood is an essential mark of authentic Christian community and should characterize the church’s internal life and its life in the world. Although society’s macrostructures must be changed or replaced before universal justice can reign, much of the battle for justice today is taking place at the level of the microstructures of family, church, and neighborhood, which are the building blocks of a just society. If the church fails to make its contribution at these foundational levels, it will have little significant impact at broader levels.

If the church is seen primarily as an institution, its ministry will be largely institutional and program oriented. But if it is viewed as a community, its ministry will be person oriented, focusing on building structures of human interaction—family, church, and neighborhood—structures that are being undermined today.

1. Family Building. The church builds families first by recognizing that the church is the family of God and the family is the church of God. Family was the original form of human community: both in Scripture and in history it preceded the church.

Mother, father, and two kids, virtually divorced from grandparents, cousins, and other kin, is not the biblical ideal. With so many isolated families and people living singly, the church should rediscover the extended family, providing for every believer literally to find a home. It must explore extended family models, so that each home truly is a church and the church truly is a family.

2. Neighborhood Building. Beyond family life, a key ministry for the church is building vital, healthy neighborhoods. This is true especially in the city where the church has often failed to invest in, or has abandoned, neighborhoods that most needed a Christian presence. Neighborhoods decline when the institutions sustaining their social and economic lifeblood pull out. When a bank refuses to grant mortgages or loans in a particular area, it is called “redlining.” The church practices redlining when it abandons or bypasses needy communities. In so doing it fails to live up to its mission as a builder of community.

Update:

“Taking a Stand When Law and Justice Conflict” by Charles W. Colson (CT, Feb. 4, 1983, p. 40)

Since the writing of the article, Harry Fred Palmer, a man who had been sentenced to serve 10 to 20 years under Indiana’s mandatory sentencing law, was transferred from Westville Correctional Center on October 6, 1982, when Indiana Governor Robert Orr signed a clemency order. Under the terms of the order, Palmer was released to spend six months at a work release center located in South Bend, which is only about 20 miles from his home in Elkhart. Within the next several weeks, Harry Fred Palmer is scheduled to complete his work release program and he expects to be united with his family.

What happens in a neighborhood when the church strives to build community? Let us imagine:

• Couples on the brink of divorce discover that God’s love can put their homes back together again.

• Fearful neighbors get acquainted and begin to work on community problems. As Christians help bring people together, fear is reduced and understanding grows.

• Poor families find that someone cares as Christians reach out in love, giving material aid when needed and working to improve housing conditions and employment opportunities.

• Aimless children find that God has a plan for them, and, as the church opens its doors to them, find a loving, caring family where they are welcome.

• Elderly folks find new security and new opportunities for service.

The church can literally transform neighborhoods, and the larger society, for Christ. Liberating the church means freeing Christians to be a community of believers that serves as an agent of the kingdom of God. As the church becomes a community in the New Testament sense, it is able to create community and to enhance existing community.

When the kingdom comes, it will come through genuine community in Christ through the power of the Spirit. Where the church today is truly the community of God’s people living for God’s glory and mission, there the kingdom is already visibly present as sign, promise, and first fruit.

Frank Gaebelein’s greatness was rooted in his love for Christ: it shaped his integrity, his love of excellence, and his service for others.

Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”

Frank Gaebelein was a great man because he loved his Lord Christ with all his heart and mind and strength. He was great because he stood upright with integrity and a desire for excellence. He was great because he cared for and served the needs of others.

The founding headmaster of The Stony Brook School, Dr. Gaebelein was an educator, author, preacher, scholar, musician, and mountaineer. Few will approach his diversity of interest and the quality of excellence that followed his efforts. Stony Brook graduates will remember a man of remarkable presence whose authoritative glance was enough to quiet a restless boy.

A concert pianist, he would play duets with young Jorge Bolet, ‘34, a student of prodigious talent and one of the world’s great pianists, who came to the school the day after Dr. Gaebelein’s death to share his talent in a touching tribute.

But Frank Gaebelein was viewed by many as a leading statesman of the Christian faith. His character, breadth, scholarship, and social concern influenced senators and congressmen, educators, and thousands who have read his works.

The most important fact of his life was Jesus Christ. It was rooted in a deep sense of reality about who Jesus Christ is—Lord of life and history. That was his starting point; here it was he would begin his day. In the study of Grosvenor House he would open the Scripture, and with thoughtfulness, humility, and openness would ask God to make him what he wanted him to be. He prayed for each student, each faculty member, for his family and friends that they too would make Christ their model, their life, their redeemer.

This rooted and realistic faith produced a quality of uprightness and moral integrity that also distinguished him. Richard Halverson, chaplain of the U.S. Senate and a long-time friend of Dr. Gaebelein, told me a story that illustrates that integrity.

Dr. Gaebelein was to make a speaking tour of India, visiting churches and speaking to Christian ministers. The government of that predominantly Hindu country was suspicious of Christian ministers at that time, and Dr. Gaebelein was cautioned to write “Editor” on his visa application, for that was his present occupation; writing “Christian Minister” would mean rejection of the application. How Dr. Gaebelein struggled! Why was he going to India? Was it not as a “Christian Minister” and not as an “Editor”? He wrote “Christian Minister” on the application, not ready to compromise his conscience. Others thought he would be refused. But he got his visa and spoke in the freedom of an open conscience.

I believe his commitment to Christ and the integrity that characterized him are the real secrets behind his love of excellence, his love of things done well. He abhorred what was shoddy! Perhaps this also was in part why he enjoyed Alpine climbing. Mountain climbers cannot be ill prepared, or make a 70 percent effort; it is life threatening to do so. Indeed, as I write of him I sense Dr. Gaebelein wielding his editor’s red pen, ready to point out errors of grammar and construction. He was quick, almost compulsive, about pointing out errors, for he loved what was excellent.

The root of that, I believe, is that his efforts were directed at honoring Christ: Christ deserved his best. His integrity demanded that what he did was to be done well. There was liberation from the self-indulgence of what was shoddy, and liberty from the fears of not achieving—a liberty of excellence for the sake of Christ.

Frank Gaebelein was great because he cared for and served the needs of others. He was concerned for the needy, and often appalled by the excesses of pomp and power in Washington where he lived.

On retirement, he became coeditor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. In 1965 he went in that role to cover Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama. Characteristic of the man, the reporter within was left at Selma. He marched with those who were calling for social justice and an end to racial prejudice. In a world of incredible affluence and abject poverty, he was concerned that Christians and others were losing their sense of values and not confronting Scripture’s challenge regarding the poor.

Frank Gaebelein was a great man. We can remember him; but we can do something more: we can understand the life he lived and know that we, too, can walk in the same quality of life. Indeed, each of us can be great as Dr. Gaebelein was great, with a greatness rooted in faith in Christ. His integrity was real, his striving for excellence something we may all emulate.

We thank God for the memory and example of Frank Gaebelein, who lived out Jesus’ call to greatness: “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant.”

Regulators rely on hearings while broadcasters rely on ratings. But where does the Christian plug in?

He’s been called the gatekeeper—that unseen, unheralded mediator of what you read, see, and hear. He’s the editor. He stands guard over the narrow channel through which the goods of his trade—information—pass from the private to the public realm. He’s the arbiter over a thousand bits of information clamoring for public attention. Each choice he makes limits in some way our choices of what we will know. Yet the gatekeeper’s role is essential to the information process. It gives some organization and balance to an otherwise indecipherable glut of contradictory facts and feelings. The responsibility is immense.

The gatekeeper analogy, first applied to the newspaper editor in 1949, has ever-increasing relevance in what we glibly call today’s information age. Contemporary society is fueled by information—in commerce, education, and leisure. Our government of, by, and for the people presupposes an informed public. And because of the profound way in which information affects our lives, the role of the gatekeeper becomes an ethical issue for Christians.

Television has now succeeded the newspaper as America’s primary source of public information. But is television ready to inherit that mantle from newspapers? The broadcaster says no.

From his perspective, the broadcaster does not stand alone at the gate. The government, personified in the Federal Communications Commission, rests a heavy hand on his shoulder, second-guessing his news judgment. Specifically, broadcasters claim the FCC has regulated free speech off the air through the Fairness Doctrine, which requires broadcasters to balance their treatment of controversial issues; and equal time rules, which require stations that provide one political candidate air time to do so for all opponents.

These two policies constitute government control of program content, they say, denying broadcasters the First Amendment guarantees of free speech enjoyed by the print media. Since the net effect of the Fairness Doctrine and equal time rules is to scare broadcasters away from controversial and political issues, the ultimate loser in this equation is the public, which is deprived of open debate.

So broadcasters are mounting a vigorous campaign to win repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, equal time rules, and other content controls from the 1934 Communications Act, the legislative mandate that undergirds regulation of the broadcast industry.

In its annual convention last year, the National Association of Broadcasters kicked off the crusade with a theme of “full First Amendment freedom for broadcasters.” Among the heavyweights there to endorse the campaign was Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Oreg.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, who called for a constitutional amendment extending freedom of speech to the electronic media. Even President Reagan, himself a former radio announcer and TV star, sent a letter of endorsement to the NAB conventioneers.

Testifying before Packwood’s committee last November, CBS News anchorman Dan Rather said, “It is ironic … that as we approach the two hundredth anniversary of the Bill of Rights, the medium on which the public most relies for its news and information must still answer to a government agency empowered to decide on the fairness, balance, and responsibility of its reporting on public events.”

But the National Association of Broadcasters has been arguing for full First Amendment rights for 60 years. What’s different now? For the first time in memory, the cause has an advocate chairing the Federal Communications Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the Communications Act. Keynoting that same convention last year, Reagan appointee Mark Fowler said, “It’s one thing for stations to follow principles like fairness and equal time.… It’s another when the government enforces those rules. That I call censorship.”

Fowler’s FCC has asked Congress to drop the Fairness Doctrine and equal time rules from the Communications Act.

Should we extend full First Amendment rights to broadcasters? What will it cost us? Before we look for a distinctively Christian response to those questions, we must see them in the context of broadcast history and practice.

Whose First Amendment Is It?

It seems a simple argument, firmly based in one of America’s paramount traditions of freedom. Certainly free speech poses no ethical dilemma for us. The Constitution promises that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Had the Founding Fathers only foreseen the potential for speech to be transmitted electronically as well as on a printed page, they could have added another clause to the First Amendment. But 60 years of broadcasting experience reveal a more complicated picture.

The first comprehensive regulation of broadcasting, enacted in 1927, was designed to resolve a chaotic interference problem in the fledgling industry. The 732 radio stations on the air were using whatever power and frequency served their needs, regardless of the damage they did to each other. The interference that resulted made it impossible for most stations to operate effectively. The Federal Radio Commission, created by the Radio Act of 1927, determined there was not room on the air for all the stations. One-fifth of them had to go.

The public and most broadcasters benefited from the decision. The commission was given authority to assign each radio station its frequency and power. But in order to do that, and for broadcasting even to get off the ground, the government also had to limit the free speech of most citizens. It was illegal for anyone else to broadcast on an assigned frequency.

So broadcasting exists as an effective medium only because the free speech rights of the majority of citizens have been limited.

Broadcasters, understandably, see this argument differently. Since anyone can legally own a station, those who do are not depriving anyone else of his rights. While this may be true, it is not too practical. Not everyone can afford a broadcast station; there are not enough to go around; and if there were enough for each of us, there would be no one to listen. To be an effective medium, broadcasting assumes that most of us are not broadcasters.

The free speech issue took another turn in 1949 when the Federal Communications Commission issued guidelines for editorializing. Ironically, this document stated broadcasters had the freedom of speech. However, this freedom was subordinate to the public’s freedom of speech, which was in essence the freedom to hear all sides of an issue. The Fairness Doctrine was born. The public interest took precedence over the interest of the broadcaster.

It seems contradictory to the American tradition of free speech that one group’s freedom could count more than another’s. But in a sense, that has always been so. In the same way that freedom of speech doesn’t permit a person to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, or to make libelous statements about another, there have always been some restrictions on speech. Freedom of speech and press were written into the Constitution to protect a higher freedom—the right of every citizen to be informed. We tend to make freedom of speech an end in itself, rather than a means to a higher good—the public interest.

Who Regulates The Regulators?

But who is best suited to protect the public interest? Broadcasters say it is not a proper role for the government, since the First Amendment was instituted as a guarantee against oppressive rulers. For the government to form a federal agency, such as the FCC, to oversee such important matters as free speech would be like giving the fox the key to the hen house.

Broadcasters contend the best protection of the public’s interest in the media is an unfettered, uncoerced freedom of speech answerable only to the public itself. Left alone, broadcasting could produce such a system, using audience ratings as a constant barometer of the public will. If the people do not approve of what they see and hear on TV, they can vote it off the air simply by turning the dial. Without viewer support, objectionable programs would be cancelled. What is produced is a continuous referendum on broadcaster performance, courtesy of the Nielsen ratings.

This is, of course, an argument for marketplace regulation, the fad these days. To quote an NAB brochure, “Broadcasters who do not hold the public trust simply do not survive.… Broadcasters not meeting the needs of the community do not maintain local interest or economic viability.”

But such assumptions reflect more political opportunism than economic reality. Deregulatory fever has hit broadcasting the past two years. The FCC has loosened its grip on the industry, removing many of the controls on program content considered by previous commissions to be safeguards of the public interest. It only makes sense, in such a climate, that broadcasters would go after the regulations they consider most threatening—fairness and equal time.

In reality, the radio and TV marketplace answers to many more pressures than public interest. The courts and Congress have consistently held that broadcasting is a special case, requiring a special type of regulation. Economic forces alone cannot protect us.

If the public interest is enforced when we “vote with the dial,” as broadcasters suggest, what are the results? To begin with, more than half of us do not count in this referendum. Even during the top viewing time of the day (prime time) 58 percent of us are doing something besides watching TV, according to the 1982 Nielsen report. But rather than counting as a negative vote, this is considered an abstention. “Dallas” is a television hit not because a majority of Americans enjoy it, but because 25 percent of us watch it. As custodian of the public interest, the ratings see only viewers, not all citizens.

But this electorate is reduced even further. The objective of broadcasters is not to amass a consensus of Americans behind their programming, but to deliver an audience of consumers to the advertisers. Therefore not all viewers count, but only those who matter to sponsors. Most products are marketed to women 18–49 years of age, since they do most of the shopping. So it is to the broadcasters’ market advantage to please not a cross section of viewers, but women in that age bracket. Others do not count for much. Television executives are not too interested in aiming programs at children and people over 55, even though they comprise about 40 percent of the prime time audience. It is hard to see how this system represents the public interest of the poor, the elderly, minorities, or even the majority of us. Instead of voting with the dial, we are actually voting with our pocket-books in a kind of supermarket referendum.

It is too bad broadcasters have tied their First Amendment arguments to marketplace regulation. There could be advantages to allowing the electronic media more editorial freedom. But if the current broadcasting marketplace is a demonstration of what we could expect them to do with it, should they be surprised at our reluctance? Les Brown, former chairman of the FCC, recently said, “Anyone who just arrived here from another country and didn’t know anything about the First Amendment could be forgiven for mistaking it as a constitutional right to make money in communications.”

As it stands, repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and equal time rules seems unlikely soon. The legislation will probably be introduced in Congress, as it is each year, but it is considered a “back-burner” issue even by some on the FCC staff. The strong lobbying activity of broadcasters could change that, however. Meanwhile, Senator Packwood has set no timetable for submitting his constitutional amendment extending free speech to the electronic media. That approach is more comprehensive, but would take even longer.

A compromise solution to the First Amendment question has been suggested. Called structural regulation, it purports to protect both the right to speak and the right to know. It takes as a starting point the First Amendment intention of diversity—that the public interest is served when a variety of voices can address the issues. But government regulation of broadcasting has instead limited diversity, first by limiting free speech and then by allowing a few voices to dominate through the present three-network system. The solution is to remove controls on speech while at the same time severely limiting the number of broadcasting outlets one person or group can control, this through strict ownership rules and antitrust laws. Rather than making each broadcaster responsible for diversity, we create an atmosphere that encourages diversity among stations.

This sounds particularly appealing at a time when new broadcast technologies are promising to multiply our viewing options and complicate our efforts to control program content. But structural regulation faces strong opposition from the broadcasting establishment, which is providing much of the financial support and technical innovation for development of cable TV, low-power TV and other new services. Forced to choose between a free market and free speech, the broadcaster may decide he cannot afford his preference.

Who Will Decide?

Minding the gate has never been easy. The choices are hard. Their consequences are weighty.

It is clear that as we come to grips with the information age we will have to reevaluate our balance of First Amendment freedoms. What will we as Christians have to contribute to the deliberations?

1. Christians have a conviction about free speech. Our ultimate confidence in the power of truth convinces us that a free marketplace of ideas enhances all of our freedoms. Those of us who have benefited from the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment know the importance of defending its neighbor in the Bill of Rights—the free speech clause. If there is a just way to extend free speech to broadcasting without jeopardizing the balance of freedoms, we will not hesitate to endorse it.

2. But as Christians we also see freedom’s flip side, responsibility. It is disturbing to hear broadcasters argue for free speech and then pass the accompanying responsibility on to the marketplace. Any practice of freedom that insulates itself from its consequences is abusive. There is serious doubt that responsibility to the public interest is inherent in marketplace regulation of broadcasting.

There have been efforts in the past to build responsibility into the system through self-regulation. But few people are satisfied with the results. For the most part, broadcasters are honest and responsible citizens. But the economic pressures of competition handicap those who would take self-regulation seriously. Self-regulation in children’s television has been disappointing to most observers. And even the legality of self-regulation has been called into question by a Justice Department lawsuit against the NAB’s TV Code, prompting the NAB to cancel the code indefinitely. If we extend further freedoms to the electronic media, we must insure that the inherent responsibilities are not left behind.

3. We have said the gatekeeper’s choices have ethical impact. Yet as Christians we must point out that neither government regulation nor the marketplace can produce an ethic to govern those choices. There is a void that must be filled. We cannot expect the public interest to be served as long as this is absent.

Christians often find themselves among the critics of television. Many are displeased with the moral tone and content of TV programming. But we have also isolated ourselves from the gatekeeper and his task. We are critics at a distance. Unless we take on our own responsibility to fill the ethical void, we have no right to complain that TV falls short of our moral standards. We cannot require of the gatekeeper an obedience for which we have not given him the power. This means we must become a part of the media processes, find out how they work, and find ways to influence them positively.

We cannot afford for the world of television to be a foreign or esoteric concern. The communications landscape of today will shape tomorrow’s world. For too long we have surrendered this leadership to others. The gatekeeper’s choices move us, mold us—in a way, they are our choices.

Christians are learning to use secular products with spiritual truths rather than religious products with limited secular appeal.

Christians on every continent are waking up to the value of reaching the secular masses with spiritual truth through the secular mass communications media: print, radio, television, and motion picture film. Since the secular masses constitute the population majority in virtually every nation, this development holds immense spiritual potential.

Several characteristics distinguish this “new wave” of Christians mobilizing mass media:

Secular products are a new priority. Christians are concentrating on creating appealing secular products with the spiritual truths embedded, rather than religious products with limited secular appeal. C. S. Lewis suggested a similar approach: “We do not need more Christian books; we need more books by Christians about everything with Christian values built in.” A notable example of Christian truth in a secular product is the 1982 top-award-winning motion picture, Chariots of Fire.

In the U.S., the most successful move into the secular domain is that of Continental Broadcasting Network, created by Pat Robertson as a subsidiary of Christian Broadcasting Network expressly to enter the secular market. The Atlanta Journal noted with approval that the network is now marketing a new, more “appealingly secular” version of the “700 Club” with a “magazine style format including such things as exercise, gardening, nutrition, time and money management, and theater film reviews.” This commercially sponsorable “700 Club” loses none of its spiritual purpose as it attracts a wider audience.

Robertson and Continental’s most challenging and ambitious entry into the secular domain was the launching of “Another Life,” a Christian antidote to television’s daily fare of “soap operas,” with a first-year budget of around $4 million. The secular press across the country has been notably positive. Variety notes, “It’s every bit as good as the networks.” Terry Knopf, Boston Globe correspondent, sums it up: “ ‘Another Life’ is a new soap with a different scent.…” utilizing “a master program strategy” with “no resident preacher to pontificate nor characters going around quoting the Bible,” yet the “religious messages seep through.” According to the New York Daily News, Richardson-Vickes, the makers of Vicks Nyquil, Formula 44, Oil of Olay, and Clearasil, first signed on as a multimillion dollar, multiyear advertiser for CBN. A growing array of major national advertisers has since signed contracts.

Pat Robertson’s entry into the secular domain, following years of pioneering in religious broadcasting, came, he said, “only after much prayer and study” leading to the conviction that “the Lord wants us to reach a larger audience—millions of unsaved people.” The changes have not always been easy, he admits. “It’s a bit scary to be an innovator; it’s frightening at times to go through changes. But I know the Lord wants this.”

Another U.S. group has entered the secular market with commercially sponsored programs. Campus Crusade for Christ, widely known for its religious emphasis, uses its nonreligiously named affiliate, Athletes in Action, to create the secular product with spiritual truth sown within. Athletes in Action has aired athletic events, inserting gospel content through halftime interviews, for several years. Recently it has recorded 18 half-hour network quality shows at a cost of only $20,000 per show. This program is a sports-magazine talk show interspersed with lots of sports action. Dave Hannah, creator of the series, explains why he entered the secular market: “Most people in the U.S. have heard the gospel in one form or another: we need to take a different approach to reach those who are unsaved.” His program strategy grows out of his belief that “TV is essentially an entertaining medium, and most of our efforts as Christians are not very entertaining, except to those already committed.”

In New Zealand, the Grapevine was born in 1981. Billed as Auckland’s most widely distributed community magazine, it circulates into 265,000 homes in greater Auckland alone, and by subscription throughout the nation. Owned by the Sunflower Communications Society, the Grapevine’s monthly issue of 40 pages with full-color covers is able to pay all its costs from advertising tastefully sprinkled throughout. Powerfully seeded with spiritual truth, it is already the largest publishing venture of its kind in New Zealand.

Commercial companies are a new impetus. The traditional mainstay of Christian media efforts has been a nonprofit company supported by Christian tax-deductible contributions. But this pattern may be changing. Christians are now launching profit-making companies designed to compete on a par with other commercial media corporations.

The most spectacular U.S. media project being developed by Christians to enter the secular marketplace throughout the U.S. and overseas is Dominion Satellite Network, DOMSAT, and its subsidiary corporations in 20 states. Founder-chairman Robert W. Johnson, who made a Christian commitment four years ago in Florida, where he had moved with his family, has already garnered an elite corps of coworkers, formerly managing directors with NASA, Walt Disney, CBS, Blair Advertising, and Radio City Music Hall.

Initially DOMSAT’s goal is to raise up a standard for the Lord within the existing commercial TV network affiliate stations and independent network stations. Also, priority applications have been filed with the FCC for 30 low-power TV stations in major U.S. markets. Later DOMSAT plans to cover the entire U.S. with satellite direct-to-home broadcasting through a subsidiary, Video Satellite Systems, Inc. The FCC has already approved the vss application to launch two of its own high-powered satellites, whose reception will require only a small housetop dish costing less than $400.

Johnson is quick to point out that DOMSAT is not a “religiously oriented” operation but a secular one programming to the secular market, which, he maintains, “Christians for the most part do not understand.” He believes networks have become vulnerable because their competition with each other has led to neglect of the public. “Nationwide research shows there is an audience large enough to attract national advertisers for wholesome family programming that upholds Judeo-Christian ethics, and that’s what ours will do.”

In Norway, International Masscommunication Service, under the leadership of Aril Edvardsen and with ministries in 100 nations, has already successfully marketed through government and commercial stations around the world an English-language radio talk show with a built-in witness. More recently four secular nationwide programs featuring the history of gospel music in Norway were sold to Norwegian television, and a feature program to Swedish TV. Looking ahead, a pilot program for a secular TV series with a powerful Christian impact was produced for sale to Norwegian and Swedish television. Last summer IMS acquired a $1 million, four-color-camera mobile van with full editing capability, and ground was broken for one of the finest television centers in Europe. Just this spring, IMS has firmed up arrangements to use commercial European satellite to telecast into Europe programs financed by commercials. This will be a historic first for a secular, international European TV program with Christian purpose.

Friendships with predominant secular media are a new trend. Christians using media often feel the secular media are closed to them because they often reject their religious products. Christians then sometimes mistakenly feel that they and Christianity have been rejected, and they turn hostile to the secular media. Most of the “new wave” Christian media users are taking a new approach. Armed with products designed for use by secular media, they are entering into friendly cooperation with the secular media. As a result, entire nations are being touched for God.

A promising venture overseas is Leila Productions PLC, headquartered in London, and capitalized at under $1 million by Charles Cordle, a successful Christian businessman. Leila’s stated purpose is to create high quality, commercially profitable television entertainment that affirms positive values, upholds family life, and encourages moral and social responsibility. Its programs are designed not only for England but also for the international market.

Joining Leila with Cordle are Robin Scott, former deputy managing director of BBC Television; William Fitch, chairman of Marshall, Morgan and Scott book publishers; and Geoffry Lavers, who is deputy chairman of two financial groups.

“All productions of Leila are to be coproductions,” says Cordle. Two BBC coproductions are completed. The first, “Day One,” a religious current affairs magazine series, started on BBC Television in 1982. Leila plans to sell the show around the world. The second, a secular, four-part series of 50-minute programs on converted singer Cliff Richard, coproduced with BBC Light Entertainment, has aired on both BBC channels nationwide with a powerful Christian witness. Another BBC drama coproduction for children will soon be produced. It is named “Baker Street Boys” after the fictitious boys who helped detective Sherlock Holmes.

Other forthcoming Leila productions include: a drama series on the Pilgrims, a labor documentary, a drama on C. S. Lewis, a drama series on a London mounted policeman and his horse, and a weekly magazine show covering in fast-paced style the world of pop culture.

Two New Zealand corporations have negotiated contracts with the government broadcasting service. Energy Source Television was capitalized, under the leadership of successful Christian businessman and professional chemist John McEwen of Wellington, to market wholesome family entertainment seeded with spiritual truth. Its first prime-time nationwide magazine format program has been accepted by government television and soon will be aired. ESTY is also scripting a comedy-variety series called “The Cleaning Company” for nationwide entertainment viewing in New Zealand, and for possible overseas sale. New Zealand Broadcasting will do the production. Also the newly formed Seven Seas Television has won a contract for a nationwide weekly series of field productions, using the beauty of God’s creation as its stage.

From these examples and many others that could be cited, we can all learn something from the “new wave” strategy:

As Christians, many of us have assumed that religious or “Christian” programs, publications, and films are the primary, if not sole, province of the Christian user of media. This assumption needs to be reexamined in light of the unprecedented changes occurring in our world today.

It is to the credit of evangelical Christians that by being reasonably aggressive they have captured more than their share of the religious action. And Christians should not relax in appropriating as much religious space and time as possible and in seeking to open the media to more. However, media availably for religious use is limited both by the media system’s operating hierarchy and by competition among religious media users. It is easy to see why the preponderant secular masses are scarcely touched by religious media efforts.

Broadcasting is a case in point. Commercial broadcast interests and free world government-operated broadcast systems do not view it as their role or purpose to serve as a conduit for politicizing or proselytizing. This is understandable. Therefore they must either outright reject overtly labeled religious materials or else accept them and “slot” them into religious time segments as paid-for religious material. In England, for example, the BBC allocates only 7 percent of its broadcast time for religious programming. Yet the British are being quite generous, since just 2 percent of the U.K. population is church related! Similar percentages apply to most of Europe, and most European national broadcasting systems will not accept any religious programs.

Religious space in magazines, newspapers, films, and books is likewise limited. For example, virtually any city newspaper editor when given religious material will automatically assign it to a religion section or page.27.7. This situation is made worse in most nations by competition among religious media users, fragmenting rather than uniting the small religious audience. Each user and his loyal constituents support some facet of the religious effort: a movement, a teaching, a group, a ministry, or a person. Cooperation is rare.

The message to the Christian is clear. Plying the religious market alone, admittedly valuable, is not enough. The larger secular market also must be entered (for example, the other 98 percent of BBC’s audience). How can a media product with a Christian purpose be developed to penetrate and even pervade the secular commercial media marketplace, which enters virtually every home in the nation every day?

What most of us Christians who are media users may overlook is that the spiritual truths and principles we support and want to communicate can be integrated into secular, commercially salable products for the vast commercial market and need not be limited only to religious products with a religious label. In fact, these truths and principles often can be communicated better this way because they also carry the intensification of the form into which they are integrated—for example, news, information, music, drama, documentary, feature, or interview. People have their “guard up” for straight sell, but they are open and vulnerable to the same ideas integrated into other communication forms.

The Beatles used this strategy with vast success. Rather than thinking of them primarily as musicians, try viewing them as among the most famous and successful “evangelists” of our century. Had they tried to propound their sinister spiritual values through religious meetings, broadcasts, and writings, their effect would have been relatively slight.

The Scripture admonishes us to be “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16, NIV). We would do well to employ this shrewdness in using the mass media. Whoever heard of “The Satan Hour” as a TV show? Such a program would have to buy its way into the market as religious time or be given away as sustaining programming on religiously oriented stations. Moreover, as a straight sell by an obviously vested interest, it would have to contend with a constantly critical viewing audience, and would have no audience apart from persons having some religious interest. Yet, Satan’s shows are more “religious” than religious shows are. He sows his seeds—literally infuses his seeds—into them so that his values are caught. With an uncommitted audience, values caught are more pervasive than values taught.

And so, a “new wave” is surging around the world, penetrating to the secular masses through mass media. These Christians are bent upon nothing less than moving whole nations for the Lord. Their strategy emphasizes secular products, commercial companies, and friendship and cooperation with the secular media. Christians are reaching into the media marketplace to sow seeds of righteousness. And “Righteousness exalts a nation” (Prov. 14:34).

Thirty-five years after his death, does Western Christianity have anything to learn from the Hindu who learned so much from Christ?

All the books are being reissued now, both the authorized and unauthorized biographies, many with a photo of Ben Kingsley rather than Gandhi on the cover, and a slash of color heralding “the book that inspired the epic film” or words to that effect. Mahatma Gandhi, the Great Soul, the wizened old man who through his personal force struck down an empire, is back in the news, thanks to Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. Thirty-five years after his death, the mass media have granted a few more nanoseconds of historical time to the man who changed the landscape of the globe.

Gandhi lived life in italics. There was no one like him: no one more disciplined, or stubborn, or consistent, or creative, or baffling, or lovable, or infuriating. Many of the political principles we take for granted today, as well as the muffled sounds of protest that echo in the streets of Jaruzelski’s Poland and Pinochet’s Chile and Botha’s South Africa, originated in the mind of this man who led a fifth of humanity into the twentieth century.

Now, 35 years later, it is time to begin to assess Gandhi, his life and beliefs, by asking what relevance he has in our speeded-up world of nuclear tension, environmental carnage, and militant nationalism. And because he was a saint—a Hindu saint, certainly, but one strategically informed by Christian thinkers—we in the church must pause to ponder what message he has for us also. Gandhi died three years after America used the atom bomb, an event that convinced him more than ever that for the planet to survive the world must look to the East for solutions, not the West. The West has always looked to the East, he claimed, citing Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Zoroaster, Mohammed, Rama. The alternative he foresaw was a global cataclysm brought on by decadence, materialism, and armed conflict.

I recently spent a month in India, Gandhi’s homeland. Its prophet is honored there, even revered, but hardly followed. Giant textile mills have supplanted the wooden spinning wheels. The corruption of India’s bureaucracy is legendary. And, three bloody wars after Gandhi, his nation flirts with the ring of power that haunted Gandhi: nuclear weapons. Even so, India cannot get the strange little man out of its consciousness. Nor, as Attenborough’s film reminds us, can the rest of the world.

If someone staged a beauty contest to select the least likely world leader, Gandhi would win hands down. Barely five feet tall, he weighed a mere 114 pounds, and his skinny arms and legs stuck out from his body like the limbs of a malnourished child. His ears flared straight out from his shaved head; his squat, oversized nose looked fake, like one of the rubber noses attached to glasses that people wear to costume parties. Steelrimmed spectacles kept slipping from that nose, tilting down towards his mouth, which itself was oddly shaped due to his habit of wearing dentures only while eating. His lips curled over nearly toothless gums. “He’s rather like a little bird,” said Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, “a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.”

As Gandhi walked, he leaned either on a bamboo stave or on the shoulders of his “crutches,” as he called his two young grandnieces. He wore the same clothes every day: a loose Indian loincloth and sometimes a cotton shawl, both of coarse homespun material he had spun at his own wheel. He carried all his possessions in a small sack, except for one, an Ingersoll pocket watch, which he proudly wore on a string; among his other idiosyncrasies was an obsessive punctuality.

Gandhi followed a strict schedule every day, and no one, not the king emperor of the British empire nor the leaders of India nor his closest friends, could alter it. He would arise daily at two A.M. to read his beloved Gita and say prayers, spend the next quiet hours answering correspondence, then do his ablutions and his toilet, completing them with a ritual salt-and-water enema. At noon every day he insisted on another health regimen—a porous cotton sack packed with oozing mud placed on his abdomen and head.

“Those who are in my company,” he warned his followers, “must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets.” Somehow he mobilized his followers, millions of them, into a moral and spiritual crusade with profound political repercussions. They fought with prayers, jail sentences, and flattened bodies, not machine guns. Finally, 400 million people were set free without bloodshed against their colonialist rulers.

It is popular today for historians to pick at the scabs of great men, exposing their flaws and inconsistencies. For a time after his death Gandhi was apotheosized, but revisionists have since dug up evidence about his petty demands on associates, his outbursts, his insensitivities to some people, his cranky stubbornness. Certainly that serene demeanor concealed an irascible streak. The man who could galvanize millions failed badly as a leader of his own family: he admittedly mistreated his wife, and imposed such strictness on his children that his eldest son rebelled and became an embezzler, gambler, and penniless alcoholic.

Even the major principles that guided Gandhi’s life proved highly problematic. He made major advances in village-level health and sanitation by encouraging peasants toward cleanliness and self-administered health treatments. But when his wife lay dying from acute bronchitis and the British flew in a vial of rare penicillin that could save her life, Gandhi refused the doctor permission to give it to her intravenously; the violence of the needle would violate her body, he said. As a result, she died. His greatest contribution to politics, the method of civil disobedience through nonviolent resistance, which he exalted as having universal applicability, has collided with the world of realpolitik. It has worked well in relatively free societies such as the British empire in colonialist days or the United States in the days of the civil rights movement. With mass media attention, nonviolent protest can arouse the conscience of a nation and prompt profound change. But in closed societies, unarmed resistance can lead, not to change, but simply to annihilation: witness the Jews in World War II and Soviet, Polish, and Czechoslovakian dissidents today.

Nevertheless, after all the gossip is heard, as the idealism of Gandhi corrodes upon exposure to the polluted atmosphere of world politics, and as his own nation continues to forsake so much of what he lived and died for—even after all that, still Gandhi radiates a saintliness and prescient wisdom that cannot fail to affect all who contact him. Mountbatten, a seasoned military commander, concluded hyperbolically that Gandhi would go down in history on a par with Jesus and Buddha. Is it time to look East again, to give another thought to the principles that formed this eccentric prophet?

No article can begin to acquaint a reader with even a cursory sketch of Gandhi’s life. But before drawing out the principles that have special relevance to the church today, I must at least trace a few of the major events. Apart from the evident neuroses so gleefully mined by revisionist historians, the measure of a man like Gandhi depends on his responses at hinge moments in life. Those few moments reveal Gandhi’s true greatness.

Prophets in the tradition of an Elijah or John the Baptist are not easily imagined in a modern setting. What would one look like? What would he wear? What would he say if confronted by shopping centers and nuclear bombs, if followed by an army of reporters, if asked his opinion on the inevitable civil war? Like some of those prophets but in a modern context, Gandhi offers a startling, innovative response. He redefined politics and spirituality, brought Britain to its knees, fused a nation, and changed the globe forever. Though not a Christian by belief or practice, Gandhi attempted to an impressive degree to live out some of the very same principles that characterized Jesus. His life deserves a moment’s reflection.

Protests

Gandhi’s doctrine of civil disobedience evolved gradually. In two decades in South Africa he had led marches, taken his share of beatings, spent a few hundred days in jail, and had experienced the mixed results of protest under oppressive regimes. Upon return to India he confronted a very different situation. There, his concern was not for a minority, a tightly knit Indian community in a strange land, but a majority, 400 million citizens strong, composed of diverse subcultures in a subcontinent ruled by the powerful British. As Britain started tightening the screws against Indian nationalism and protest, notably in the Rowlatt Act, Gandhi meditated long hours about the appropriate response. It came to him early one morning, in the twilight moments between sleep and consciousness. He decided to call for a day of mourning. No activity at all. India would respond with utter quietness. Shops would close, traffic would cease, the country would simply shut down for one day. Nothing like it had been attempted before in history, and we who live in its wake, after dozens of adaptations around the world, can easily miss the extraordinary genius of that response.

Gandhi devised a suitable reply to the classically colonialist system of exploitation. Britain was growing raw cotton in India, transporting it to England for milling and manufacture, and shipping the finished product back to India for sale at high prices. To break the chain, Gandhi urged every Indian, villager or city dweller, to spend at least an hour a day spinning cotton. He set the example himself, digging up an old wooden spinning wheel that he used the rest of his life.

When Britain imposed a tax on salt, a staple that every person, no matter how poor, required, Gandhi countered with his famous Salt March, a 250-mile, painstakingly slow march to Bombay. Millions of cheering peasants hailed his entourage along the way while nervous officials back in London anxiously watched every step of his snail-like progress. One man was stitching together the fabric of a nation. He arrived in Bombay, waded out into the sea, and scooped up a fistful of salt. He held it in the air like a scepter as a symbol of defiance to the empire. Let India gather her own salt, and boycott everything British. (Contrast that approach with the American colonists’ response to Britain’s stamp tax.)

Gandhi proved to be a thorn in the side of the British because orthodox means could not put down his unorthodox protests. When they hauled him into court and threatened a jail sentence, he calmly asked for the maximum sentence. Far from being a discipline, the jail environment offered more luxury than he allowed himself when free, and gave the additional benefit of extended periods of time for reflection and writing. In all, Gandhi spent 2,338 days (the equivalent of six years) in British jails. He said, “Freedom is often to be found inside a prison’s walls, even on a gallows; never in council chambers, courts, and classrooms.”

When the British tried more traditional methods of oppression—opening fire on the demonstrators—they created martyrs and only served to unite the nation further. In one notorious incident, British troops trained machine guns on a peaceful but illegal gathering, shooting 1,650 rounds and causing 1,516 casualties.

Later in his life, Gandhi’s inner voice led him to the most devastating tactic of protest, a tactic that sealed the fate of the empire and eventually was to save the new nation from anarchy. He simply fasted, depriving himself of food. Gandhi planned his fasts as carefully as a general plans military strategy. Sometimes he set them for specified lengths of time, such as 21 days, and sometimes he announced a fast unto death unless certain demands were met. The ironies defy comprehension: an ultimate weapon of intentional starvation within a nation of starving masses, a single man’s self-sacrifice as the most potent force in defeating the most widespread empire in history.

Against all odds, the tactics worked. Churchill had foamed at “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the king emperor.” But Gandhi became Mahatma, the Great Soul. He guaranteed morality with his own life: no one was willing to risk responsibility for letting the Great Soul die. One by one, the generals, viceroys, prime ministers, and finally the king yielded to the demands of “that half-naked fakir.”

Untouchables

When Gandhi lived in India, one-sixth of the population comprised a group of people who seemed more animal than human. They lived in dark, putrid slums, amid open sewers in which swarmed rats and every other disease-bearing agent. Thousands of years before, a Hindu ruler had devised the caste system as a means of keeping the darker Dravidians in utter subjection to the ruling Aryans, and his success surpassed that of any comparable form of slavery. The Hindu doctrine of Karma gave a theological basis for the elaborate system of 5,000 subcastes, and the lowest caste of all, the Untouchables, did not dare protest. Until Gandhi, no one had taken up their cause.

You could tell Untouchables by their dark color and by their posture, for they cringed like beaten animals. The name defined them—if a caste Hindu so much as touched one, or touched a drop of water one had polluted, he would shriek away and begin an elaborate purification process. An Untouchable had to shrink from the path of a caste Hindu to avoid casting a shadow and thus defiling him. Some parts of India allowed Untouchables to leave their shacks only at night; there, they were known as the Invisibles. Untouchables gave a valuable service to society; they swept the streets and cleaned the latrines and sewers, acts a caste Hindu would never perform.

With nothing to gain but abuse and rejection from the rest of his peers, Mahatma Gandhi took up the cause of the Untouchables. In a singularly brilliant stroke, he bestowed on them a new name; they were no longer to be called Untouchables, but rather Harijans, the Children of God. At his first ashram (a commune), Gandhi stirred up a storm of protest by inviting an Untouchable to move in with him and the others. When the chief financial backer of the commune experiment withdrew his support, Gandhi made plans to move to the Harijans’ own quarters. Finally he committed the most defiling act possible for a Hindu to perform: he cleaned the latrines of the Untouchables. Back in India he adopted them as his brothers and stayed in their hovels in Calcutta whenever possible.

Years later, after independence, when all other leaders in India pressed Lord Mountbatten to accept the honorary post of governor-general, Gandhi proposed his own alternative candidate: an Untouchable sweeper girl “of stout heart, incorruptible and crystal-like in her purity.” His candidate did not get the nomination, of course, but by such symbolic actions Gandhi indelibly changed the perception of Untouchability all across India. Laws were changed and strictures removed. Social ostracism gradually melted. And today, all over India, 100 million people now identify themselves not by a curse but by a blessing—they are the Children of God.

Gandhi And Christianity

Gandhi never called himself a Christian and was never seriously tempted to become one, but he was a devout admirer of Jesus Christ. Each evening at seven he would conduct a prayer meeting which became the forum for most of his important thoughts. Sometimes he would simply stand, read the Sermon on the Mount, and sit down. He credited Christianity for two of his most significant guiding principles: nonviolence and simple living. But he had often seen the disparity between Christ and Christians. He said, “Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.”

Growing up in India, Gandhi had little contact with Christians as a youngster. Rumors spread in his town that if a Hindu converted to Christianity he would be forced to eat meat, drink hard liquor, and wear European clothes. Gandhi recalls one very distasteful memory of a Christian missionary on the street corner of his town pouring abuse on the Hindu gods.

As a law student in England, Gandhi had a more prolonged exposure to Christianity. Out of obligation to a friend, he read through the entire Bible. He admits that the Old Testament was uninspiring and put him to sleep, especially the book of Numbers. But the New Testament produced a profound impression. Throughout his life, Gandhi found himself going back to the teachings of Jesus.

Gandhi lived in South Africa during the most formative period of his life, and a few nasty incidents there did little to disabuse him of his notions of Christianity. He encountered blatant discrimination in that ostensibly Christian society, being thrown off trains, excluded from hotels and restaurants, and made to feel unwelcome even in some Christian gatherings.

One white woman who used to invite Gandhi for Sunday meals made it clear that he was unwelcome when she saw the influence Gandhi’s strict vegetarianism was having on her five-year-old son. Before that incident, he had attended the Wesleyan church with her family every Sunday. “The church did not make a favorable impression on me,” he concludes laconically, citing uninspiring sermons and a congregation who “appeared rather to be worldly-minded, people going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom.”

Yet while in South Africa Gandhi made a thorough study of comparative religions. He cites two books by Christian authors (Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You and Ruskin’s Unto this Last) as two of the three most influential books in his life. The third was the Bible. He read Pearson’s Many Infallible Proofs (which “had no effect on me”) and Butler’s The Analogy of Religion among a host of other Christian books and commentaries.

In his autobiography, Gandhi recounts several episodes of Christians attempting to convert him. One kindly man even went so far as to take him to the Wellington Convention, a revival-type service similar to Keswick conventions. Andrew Murray spoke, and Gandhi was quite impressed by stories he told about George Müller’s faith. This is how Gandhi recalls the convention and summarizes his difficulties with Christianity: “Mr. Baker was hard put to it in having a ‘coloured man’ like me for his companion. He had to suffer inconveniences on many occasions entirely on account of me. We had to break the journey on the way, as one of the days happened to be a Sunday, and Mr. Baker and his party would not travel on the sabbath.…

“This Convention was an assemblage of devout Christians. I was delighted at their faith. I met the Rev. Murray. I saw that many were praying for me. I liked some of their hymns, they were very sweet.

“The Convention lasted for three days. I could understand and appreciate the devoutness of those who attended it. But I saw no reason for changing my belief—my religion. It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian. When I frankly said so to some of the good Christian friends, they were shocked. But there was no help for it.

“My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity only human beings had souls, and not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give my anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.

“I shared this mental churning with my Christian friends whenever there was an opportunity, but their answers could not satisfy me.”

Gandhi graciously omits from his autobiography one more painful experience that occurred in South Africa. The Indian community especially admired a Christian named C. F. Andrews whom they themselves nicknamed “Christ’s Faithful Apostle.” Having heard so much about Andrews, Gandhi sought to hear him. But when C. F. Andrews was invited to speak in a church in South Africa, Gandhi was barred from the meeting—his skin color was not white.

Commenting on Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa, E. Stanley Jones concludes, “Racialism has many sins to bear, but perhaps its worst sin was the obscuring of Christ in an hour when one of the greatest souls born of a woman was making his decision.”

—Philip Yancey

India’S Ointment

As the momentum for independence swept across India and its citizens realized they were going to get their country back at last, centuries-old animosities began to boil to the surface. In sudden spasms of violence, Hindus and Moslems turned on each other with ferocity on a scale without historical precedent. Moslems in the Bengal and Noakhali districts burned the huts of their Hindu neighbors, forced them to eat sacred cows, raped the Hindu women, and butchered their husbands. Hindus fought back with a vengeance, and thousands of Indians died in the months leading up to independence. Increasingly it appeared that the whole country would explode in flames. In New Delhi, Congress party leaders met anxiously with British and Moslem officials to try to work out some compromise. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Moslem leader, stood firm against compromise. To him, the Hindu-controlled Congress party had already proven itself untrustworthy by excluding Moslems from power. He and 100 million Moslems were demanding a separate country called Pakistan. But Congress leaders, most notably Gandhi, saw partition as a terrible blow to their dream of a unified India. In an emotional appeal, Gandhi cried out that his own body would be broken before he could ever allow Mother India to break in two. The debates went on, and so did the rapine.

Gandhi proposed his own solution with total sincerity. In order to avoid partition, he suggested, the Congress party should turn over all the government to the Moslems, the Hindus thus voluntarily subjecting themselves to a Moslem minority one-third their size. Not everyone was up to his ideals; the Congress leadership permanently broke with Gandhi, and a separate Pakistan became inevitable.

While the officials sat in elegant palace rooms and bartered for power and land, Gandhi headed out on an “ointment” crusade. Let them argue, he said—he was going back to the people, to the angry hordes that were assailing each other so viciously. At the age of 77, he headed to the Noakhali region where the most violence had occurred, and roamed among the charred villages. He simply wanted to be there, he said, to absorb their pain and to hold prayer meetings for the love and brotherhood that he cherished. Though a Hindu, he led his ragtag group into Moslem villages to face their taunts and rocks and bottles. When he approached a village, the most famous Asian alive would beg for shelter and live on the charity of the villagers. If turned away, he would look for a tree to sleep under. If accepted, he would read from the Gita and Koran and New Testament, teach simple principles of health and hygiene, then trudge on to the next village. In all, he visited 47 villages, walking 116 miles on bruised and aching bare feet.

In each village Gandhi tried to persuade one Hindu and one Moslem leader to move into the same house together and serve as guarantors of peace. He asked them to pledge themselves to fast unto death if one from their own religion attacked an enemy. Incredibly, the method worked. While debates continued in the Delhi palaces, Gandhi’s personal ointment began to palliate the open wounds across that state and nation. For awhile the killing stopped.

Soul Force

After independence, however, India needed more than ointment; she needed huge swaths of gauze bandages to stanch the flow of blood that quite literally turned her rivers red and filled her skies with vultures. As Gandhi had predicted in his eloquent appeals against partition, independence ushered in a holocaust of death and destruction such as the world had never seen. When the boundary lines were finally announced, millions of Hindus found themselves islanded within the borders of a newly created and hostile Pakistan, and millions of Moslems found themselves in Hindu India. Thus began the greatest mass migration in human history. In all, 10 million people left their homes and attempted a frenzied march across searing plains to a new home.

Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy who oversaw independence, knew that two areas were potential conflagrations. On the west where India bordered West Pakistan, the scene of the largest migration, hostilities would undoubtedly erupt. But the east, along the gerrymandered border of East Pakistan, threatened even greater danger. Sitting beside that border was the most violent city in Asia, Kipling’s City of Dreadful Night—Calcutta. No city in the world matched its squalor, its pullulating masses (more than 400,000 beggars), its religious bigotry, its unrestrained passions. Calcutta brazenly worshiped the Hindu deity Kali, the Goddess of Destruction. Months before, as a one-day preview of what was to come, violence had erupted in Calcutta. On that day, known as the Great Calcutta Killings, 6,000 Hindu and Moslem bodies were tossed in the Hooghly River, stuffed in gutters or left to lie in streets. Most had been beaten or trampled to death.

Mountbatten had to respond first to the western frontier as reports of atrocities came flooding over the telegraph wires. Ultimately, as many as 500,000 people were to die on that frontier. Mountbatten had no choice but to send his Boundary Force, 55,000 of the most dependable British and Gurkha army troops. But that left him no reserves for the eastern front. In total desperation, Mountbatten pled with the Great Soul, Gandhi, to go to Calcutta and there, among the Untouchables he had embraced as brothers, somehow to work a miracle. Gandhi firmly declined, for he had pledged to spend the time around independence spinning, fasting, and praying with the beleaguered Hindu minority in Noakhali.

This time, Gandhi was led to change his mind, on the eve of his departure to Noakhali. He was convinced not by Mountbatten, but a Moslem leader who came personally from Calcutta to beg Gandhi to come to his city. The man, Suhrawardy, was one of the most corrupt politicians in Calcutta, and was widely believed responsible for inciting his Moslem League followers to much of the violence on the day of the Great Calcutta Killings. Now he feared for the life of every Moslem in Calcutta, and for the very survival of the city. The desperate Suhrawardy admitted only Gandhi could ward off disaster.

Gandhi listened, reconsidered, and came up with two conditions for his going to Calcutta. First, Suhrawardy must pledge that the Moslems of Noakhali (where Gandhi had been headed) would not kill a single Hindu. If the pledge was broken, Gandhi would fast to death. In effect, Gandhi was placing his own life in Suhrawardy’s hands.

The second condition was appalling to Suhrawardy, known for his decadent, luxurious lifestyle. Gandhi proposed that he and Suhrawardy live together day and night, without arms, in the heart of one of Calcutta’s worst slums. Suhrawardy swallowed hard and reluctantly agreed to accept Gandhi’s two conditions.

So it was that two days before India’s independence Mohandas Gandhi arrived in the City of Dreadful Night. A massive crowd of Indians awaited him as usual, but this one, unlike so many others, greeted him not with cheers but with shrieks of hatred and anger. They were Hindus out for revenge, and to them Gandhi represented a meek submission to the injustices Moslems had already wreaked. Many of them had seen relatives slaughtered and wives and daughters defiled by Moslem mobs. Gandhi got out of his car amid a shower of rocks and bottles. Raising one hand in a frail gesture of peace, the 77-year-old man walked alone into the crowd. “You wish to do me ill,” he called, “and so I am coming to you.” The crowd fell silent. “I have come here to serve Hindus and Moslems alike. I am going to place myself under your protection. You are welcome to turn against me if you wish. I have nearly reached the end of life’s journey. I have not much further to go. But if you again go mad, I will not be a living witness to it.”

Peace reigned in Calcutta that day, and then Independence Day, and the next, and the next, for 16 days in all. Huge throngs gathered each evening, not as mobs bent on violence but as a congregation at Gandhi’s prayer meetings. At first a thousand came, then 10 thousand, and finally a million people jammed the streets of Gandhi’s slum to hear him lecture on peace and love and brotherhood. Once again Gandhi was confronting a political crisis with what he called “soul force,” the innate power of human spirituality.

While whole states in India were going up in flames, with millions of people fleeing their homes and thousands dying in the process, not one act of violence occurred in that most violent city. “The miracle of Calcutta,” it was called worldwide. Lord Mountbatten wrote in grateful tribute, “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal, our force consists of one man and there is no rioting.” My “One Man Boundary Force,” he called Gandhi.

Nevertheless, the miracle did not endure. On the seventeenth day two Moslems were murdered, then a rumor spread about a Hindu victim, and before long, a few hundred yards from Gandhi’s house, a grenade was lobbed into a bus full of Moslems. The people had broken their pledge; Gandhi was to keep his. He began a fast unto death, this one not against the British but against his own countrymen. He would not eat food again unless he received repentance from all those who had committed violence and solemn vows that no more would occur.

At first no one cared. What was the life of one shriveled old man in the face of an assault on one’s religion, family, and honor? Revenge seemed far more appropriate than forgiveness. Gunfire echoed through the streets of Calcutta all during the first day of Gandhi’s fast. But within a day his already weak heart started missing one beat in four, and his blood pressure dropped precariously. The next day, as his vital signs plummeted toward death, rioters paused and began listening to reports of the old man’s blood pressure and heart rate and the analysis of his urine. The Great Soul was having an effect. Soon the attention of every citizen of Calcutta was riveted on the straw pallet where Gandhi lay, too weak to speak. The violence stopped. No one was willing to take an action that might allow the Great Soul to die.

One day more and the gang responsible for the brutal murders came to confess to Gandhi, to plead forgiveness, and to lay their arms at his feet. A truck arrived at his house filled with guns, grenades, and other weapons that people had turned in voluntarily. The leaders of every religious group in the city agreed on a declaration guaranteeing that no more killing would take place.

Convinced of their sincerity, Gandhi took his first few sips of orange juice and said his prayers. This time the miracle held. Calcutta was safe. As for Gandhi, as soon as he regained strength he made plans to head west, into the heart of the violence that had killed half a million people.