NEWS

For years, Christians have been trying to spread the faith through films, mostly rented to individual churches and religious organizations. Who would have thought that a “non-Christian” movie, financed by an Arab shipping magnate and Twentieth Century-Fox, then purchased and distributed by Warner Brothers, would become a hit in a secular world, yet contain a powerful Christian message?

Chariots of Fire, based on a true story of two British runners training for the Paris Olympics in 1924, has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, has been a huge box office success, and is still playing in all of the five cities in which it opened last September. It has been nominated for best picture, best director, best supporting actor, best editing, best music, best costume design, and best screenplay.

“I was raised a Catholic. This is probably one of the most stirring movies I’ve seen in my whole life,” said Barry Reardon, president and general manager of Warner Brothers Film Distribution Company. He estimates the movie will earn his company some $15 million in film rentals (which would mean about $30 million in gross box office receipts). Most good foreign films (Chariots of Fire is British) earn between $1 million and $3 million in film rentals.

British producer David Puttnam got the idea for the film by reading through a reference book entitled The Official History of the Olympics, the only book he could find to browse through in a home he had just rented in Los Angeles. He hired a writer, Colin Welland, whose film credits include Straw Dogs, to work with him as the idea for the movie developed. The director was Hugh Hudson, who has directed television documentaries before, but never a movie. The film’s two leading actors, Ben Cross and Ian Charleson, were playing their first movie roles. In an interview about Chariots, Puttnam said, “More and more I feel I’m living in a totally expedient age. Yet the values I was given as a youngster were real values … the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, truth and untruth, decency and cynicism … all fundamental values which have been eroded in the last 20 years. There is no doubt that progress, which reshapes the old, can improve the quality of life, but it can also distort and destroy.”

The movie cost $5.5 million to make. Half of it came from Twentieth Century-Fox in exchange for foreign distribution rights, and half from Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian employed in his family’s shipping business. Fayed formed a movie production company in 1979, and its first movie was Breaking Glass, a rock musical. Chariots of Fire was the second.

Betting that the movie would not play well in the United States, Twentieth Century-Fox decided not to buy the rights to U.S. distribution, but Alan Ladd, Jr. (son of the actor), former president of Twentieth Century-Fox, saw value in it, and pursued the rights through his own company, which distributes films through Warner Brothers.

Terry Semel, president of Warner Brothers, and Barry Reardon, who heads its distribution company, saw a rough cut of the film in August 1980, and in Semel’s words, “It’s rare to get emotionally involved with a rough cut the way we did.”

Before Warner Brothers attached its name to the film, however, it hired Inspirational Films, a promoter of Christian movies, to generate the interest of Christian leaders, if that could be done. The film was shown to numerous religious organizations and church groups, and valuable testimonials from Christian churchmen quickly followed. “We did a month’s work before Warner Brothers jumped in with both feet,” said Tim Penland, vice-president of Inspirational Films. Warner Brothers opened the film commercially last September in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and two Canadian cities, and excellent reviews from important reviewers began turning up. It was released nationwide in February.

New York film critic Rex Reed called it “the number one film of 1981.… It’s not only the finest film about athletes ever made, but also one of the best movies of any kind ever made … fresh and original, it reached deeper for universal truths about human experience than most films, and expressed sentiments considered old fashioned by today’s cynical standards.” Reviews in the Christian press also were strong (CT, Jan. 22, p. 40). Penland said word did not get out that the film had a Christian message, and that helped it among the larger movie-going audience.

Reardon of Warner Brothers said his company is getting lots of mail from people expressing thanks for putting out such a film. He was asked if the public can expect to see more such films from Warner Brothers. “If we find them, we would be very prone to distribute them,” he said.

Pastors Getting Fired: A Growing Problem Among Southern Baptists

A trend toward more clergy firings and forced resignations has alarmed officials of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination with 13.6 million members.

Pastor firings are at an all-time high, according to Brooks Faulkner, supervisor of the denomination’s career guidance section in Nashville, Tennessee. He said 29 of the 35 state Baptist newspapers carried editorials concerning the problem in the last year.

He said ministers sometimes start slipping when they experience “burnout,” a problem his division is starting to address in seminars. Faulkner is also helping pastors start peer-support groups and has a strategy for establishing 150 new ones by October 1984. There are 116 such groups now in communities across the country.

Harold Bennett, executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention, said denominational officials are aware that ministerial firings are more prevalent today than in the past, but no national studies have been done, and there is no plan on a national level to deal with the situation.

Reasons for clergy firings are varied. They include sagging church financial and attendance statistics, for which a pastor is blamed; general unstable conditions in the country, resulting in frustration among congregations and clergy; personality clashes; breakdowns in communication between pastor and congregation; and power struggles between the pastor and a faction within the congregation.

Bennett speculated that the denomination’s push for church growth under the theme of “Bold Mission Thrust” may also be part of the problem.

Ed Bratcher of Manassas, Virginia, who did a study of ministerial turnover nine years ago at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said more congregations are taking the initiative in firing their ministers.

A North Carolina Baptist study indicated the following reasons for firings:

• Unrealistic expectations on the part of the congregation where the pastor is concerned.

• Differences between the pastor and other church leaders concerning the pastor’s style of leadership.

• Inadequate self-care by the pastor—not taking days off, not pacing himself—resulting in depletion and burnout.

(The problem is not confined to the Southern Baptists. According to a study done for the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., the United Presbyterian Church, and the United Church of Christ, one of every 100 congregations in those denominations fires its minister for reasons other than unethical or immoral conduct. More than 40 percent involve conflicts existing before the dimissed pastor’s arrival.)

RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE

Three chief faults of conference sermons.

I recently sat through a barrage of pulpit fireworks at an evangelistic meeting. Each of the oratories had been honed to excellence the previous 100 times the sermon had been delivered:

Some were cute,

Some were cozy;

Some seemed brusque

And awf’ly nosy.

But in keeping with the tripartite speeches I heard that day, let me proceed to describe the chief faults of conference sermons.

I want to declare at the outset that not every sermon must, like Gaul, be divided into three parts—two less may be preferable. I have always agreed with the wag who, when asked how many points a sermon should have, promptly replied, “At least one.”

If “triptyching” the sermon makes clear the single point to which the sermon aspires, then three divisons are fine as long as the three are one. But more complex outlining may degenerate into a polypointalism where unity is disjointed by one thunderous imperative after another. In the interest of better conference preaching, I offer you, of course, three points—and a poem.

First of all, let us consider the cute sermon. Like a Mercedes, it is all grill, chrome spokes, and hubcaps. It isn’t designed to go anywhere or carry any loads—it is a conversation piece. It may have a poetic outline, such as God’s love:

A love with flaws,

A love without pause,

And a love without cause.

Or it may have a flashy title such as “The Penitent Prodigal Pining in a Pig Pen.” It may abound in cleverisms that fascinate without contribution. Such sermons are ever popular at conferences since they tend to summon reluctant delegates from the bookstores and corridors that surround the main arena.

The second kind of conference sermon is more cozy. It is a snuggling session in which identity is the issue. The “we” feeling is the aim. This kind of sermon is not preached by a Jeremiah who is fond of company. A popular pulpit agenda offers the great rapport of TV talk shows and says, “Feel along with me for 30 minutes or so.” The preacher of the cozy sermon likes snuggling into the down of psychological fuzzies that keeps the thermostat set on togetherness so nobody is asked to stand apart from the group.

The third type comes from conference speakers who seem courageous enough to run the risk of preaching the brusque and nosy sermon. A better name for this one might be the “command and decision” sermon. It is a real burr under the saddle of our security. It seems to originate in another world and set of values, and it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves.

Naturally we turn from such sermons to those that are cute and cozy. But the brusque and nosy sermon sometimes leads to brokenness and evaluation of ourselves that make us remember God’s purposes in our lives. Cheers for this sort! It opens even the most mundane conference to the possibility of really hearing from God.

Oh yes, a poem (for those in the cute category):

A brilliant young pastor named Smeedy, A.B., M.Div., and yes, D.D.,

Preached sermons most cozy

On subjects so rosy

He passed by the spiritual needy.

Author Calvin Miller is pastor of the Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, Nebraska.

Karl barth, whose views about the Bible were not all we wish they might have been, once warned against the danger of replacing the Bible with books about the Bible. One hundred years ago that great evangelical pulpiteer, G. Campbell Morgan, made a similar discovery. His grandson, Richard Lyon Morgan, late in adulthood, rediscovered the same truth for himself. His essay is based on a sermon preached at Fairview Presbyterian Church, Lenoir, North Carolina, on the occasion of the dedication of a pulpit Bible in memory of his father, Howard Moody Morgan, who, for 57 years, preached in five churches across the country.

John 5:39: “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me.”

Luke 24:32: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

These two texts from the New Testament plainly show us the wrong and right ways to approach the Bible. Religious people misread the Bible because in it they failed to recognize Christ—the key to understanding the whole of it. Two disciples of Jesus walked the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus that first Easter afternoon with broken hearts and denied dreams. Then Christ walked with them, opened the Bible in a new way, and they found new hope and new life in the midst of what had been overwhelming despair.

Almost 100 years ago, in 1883, a young British minister named G. Campbell Morgan experienced an eclipse of his faith in the Bible. Confused and perplexed by the many theories of his times, he seriously doubted the truth of the Bible. However, he took all the books about the Bible and locked them in a corner cupboard. Relating this afterward, he remarked, “I can hear the click of that lock now.” He went down to a bookshop, bought a new Bible, and said, “I am no longer sure that this is what my father claims it to be—the Word of God—but of this I am sure, if it be the Word of God, and I come to it with an unprejudiced and open mind, it will bring assurance to my soul of itself.”

Almost 30 years ago I entered seminary and began to be exposed to critical views of the Bible. As a boy I had loved the Bible, and the stories of Jesus were very real to me. But, like my grandfather, I too had an “eclipse of faith” as I became more preoccupied with views about the Bible than with listening to the Bible itself. Now, in my twilight years, I have come back to the Bible with new interest and hunger. I have learned through experience that it is more important to have your heart stirred with God’s Word than your head stored with man’s views.

The Misuse Of The Bible

Despite the fact that the Bible remains the best seller among all books, it is still one of the least known and most abused books in the English language. That is as strange as if every home should have a television set and never turn it on, or as if inhabitants of the city of Lenoir, North Carolina, which is filled with furniture factories, never used furniture in their homes.

Some people regard the Bible like a fetish. For them it serves as a charm against danger or a guardian against death. Ralph Sockman used to say that too many Christians treat the Bible like bridesmaids treat wedding cake after the wedding. They take a piece of it the last thing at night and hope it will work a miracle!

It is even stranger how this Book has been used to justify all manner of ignorance and human opinions. Many people treat the Bible like a drunk treats a lamppost: for support, not illumination. John Calvin said that the Bible has been used like the waxen nose the actors used—that is, shaped to mean whatever men desired.

To the religious men of his day, Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life: and it is they that bear witness to me.” Too many people focus their attention on the Bible as an answer book that speaks to their question without ever listening to what the Bible itself writes to us today. When we let the Bible speak for itself we quickly discover that its central message is Jesus Christ and the good news of his grace.

The Power Of The Bible

Unlike those religious leaders, these two disciples of Jesus on the road to Emmaus experienced the power of the Bible as Christ himself made its meaning plain to them.

My father used to tell this story: Two men were sitting working in Africa. One was a white man engaged in translating the Bible. The other was an African, called in by the white man to check the translation. The African was unfamiliar with much of the Bible, and so the white man would stop him from time to time to make quite sure the translations were clear. Suddenly the African said, “This Book is not like other books. When a man reads this Book, he hears another speaking to him in his heart.”

The Bible’s power lies in the fact that God speaks to us directly in the pages of this Book. This does not mean that God cannot speak to us in nature, experience, or history. But in this Book, he speaks as nowhere else. It is his written Word. In this Book, we hear the voice of the living God speaking to us his truth.

Throughout Christian history, reformation has occurred in the church when men and women rediscovered the Bible. A Roman Catholic monk named Martin Luther heard God speak to him in the biblical words, “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17), and the Christian church was reborn and reformed.

During the days of great evil and social sin in England, a clergyman named John Wesley found his heart strangely warmed as he meditated on those same biblical words, and the church again found new life. The power of the Bible lies in the fact that when we listen in faith we, too, hear the liberating word of God for our own day. The old hymn of John Burton makes us aware of the constant power of the Bible to change our lives:

Holy Bible, book divine,

Precious treasure, thou art mine;

Mine to tell me whence I came;

Mine to teach me what I am;

Mine to chide me when I rove;

Mine to show a Savior’s love;

Mine art thou to guide my feet

Mine to judge, condemn, acquit;

Mine to comfort in distress,

If the Holy Spirit bless;

Mine to show by living faith,

Man can triumph over death;

Mine to tell of joys to come,

And the rebel sinner’s doom;

Holy Bible, book divine,

Precious treasure, thou art mine.

The Way To Discovering The Bible’S Power

Both the religious leaders and those two disciples of Jesus read the Bible. For the first group, the Bible never brought them to Christ. For the two men, it was through the Bible that they found Christ. What was the difference? It was that those two men on the road to Emmaus were broken men. Their hopes for a better world had been nailed to a cross outside the city wall. The One in whom they had placed their trust had been killed. Through this despair, they knew their need. Karl Barth once said, “We must read the Bible through the eyes of shipwrecked people for whom everything has gone overboard.”

These are troubled days for the church, and one does not always hear the authentic Word from every pulpit. Amos prophesied that there would be a “famine of hearing the word of God” (Amos 8:3). Telling clever stories, giving advice, expressing merely human opinions is not giving people the Bread of Life. Nothing is more necessary to any church, large or small, than that people hear what this Book has to say, for it is the Word of God. On its pages we learn what God would say to us. It is God’s marching orders for each day of our pilgrimage on this earth.

Richard Lyon Morgan is pastor of the Fairview Presbyterian Church in Lenoir, North Carolina. He is also a pastoral counselor at the Life Enrichment Center in Morganton, North Carolina.

Creationists are fighting the right battle, but on the wrong front.

Because a number of people have asked about my participation in the “creation-science” trial in Arkansas, I want to clarify the issues involved. In fact, one of my motives in testifying was to provide an opportunity for conservative Christians to discuss these questions more considerately and cautiously. There are some factors that may not appear on the surface of the issue to which Christians ought to give careful consideration.

Such consideration is particularly important if your initial reaction was like mine: that it probably was unwise for me to get involved in the matter—or even that I might be getting involved on the wrong side. Specifically, I was asked by the attorneys for the plaintiffs in Arkansas who oppose the law to testify as an “expert witness” on the history of fundamentalism. Only after carefully reviewing the law and reflecting on its implications did I conclude that not only would it be right to offer my expertise as a service to the court, but that it could also be a valuable service to the Christian community. Following are some of the considerations that led to the conclusions.

1. This law is not, as commonly supposed, one that places creationists all on one side, with only evolutionists on the other. In fact, most of the plaintiffs in Arkansas who opposed the law were creationists. For instance, my testimony was preceded by that of one of the plaintiffs, the Methodist bishop of Arkansas, who affirmed his deep commitment to the doctrine of creation as revealed in Genesis. Though not all the plaintiffs were religious people, most of them were.

Moreover, there are many views of divine creation—and that is just the point: creationists of almost every sort have been divided on the wisdom and the constitutionality of this law. As an expert witness for the plaintiffs, then, I was neither coming in on the side of evolution, nor standing against creation.

2. The law establishes, in fact, or gives a privileged position to, the arguments concerning science offered by only one group of the defenders of the Genesis account of creation—those associated with the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego and related agencies. These “creation scientists” defend the most conservative of the literal interpretations of Genesis 1, insisting that the “days” of that chapter refer to 24-hour periods, that the earth is likely no more than about 10,000 years old, and that most of the apparent geological data is explained by the worldwide flood.

The Arkansas law requires that whenever the question of the origins of man, life, or the universe is discussed in public schools, the scientific evidence for “creation-science”—defined to include “a relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds” and “explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood”—be given “balanced treatment” with the scientific evidence for naturalistic evolution.

3. The law institutes a false choice. As evangelicals are well aware, there is a variety of views, even among conservative, Bible-believing Christians, relating the biblical and the scientific accounts of origins. For instance, one of the views that for all practical purposes is left out by this law is that of Davis Young, professor of geology at Calvin College. He is author of Creation and the Flood: An Alternative to Flood Geology and Theistic Evolution (Baker, 1977) and Christianity and the Age of the Earth (forthcoming from Zondervan). He had hoped to write Creation and the Flood with his late father, Edward J. Young, well-known conservative Old Testament scholar (and one of my former teachers) at Westminster Theological Seminary. Davis Young shares his father’s conservative interpretations of Genesis 1, but argues at length that the scientific evidence presented by the so-called creation scientists is both bad science and bad interpretation of Scripture.

Other views are often offered by conservative evangelicals, including the long-standing view that limited elements of evolution are perfectly compatible with the biblical account, presenting only the method of divine creation of species. For example, this view was represented in The Fundamentals of the earlier fundamentalist movement, or in conservative evangelical Bernard Ramm’s The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Eerdmans, 1954), which was praised by Wilbur M. Smith in Moody Monthly as “the best our evangelical world has yet produced in our days.”

None of these views, which would include my own and those of many other Bible-believing Christians, is represented by the Arkansas law. The choice is therefore a false one even for conservative Christians. I am convinced that it is a great disservice to evangelical Christianity to identify it with one very narrow argument from science—especially when such conservative geologists as Davis Young say it is bad science. For evangelical Christianity to be tied to bad science in Arkansas is a great disservice to the people of Arkansas if it is allowed to pass unopposed. Many young people who do not see the subtleties of the issue will come to the conclusion that one must believe bad science in order to believe the Bible. Such an impression, regardless of how one arrives at it, is likely to become for many a stumbling block to Christian faith.

It seemed very important for me, then, as an evangelical Christian, to help resist a law that created such a false choice and false impression. This was the basic thrust of my testimony.

In sum, I pointed out that historically, fundamentalism was a movement marked by its militant opposition to modernism or secular humanism, and that biological evolution had become an important symbol in their battles. Fundamentalists typically reduce the options to two: God or Satan. Their interpretations of the Bible are put on God’s side, and all other views are of the Devil. I quoted a leading creation scientist to that effect.

Accordingly, fundamentalists had a very direct hand in formulating the Arkansas law so that it set up the choice as though there were only two views. The law, for instance, says that it is designed to ensure “neutrality.” One could suppose that such a law ensured “neutrality” only if one also supposed that there were two and only two options. But if there are 6 or 10 or 20 or whatever number of options, one could not suppose that “neutrality” was established by giving just 2 a special privilege.

4. That the law considers only two views is also important as a question of civil rights. If there are more than two views among conservative evangelicals, there are vastly more views of the relation between science and creation among the general populace. Many other people from other religions who might not think (as I do) that purely naturalistic evolution is an adequate means for explaining the origins of life or the universe would not have their opinions represented by either of the two views. Such people have civil rights, too, as well as the fundamentalists who believe in creation in six 24-hour days. One ought to recognize this as a point of justice, regardless of whether one thinks the “creation-science” version is correct. Whatever else one might think on questions of church and state, it would be clear that it is unconstitutional for the state to give one particular religious view a privileged position.

The Arkansas law is almost exactly analogous to a requirement that, say, dispensationalism should be taught in the public schools as an alternative view of history. It is difficult to see why Christians should think the law ought to be used to give such a special position to the views of one group.

In my opinion, the American Civil Liberties Union, which played a major role in this case, holds many incorrect views on the separation of church and state. Nonetheless, in this case they are, even by a very conservative construction of the implications of the First Amendment, on the right side constitutionally. If the ACLU should happen to be on the right side of an issue, that should not oblige Christians to stay away from that side.

5. There is, then, the question of what views Christians should advocate concerning the issue of creation and evolution as taught in the public schools. Though I was not asked to testify on this subject since it is not the area of my professional expertise, my view is that the “creation-science” law is an attempt to address a real problem. I am convinced it is an instance of fighting the battle at the wrong point—at a position untenable both religiously and constitutionally. Nonetheless, I admire the creation-scientists for attacking a real problem. Often evolutionism is taught in public schools as though it were an alternative to religious belief, as though it settled questions about the ultimate origins of the universe, life, or man.

In fact, evolutionism does none of these things. The false claims that are made by some (by no means all) scientists and teachers of science on such subjects should be challenged. Such negative religious teachings in public schools should be balanced by more positive approaches. The rights of minorities (or even of majorities in some communities) who do not share such antireligious views should be protected. Religious people should not have to have their children exposed to such views—especially as they are falsely equated with “science” (they are really philosophical or religious opinion)—in order to share in the educational programs of the state.

I am not entirely sure how this problem should be resolved. However, a major step toward solving it would be for the states to adopt something like a voucher system for the support of Christian education and education by other groups who do not share secular stances. Such a system would provide an important avenue for resolving the religious and constitutional issues raised in this case. These issues are discussed well in Gordon Spykman, et al., Society, State, and Schools: A Case for Structural and Confessional Pluralism (Eerdmans, 1981).

THE PUZZLE

Dear Heavenly Father:

I’m working on a puzzle,

Pure and simple.

It is I.

Dear searching child:

Here’s the answer

to your puzzle,

pure and simple.

It is I.

ETHELYN A. SHATTUCK

6. There are some people who have suggested that this law should not have been opposed. They say the law challenges the assumption that evolutionary science as typically taught in public schools is neutral. In fact, there is a good case (with which I agree) that secularism, as it often appears in public schools and in much evolutionary teaching, is a species of religion. Some thought this law might provide a test case on that issue, and I agree that the point should be tested in the courts. I think it would be a great tactical blunder, however, to try to do so in the context of a law such as this, which contains so many other glaring constitutional weaknesses. Christians who wish to test this point should do so by carefully framed legislation or litigation that seeks to balance the religious aspects of such teachings with some acknowledgement of the equal legitimacy of a multiplicity of alternative religious views. Such a test would take the most careful framing to have a chance constitutionally. The Arkansas law lacks such framing on this critical point.

Even if the Arkansas law were a good test of this point, the value of what might be gained for Christians constitutionally would have to be weighed against what might be lost constitutionally by favoring fundamentalist Christian teachings over all other traditional religions. It should also be weighed against the potential damage to Christian witness involved in institionalizing the false choice discussed in the third point.

7. The Arkansas law would fail to provide a solid Christian response to secular humanism in the public schools even if it had none of the defects described. This law not only requires that naturalistic evolution be taught whenever the subject of origins is considered, it also mandates that the teaching of either evolution-science or creation-science “must not include any religious instruction or references to religious writings.” At most, this would institute a sort of deism by forbidding teachers, even when asked, from referring to the Bible or the God of the Bible as the true authorities on which we ground our belief in Creation. Positions derived from the Bible, while implicitly presented, could not then be fully or adequately defended.

In my opinion, this is a superficial solution, though well intended, to a most serious problem. It is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The problems of secularism in our culture are far too important and serious for Christians to concentrate their energies on such misleading and token responses. Therefore, while I sincerely applaud the good intentions of those who propose such solutions and share their central concerns, I am convinced they are hurting their own cause.

I am sure not everyone will be convinced by all these considerations, but perhaps at least it may be acknowledged that they provide sufficient grounds for a plausible approach to the question from a perspective of evangelical Christian commitment.

George M. Marsden is professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of Fundamentalism and the American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford, 1981).

Between December 7 and 17 of last year, a historic trial took place in Little Rock, Arkansas. The American Civil Liberties Union charged that the recently enacted Arkansas Act 590 (of 1981), which mandated a balanced treatment of creation-science and evolution-science, was a violation of First Amendment guarantees of the separation of church and state. I was asked to be a religious witness for the state in defense of the constitutionality of the law.

The Essence Of Act 590

The preamble to the act states well its purposes:

An Act to require balanced treatment of creation-science and evolution-science in public schools; to protect academic freedom by providing student choice; to ensure freedom of religious exercise; to guarantee freedom of belief and speech; to prevent establishment of religion; to prohibit religious instruction concerning origins; to bar discrimination on the basis of creationist or evolutionist belief; to provide definitions and clarifications.…

The crucial section of Act 590 is the fourth, which defines the meaning of “creation-science” and “evolution-science”:

Section 4. Definitions. As used in this act:

(a) “Creation-science” means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences. Creation-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate: (1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals; (4) Separate ancestry for man and apes; (5) Explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.

(b) “Evolution-science” means the scientific evidences for evolution and inferences from those scientific evidences. Evolution-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate: (1) Emergence by naturalistic processes of the universe from disordered matter and emergence of life from nonlife; (2) The sufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of present living kinds from simple earlier kinds; (3) Emergence by mutation and natural selection of present living kinds from simple earlier kinds; (4) Emergence of man from a common ancestor with apes; (5) Explanation of the earth’s geology and the evolutionary sequence by uniformitarianism; and (6) An inception several billion years ago of the earth and somewhat later of life.

(c) “Public schools” mean public secondary and elementary schools.

Several things should be noted about these “definitions.” First, the lists are parallel and opposing views, point by point. Second, the lists are suggestive, not exhaustive. The key word is “includes,” which does not mean “limited to.” Third, not only are these series of six factors opposing, they are in fact logically opposite.

For example, the universe and life either arose spontaneously, or they were created; there is no third alternative. Also, all living things either have one common ancestry, or they have separate ancestries. The same is true of man (4). Further, either there are changes between fixed kinds or there are not. And the world is either billions of years old, or it is more recent (6). The same contrast is true between “uniformitarianism” and “catastrophism” as explanations of earth’s geology (5). Both cannot be true, since one involves millions of years and the other a very short worldwide flood.

It should also be noted that the Act does not imply that no combinations of choices can be taught. For example, someone holding to points 1 through 4 of “creation-science” might also opt for 5 and 6 of “evolution-science,” or many other combinations. (In fact, I testified in defense of the Act even though for years I have been inclined against “catastrophism” and a “recent” earth. These are viable views, held by credible people who have a right to be heard even if I don’t believe them.) What the Act does insure is that both sides of each issue will be presented.

Another important point is brought out in Section 5:

This Act does not require each individual classroom lecture in a course to give such balanced treatment, but simply requires the lectures as a whole to give balanced treatment; it permits some lectures to present evolution-science and other lectures to present creation-science.

One final point is important (from Section 5):

This Act does not require any instruction in the subject of origins, but simply requires instruction in both scientific models … if public schools choose to teach either.

There is thus always the option of avoiding either evolution or creation and sticking to the observable and repeatable areas of science.

Some Misconceptions About Act 590

An informed reader of Act 590 can see that many of the popular misconceptions of what the Act intends are obviously false. Among these false ideas are beliefs that:

1. It mandates teaching of the biblical account of creation. (It actually forbids that.)

2. It is opposed to teaching of evolution. (It actually mandates teaching evolution alongside creation.)

3. It refers to God or religious concepts. (There is no reference to God and it opposes teaching religion.)

4. It forces teachers who are opposed to creation to teach it anyway. (Actually, teachers do not have to teach anything about origins, and/or they can have someone else teach and give the lectures they do not want to give.)

5. It is a “fundamentalist” act. (Actually, the “fundamentalists” of the 1920s were categorically opposed to teaching evolution and wanted only the Genesis account of Creation taught. This Act is contrary to both attitudes.)

Why I Supported Act 590

My first reason for supporting Act 590 is one uttered by Clarence Darrow, the famous ACLU lawyer for the 1925 Scopes trial. He called it “bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.” I found it a strange irony to hear the same ACLU 56 years later argue that, in effect, it would be religious bigotry to allow two models of origins to be taught.

This same inconsistency can be seen in the most recent statement of “A Secular Humanist Declaration” (Winter 1980/81, Free Inquiry). It declares admirably:

“The lessons of history are clear: wherever one religion or ideology is established and given a dominant position in the state, minority opinions are in jeopardy. A pluralistic, open democratic society allows all points of view to be heard. Any effort to impose an exclusive conception of Truth, Piety, Virtue, or Justice upon the whole of society is a violation of free inquiry” (p. 4).

And yet only two pages later, in an inconceivable inconsistency, the same declaration says:

“We deplore the efforts by fundamentalists (especially in the United States) to invade the science classroom, requiring that creationist theory be taught to students and requiring that it be included in biology textbooks. This is a serious threat both to academic freedom and to the integrity of the educational process” (p. 6).

For the same reason therefore that I regret the narrow-mindedness of some Christian religionists in the 1920s who opposed the teaching of evolution as a scientific theory, I now deplore a similar narrowness on the part of those holding a humanistic religious perspective (and their sympathizers), who would exclude the teaching of creation as a scientific theory in public schools.

Second, I favor Act 590 in the interest of openness of scientific inquiry. As anyone who has studied the history of Copernicus and Galileo knows, minority scientific opinions are often the cutting edge of progress. Suppression of the “loyal opposition” is seldom if ever good politically, and never scientifically. Academic freedom entails hearing opposing points of view. Many times during the trial I was reminded of the value of the adversary relationship of the courtroom. When only one side of an issue is presented (without cross-examination or rebuttal), a judge or jury would often come to an invalid conclusion.

The same is true when only one view is presented in the classroom: it is a trial without opposing witnesses. Since there are serious religious implications when origins are taught from only one perspective—one that favors humanistic religion—it is necessary as a guarantee to religious neutrality that the opposing view also be taught.

Third, teaching creation is no more teaching religion than is teaching evolution. Creation and evolution are both beliefs that belong to religions, but teaching creationism is no more teaching the Christian religion than is teaching evolution teaching the humanist religion. If teaching a part of a religion is automatically teaching that religion, then teaching values (such as freedom and tolerance) are also teaching religion. But the courts have ruled that values can be taught apart from religion, which may hold the same values. Likewise, creationism can be taught apart from the religious systems of which it may be a part.

The fact that “creation” may imply a Creator while “evolution” does not is no proof that the former is religious and the latter is not. Believing that there is no God can be just as religious as believing that there is a God. Humanists hold, and the Supreme Court has ruled, that belief in God is not essential to a religion (U.S. v. Seeger, 1964).

Fourth, scientific progress depends on teaching alternative models. There would be little progress in science if it were not for minority scientific opinions. Copernicus’s view that the earth revolves around the sun was once a minority scientific view. So was the view that the earth is spherical, not flat. If no alternative models to Newton’s law of gravitation were allowed, then Einstein’s insights (and space travel) would have been rejected and scientific progress retarded.

That creationism may be a minority view among scientists today does not make it wrong, and certainly does not mean it should not be heard in science classes. (Arguing that it should be taught only in social studies classes is like telling someone running for the Senate that he can present his views only to sociologists’ groups, but not to political gatherings.) One of the most despicable examples of intellectual, prejudice I have ever witnessed was when evolution scientists at the Arkansas trial claimed that creationism was not science and that creationists were not scientists. It reminded me of Voltaire’s famous satire in which he described ants on one anthill looking at different colored ants on another anthill and declaring that they were not really ants and that what they were on was not really an anthill.

John Scopes summed up well when he said, “If you limit a teacher to only one side of anything the whole country will eventually have only one thought, be one individual.” I believe it would be (is) a gross injustice for the court to rule it unconstitutional to teach both sides of any issue. Although I would not go as far as some in these matters, one can understand why Francis Schaeffer in his recent book, A Christian Manifesto (Crossway, 1981), has called upon Christians to engage in civil disobedience and even use force to overcome the tyranny he sees implied in a negative decision in the Arkansas creation-evolution issue.

Norman Geisler is professor of systematic theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, Texas, and the author of several books, including Christian Apologetics (Baker, 1976).

Few court cases have aroused more concern among evangelicals—or created more puzzlement—than the recent creation-science case in Little Rock, Arkansas. At stake were basic values to which the fundamentalist-evangelical community is deeply committed. The evangelical will lay down his life in defense of freedom of religion, and for most evangelicals, this includes the right to determine the education of his children. He knows that in many public schools, evolution is taught explicitly as the rational alternative to the biblical teaching about creation held by uneducated fundamentalists!

All evangelicals resent this. It is a violation of their constitutional right to the free exercise of their religion. They will make laws to secure their rights, and they will battle them through the courts and beyond. Eventually they will win—if America is to remain a free nation.

But evangelicals are equally committed against any infringement of the religious rights of others. For conscience’ sake they support separation of church and state and reject the establishment of any particular religion, including their own.

Evangelicals are divided over whether or not to support the Arkansas law. Here you can read how two conservative evangelicals sorted out the issues.—Eds.

I was brought up to understand that there are three questions one never asks: How old? How much? What kind of operation?

Last July 29 I got up at 4:45 A.M. along with some seven or eight hundred million other people to watch the royal wedding. It was an unforgettable six hours of pomp and circumstance. The pagaentry, the responsive crowds, the young bride’s loveliness, the groom’s character and relaxed demeanor were all threaded together with sometimes bumbling explanations by American commentators aided or corrected by their British counterparts.

To me, the grandest moment came when, at the request of Prince Charles, that great congregation and choir sang “Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation.” It would have been worth whatever the wedding cost just to have 800 million people hear that great hymn!

What followed was a variety of interviews that filled the time while the bride and groom, with their families and friends, had a meal in Buckingham Palace before leaving for Broadlands and the beginning of their honeymoon.

“Is it true,” Barbara Walters asked Mrs. Reagan, “that the Steuben glass urn cost $75,000?”

“And have you chipped in to pay for the gate?” a young girl was asked in the tiny village of Tetbury, where the country residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales stands. The surrounding villages had gone together to have a new wrought iron gate made to replace the old one, which was broken down.

“Yes I ’ave,” the girl replied with a smile.

“Not yet. But will do,” the next responded.

“No,” growled one man. “They’ve got more money than I’ve got. Why should I?”

George Macdonald wrote, “But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from lack of it.”

We have put a price tag on everything but the human soul and its relationship to God who made it. And a wise man once said, “He who has God and has everything, has no more than he who has God and has nothing.”

My first experience of direct combat with the Viet Cong came soon enough. Drafted into the South Vietnam army in 1972 while a senior at Saigon University, I had nine months of boot camp. Then I was put in command of a platoon as a second lieutenant and ordered to search the jungles 43 miles from Saigon for Viet Cong guerrillas.

One day while I was leading a group of soldiers through a dry stream bed, I heard an explosion behind me. The air was filled with smoke and debris. Then came the scream of soldiers crying, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” Two of them fell wounded by a bomb set off by watching Viet Cong.

That night when my soldiers and I were on night duty, my military radio communicator came to me and asked, “Do you have a brother by the name of S. N. Ch’en?”

“Yes,” I replied, wondering why he asked.

“I am sorry to tell you that I got the news on the radio today for you that he died a few days ago during heavy fighting on the front lines.”

My younger brother dead? I found it hard to believe. But as the news finally filtered into my mind, I started to sob like a baby. Then I checked myself. I could not afford to make any noise the guerrillas could hear. My younger brother dead!

Gradually comfort stole into my heart with the thought that he was with Christ in heaven. Both of us had received Jesus Christ as Savior while we were boys in Sunday school in the Chinese church in Saigon’s Cholon quarter. I thought of my godly father and mother and how they would be grieving and also praying for my safety. My father, who was principal of a Chinese high school, had come to Saigon from mainland China in 1949. He had seen to it that his 10 children all had opportunities to hear the gospel.

As a student, I had felt the urge to prepare to preach that wonderful good news of forgiveness, new life, and hope for eternity. But I pushed this thought to one side. I was intent on a successful secular career, and also interested in a lovely girl friend.

Then I was caught up in the war myself, only to find it ending with stunning suddenness in the spring of 1975. So much sacrifice for what purpose? We had lost the war to the Communists. I soon found out what that meant for me.

A newly established “Revolutionary Military Control Committee” ordered all former officers of the Republic of (South) Vietnam to present themselves for a 10-day political and labor course.

“I’ll be back after 10 days of brainwashing,” I assured my girl friend as I said goodbye. But I knew better. My father, who had received military training on mainland China, was well aware of the devious tactics that were practiced by the Communists.

“Son,” he said to me, “I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again if you get into their hands. I think I could help you make your escape by boat. It’s dangerous, I know, but not as dangerous as the Communists.”

But I didn’t want to be separated from my girl friend. Somehow I felt a responsibility for her safety—as if I could do anything for her. I prepared food, clothes, and money for 10 days as ordered, and then surrendered to the Communists.

When I arrived for indoctrination, I found myself with hundreds of other officers. We were packed in, 40 to a truck, with our gear, and we formed a convoy of about 100 trucks. As we rolled along that day, June 27, 1975, we had little thought of the beautiful countryside. We were gasping for air and covered with perspiration.

Camps, and there were many of them, were makeshift. I found myself crowded into a small room where, with others, I slept on boards. The food was awful, the lectures were boring. But what really hurt was when the tenth day passed and we all knew for sure that we had been tricked. We were actually prisoners in concentration camps. The Communists laughed at us or cursed us when we asked when we could go home. “You’ll learn to work for the first time in your lives,” they said.

From that time on it was long hours of work, clearing the jungles for farmland, planting other trees, cutting trees for lumber, planting rice, corn, and vegetables. What made this life hard was the lack of food. The Communists gave us just enough to keep us alive—an average of 15 kilograms of rice per prisoner per month. Prisoners who worked extremely hard were given an extra three kilograms of rice each month, but these bonuses were extracted from the rations of sickly prisoners who could not work.

The constant brutality attacked our minds and spirits; the malnutrition attacked our bodies. Soon we began to see men falling by the wayside, unable to rise in the morning. Dropsy was common, diarrhea was endemic. Tuberculosis showed up, as well as yellow fever.

The constant hunger drove us to eat anything. One of my friends ate more than 200 rats in one year. I wouldn’t have imagined that I could relish eating a toad, but I learned how to pull off the skin, put it in a can, pour boiling water over it, and wait a few minutes. Then I would quickly swallow my prize before a guard could see me. We were punished severely for cooking food out of regular mealtimes.

My diet included rats, locusts, lizards, frogs, toads, woodworms, snakes, insects, and birds—not that I found them in abundance. They were the special treats that helped me survive five years of starvation. Some of my companions were driven insane by the pressure of hunger. I saw one pick up a small potato from the filth of a toilet, rub it on his pants, and devour it.

We were allowed to write one letter a month to our families, and they were allowed to visit us twice a year. What joyful, yet painful meetings these were, trying to exchange all news as quickly as possible, trying to ignore our loss of weight and pallid color. I lost several teeth during my imprisonment, and many other teeth were hollow inside. I would write tiny notes to my girl friend and stuff them between and inside my teeth. Then when family members came, I would pass these notes to them. What a slender thread it was. After two years, she managed to pay me a brief visit, but then she herself gave up hope. She escaped Vietnam, and in my fifth year of imprisonment I received the crushing news that she had married and gone to the United States.

I had seen the despair of others in camp whose wives had deserted them. Some women even married Viet Cong soldiers, much to the delight of the Viet Cong, who thought it quite a feat to steal the wife of an ROV officer. Now I had lost my girl friend, and I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my life. I could understand now why some of the men had been driven to commit suicide. Should I do the same? No, as a Christian I could not bring myself to such an act. But I was in so deep a depression as the days went by, that even the words of such Scriptures as Romans 8:28 did not seem to live.

Could I endure any more of this mental torture? At night, when we returned exhausted from the fields and jungles, we were forced to listen to three-and-a-half hours of political indoctrination over the loudspeaker. And in our minds were thoughts of escape. Yet we also knew how those who tried to escape and were recaptured were tortured. I had seen a guard butchered in front of my eyes by escapees; but they were caught. How long would we be on the chain gang? Could we possibly last out this imprisonment? Sometimes my mind would be a riot of thoughts.

It was hope in the Lord Jesus that kept me alive. I fed this hope by reading the Scriptures, sometimes for hours. I had to do this secretly, but I did have several small Bibles and New Testaments in Chinese, Vietnamese, and English. I still carry two of them with me. Sometimes I dug holes in the ground and buried them. Once I lost a Bible I had lent a friend, and the guards discovered it. But I never lost those I guarded, and I read them early morning and late at night.

I shared the Scriptures with my fellow prisoners, who were eager to hear God’s Word. We took turns reading the Bible and tried to encourage one another. We could only talk when the guards were not around to hear what we said. But even talk with fellow prisoners was dangerous; a number of them acted as informers to gain special favors, and they could relay our conversations and activities to the Communists. For this reason we only felt free to talk to our closest friends.

I remember how shocked I was when one of these spies was responsible for the death of a pastor’s son in our camp. This young man became ill after three-and-a-half years and was allowed in the camp hospital. There, as he began to recover his strength, he made plans with another prisoner to escape. A third prisoner reported that their beds were empty, and they were pursued until they were caught. Both were tortured to death.

Under these circumstances I grasped like a drowning man for the promises in the Word of God. I promised the Lord I would serve him if he would give me the opportunity. “You have opportunities right here,” the Holy Spirit whispered to me. Yes, that was true, for as I shared my testimony and the gospel with other prisoners, at least three of them became Christians. Looking back, I can see that the fact that even one escaped eternity in hell and is enjoying hope of heaven makes my five years of suffering worthwhile.

There in camp I reflected on the sufferings of Jesus Christ. How much better I could understand how heavy the load of sin and suffering was that he bore for us. He had fasted in the wilderness. He had borne the weight of the cross. Yes, he knew what I was going through and could strengthen me. Again and again I found refreshment and exhilaration in the midst of my weakness. It was a strange combination, but I found it summed up in the words of my Lord: in him I would find peace; in the world, tribulation. That is what I had—peace in the midst of tribulation.

I prayed. Oh, how I prayed! And then one day the answer came. I was called to the camp office and notified of my release, effective immediately. It was April 3, 1980. Amazed, incredulous, I went back to pick up a few belongings and to say goodbye to my friends. They rejoiced with me. It gave them hope. Soon I was in a truck, going down mountain roads out of the highlands. Then I had a 700-kilometer train ride back to Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City. I walked as in a dream, and when I reached my home, it seemed strangely empty. Where was everybody? My father wasn’t there. Oh, after 18 months in prison, he had been able to go to Canada. But how about the rest? Oh, it was Good Friday, and they were at our church.

I hurried to the service. Yes, there were my brothers, my mother, some of my sisters. The church was packed with people. A choir of 40 was singing praises to God. I felt like I had entered the courts of heaven.

The leader of the service saw me and asked me to pray. The congregation and I wept as we thanked God for answering our prayers for my release. I was overjoyed to see the church crowded with people instead of a mere handful as I had feared. I had steadily maintained my Christian witness and identity in camp; but I wondered what had been happening back home. I learned that within the last year one thousand people had been saved in that one church and 200 baptized!

After the service I returned home for my first meal of home cooking in five years. My mother tried her best to fatten me up, but even there food was scarce. I learned that believers were suffering a great deal, but they did not complain. My own family was surviving by means of a small handicraft industry set up in our home. A worker can earn about 25 cents a day (U.S.), and that is barely enough to buy necessary food.

My release from camp had been the result of an appeal made by the International Red Cross. God continued to answer prayer. Others were moved to help in my behalf. Before long God provided me the opportunity to fly out of Vietnam to Thailand, and then in February 1981 up to Taiwan in the Republic of China. What a kind reception I had, and how many friends I have found!

But I had to face the future. What should I do now that I had my freedom?

I could not forget that nothing had separated me from the love of Christ—neither tribulation nor distress nor persecution nor famine nor nakedness nor peril nor sword (Rom. 8:35). And nothing need separate me from the love of Christ in the days ahead. But what of others living lives of emptiness in the midst of material wealth? I wanted to share the gospel with those around me and also prepare myself to be an evangelist on the mainland of China when God opens that door. As I knelt and prayed to know God’s will for my life, it was very clear to me just what he wanted me to do. As a result, I applied and was accepted by China Evangelical Seminary in Taipei to train for the gospel ministry.

Looking back, I can see that I experienced God’s love more when I was in the concentration camp than at any other time in my life. Other believers are still suffering and rejoicing in faith, and we should not forget to pray for them. But I pray that the lessons of faith that I learned may now bear fruit, keeping me humble and trusting, as I continue to walk and learn from my Savior.

Wilson Chen is a student at China Evangelical Seminary in Taipei, Taiwan.

The marriage of mainline denominations to the Great Society caused the rise of the New Religious Right.

The relationship between the sacred and the profane is not a new issue, and it is not terminal. At least it will not be terminated short of the promised coming of the kingdom of God. We want to deal with the conflicts, tensions, and sometimes harmonies of that relationship. In courts of law, the issue is church-state relations. In ethics it is the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. In every field of human endeavor the issue erupts in a distinctive form. It is irrepressible.

Christian wrestling with this issue was always tortuously complex. Jesus spoke of duties to God and to Caesar. Paul wrote of principalities and powers. For Tertullian, it was the empire of Christ; for Augustine, the City of God and the City of Man. It was pondered by Innocent III, Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and by John Courtney Murray who, in what he called “the American proposition,” underscored the historical nature of our thinking about the sacred and the profane in society. Contemporary insights, he wrote, “became available only within twentieth-century perspectives, created by the ‘signs of the times.’ [They] were not forged by abstract deductive logic but by history, by the historical advance of totalitarian government, and by the corresponding new appreciation of man’s dignity in society.”

A question many thought was definitively settled is being asked again today in many different ways: Is America a secular society? If not, what might that mean? If America is presumed to be the “advance society” of world history, the question has large implications for our thinking about the future of humankind.

The “signs of the times” reveal an increasingly urgent impingement of the sacred upon our public discourse. The conventional wisdom has been that public discourse is essentially profane in the precise meaning of the word—that is, outside the sphere of the sacred. In recent years, controversies in law and public policy have raised challenges to the conventional wisdom:

• There is the issue of conscience in relation to various societal rules, including military service.

• In connection with tax exemption and other rights, we have witnessed efforts by the state to define, and by defining, to restrict the public role of religion.

• There is the still heated debate over prayer in public schools.

• In the realm of public policy, there is no more painful conflict than the one over the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to abolish abortion law in the United States.

Perhaps what has most clearly brought to public attention the problem of the sacred and the profane is the emergence of the New Religious Right in U.S. politics. The movement commonly referred to by the generic name Moral Majority is likely to be with us for a long time. In their passion and frequent crudity, the Moral Majoritarians have kicked, or perhaps stumbled over, a cultural trip wire and set off an alarm alerting us to a much more fundamental change in modern society: the collapse of the 200-year hegemony of the secular Enlightenment in Western culture.

A dogma of this secular Enlightenment has been that as people become more educated—that is, more enlightened—religion will wither away. The corollary of this dogma is that to the extent religion lingers on as a residual force, it must be rigorously excluded from the public arena.

But the collapse of the secular Enlightenment is not unmitigated good news, for from that tradition emerged much of value in Western culture and policy. Nor was its hostility to religion entirely without warrant. The seventeenth-century wars of religion in Europe nearly destroyed the basis of civil discourse. Religion was understandably viewed as a dangerously divisive force that must be relentlessly privatized and sealed off from the public realm. Today that seal is not holding, and it cannot be put back into place.

The collapse is evident in many spheres of our culture. It is seen in legal philosophy’s protest against a sterile positivism. It is seen in the physical and theoretical sciences that increasingly point us not merely to puzzles to be solved but to mysteries to be revered. It is manifested in the popular and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in the fine arts. In education and the social sciences it is manifested in the debunking of the myths of value neutrality. And, of course, it is manifested in the renascence of religion in which our society and others are unmistakably engaged.

As the sacred is irrepressible, so the present decline of secularism may be irreversible—for better and for worse. Certainly it is for worse in the ignorant polemic of the New Religious Right against what it calls secular humanism. It is a polemic that maligns the noble tradition of Christian humanism, and it disdains God’s love for the secular—that is, this world. Yet we are surrounded by a hunger for the transcendent that will not be denied. It is the irrepressible belief in what Peter Berger calls a “sacred canopy”—an overarching meaning, a redemptive story, that can bestow dignity upon the world and our place in it.

There is yet another reason why the religious factor cannot be sealed off from public space. Quite simply, it is that America professes and aspires to be a democracy. Public policy that is to be perceived by the people as morally legitimate cannot be decided in indifference to the values of the people. For the overwhelming majority of the American people, those values are religiously based. They are based, for the most part, in the biblical traditions of Christianity and Judaism. Roe v. Wade is a classic instance of trying to deal with ultimate questions without reference to the traditions that inform our thinking about ultimacies. In that case, the ultimate question is, Who belongs to the human community for which we accept common responsibility? Or, to put it in biblical language, Who is my neighbor?

If we are to avoid such legal and political disasters as Roe v. Wade in the future, and if we continue to cherish democratic governance, we will have to devise a better language for our public discourse. It will need to be a language that mediates between particularist religion and universal reason. We cannot, as the New Religious Right would have us do, leap from Bible passage to legislative enactment. But neither can we democratically enact legislation that is uninformed by the Bible-based convictions of millions of Americans. To some strict separationists to the contrary, it is not an unconstitutional “establishment of religion” to have a decent respect for the opinions of the citizenry. Nor is it within the competence of the state to decide which options, by virtue of being untainted by religion, are admissible to the public square.

The argument, then, is that we are witnessing the collapse of a dominant secular world view. In the political realm, this collapse is precipitated by what in social science jargon is called a legitimation crisis—that is, government is out of “sync,” and frequently in conflict, with the values of the American people. These values, in turn, are religiously based, and religion therefore bears a major responsibility for the moral reconstruction of the American experiment. If this reconstruction succeeds, the democratic process will be strengthened, pluralism will be enhanced, and individual rights will be more firmly secured. If it does not succeed, millions of Americans will become increasingly alienated from a political process that will come under growing attack from conflicting belief systems, both religious and secular. If our only choice is between the militant fundamentalism of Moral Majority and the militant secularism of the American Civil Liberties Union, the outlook is not encouraging.

Which religious force might take the lead in providing a new moral legitimation for the American experiment? (Note that moral legitimation does not mean uncritical affirmation of America, but rather, articulating a transcendent sense of purpose by which the nation can be both criticized and affirmed.) As late as 1954, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Though the phrase was added for dubious reasons, it speaks to the issue of moral legitimation. “Under God” means that America is under both the blessing and the judgment of a reality that transcends the nation and the state. It means there is finally, however ambiguously we express it, a sacred canopy.

In considering religious forces that might help reconstruct this moral legitimation, one must first mention the Puritan tradition. The lineal descendents of that tradition are today called “mainline” or liberal Protestants. They are clustered in churches such as the United Methodist, United Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ. They operate in large part out of 475 Riverside Drive in New York, the National Council of Churches headquarters. These churches are not all Puritan in any precise theological or historical sense, but they are in the Puritan tradition because they have accepted historically the culture-forming tasks that can be traced back to the country’s Puritan beginnings. They represent thoroughly Americanized Christianity and the effort to Christianize America. They have provided in the past a transcendent or providential meaning for the American experiment. For the most part, the leadership of mainline Protestantism has abdicated that culture-forming responsibility today.

But what happened to the Puritan tradition? Sydney Ahlstrom’s recent influential book, A Religious History of the American People, ends with the mainline dispirited and uncertain, and because he tends to identify religion with the mainline, Ahlstrom suggests we have entered a post-Christian era. I believe it is more accurate to say we have entered a postsecular era in which new religious forces are taking over from the failed establishment of Protestantism. That failure is brilliantly shown in Robert Handy’s A Christian America. According to Handy, the declension of the Protestant establishment means that it can no longer do what it once tried to do. At a deeper, more ominous level, it no longer even wants to do what it once believed was its divine mandate to do.

Today, talk of a “Christian America” is portrayed as right-wing extremism. But that America was as Christian as it was a republic was self-evident throughout most of our history. If we wonder why some people react so aggressively to the course of American society, we need to be reminded that some of the fundamental changes in our national life are very recent. Historian Timothy Smith notes that talk about our being a secular society and state began to gain currency only in the 1940s. From the Mayflower Compact in the seventeenth century through the social-gospel movement that ended in this century, it was assumed that in some significant sense this is a Christian nation. Opponents of that notion have failed in recent decades to eradicate that belief from American life.

Business leaders, politicians, educators, and jurists all thought it self-evident that this is a Christian nation. The proclaimed purpose of Horace Mann and the public school movement was to advance the Christian—that is, Protestant—religion. In 1892, the Supreme Court declared, “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon Christianity” (Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S.).

As late as 1931 the same Court could say without fear of contradiction, “We are a Christian people, according to one another the equal right of religious freedom, and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God” (U.S. v. Macintosh). Such assumptions were commonplace in mainline Protestant pulpits and periodicals until the 1960s. The puzzling thing is not that some people still talk about Christian America, but that talk about Christian America is thought to be un-American.

In the sense that the great majority of Americans are Christians, this is a Christian nation. But the claims of the Puritan tradition went far beyond mere statistics. Into the first half of this century, its leaders believed that America is Christian by providential purpose. It was the social gospel movement that worked a subtle change that later proved devastating to that vision. For all the good it produced, it also effected the fatal equation of Christianity with secular progress. Especially after the triumphs of evolutionary thought, progress was thought to be inevitable. The restlessly transcendent truth claims of the faith were domesticated and placed in service to a society moving ever upward and onward toward a socialized version of the beatific vision. The promise that pointed toward the kingdom of God was replaced by programs that pointed toward the Great Society.

Washington Gladden and other leaders of the social gospel movement declared that the worth of Christianity—indeed the truth of Christianity—is proved by its ability to advance societal reform. But such a Christianity could no longer shape culture because it had been thoroughly assimilated into the culture’s vision of its own happy and inevitable future. With the social gospel movement, establishment Protestantism assumed an ancillary and supportive posture toward the culture: the direction of the culture could not be brought under divine judgment because the culture itself is the working out of God’s purposes in history. To borrow Pauline terminology (Romans 12), the church’s mission is no longer to transform the culture, but to be conformed to a culture that is transforming itself into the heavenly kingdom. (A later variant of this view appeared in the World Council of Churches’ pronouncement that “the world sets the agenda for the church.”)

In The 1930s, a terrible thing happened to the mainline Protestant witness: it succeeded. With the arrival of the New Deal, the country seemed set on the course the social gospel mandated. But beginning with World War II, the decades to follow turned out to be disappointing. To be sure, there were exhilarating moments, such as the early civil-rights movement. But the last great spurt of domestic innovation in the New Deal tradition came with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, which, far from reviving liberal confidence, collapsed in a cacophony of recrimination over Vietnam and what began to be perceived as the “systemic evils” of the American social, economic, and political system. It is a very long way from mainline Protestantism’s euphoric hopes for Christian America.

Typical of the mainline is Engage/Social Action, a United Methodist magazine, whose 1980 pre-election issue blasted Moral Majoritarians for saying there is a Christian postion on many public issues. The same issue carried a comparison of the Democratic, Republican, and Anderson platforms with the “official teachings” of the United Methodist church. It turns out that the church’s positions are those of the Democratic party, and any differences would have been reconciled had the party’s McGovern-Kennedy wing written the entire platform. Though they may be right on the issues, mainline Protestantism has invested the fortunes of its self-described “constituency of conscience” in a political past that may turn out to be an ineffectual minority for years to come.

What was thought to be the tide of the future begins to look like the backwater. In the bitterness of its isolation, the mainline’s pronouncements become more acerb. In its disappointment at betrayal by the America it married, establishment Protestantism becomes ever more “prophetic”—which is small consolation for being ignored.

What I have described is the story line of the Puritan tradition and its mainline descendents. Because it is a story, however, it is not yet over. Mainline leadership may change its ways, or be replaced by the discontented memberships of its several churches. But for the foreseeable future, it seems unlikely that mainline Protestantism will be a major participant in redefining and reconstructing the American experiment.

There is another reason that this is unlikely. Martin Luther King, Jr., was fond of saying, “Whom you would change you must first love.” This is not the same as the reactionary slogan of the sixties, “Love it or leave it.” Love, because it is love, often must be critical. Certainly there was no doubt that King’s “dream” was for, not against, America. It is not so evident that the National Council of Churches loves America, and the Protestant mainline has thereby dramatically broken from the social gospel. Abbott, Gladden, Rauschenbusch, and others had no question but that America’s influence is not only good for the world, it is the hope of the world. Today’s mainline is like the social gospel in identifying Christian hope with social change, but the change with which it identifies that hope is frequently perceived as being against, rather than for, America.

There is, however, another story. It is of another Protestantism, and it leads us to the New Religious Right that today both frightens and encourages so many Americans.

By the beginning of this century, some Protestants were choosing a quite different course. Some of them, such as J. Gresham Machen of Princeton, were intellectually and spiritually impressive; but like most people everywhere, most were not. The fundamentalism to which they gave birth provided no compelling alternative vision of America—it seemed reactive and sour. Its resounding No! to modernity seemed as sterile and bereft of culture-transforming power as liberalism’s accommodating Yes.

By the end of the 1920s, fundamentalism had been expelled from the circles of the influential and respectable, and in truth, retreated almost faster than it could be expelled. Its lingering imprint on the general culture was etched by that master of cruel contempt for the Bible-thumping “booboisie,” H. L. Mencken. Aside from occasional forays, fundamentalism would not be heard from again for more than 40 years. The mainline was left in secure possession of all the religious turf that mattered—or so the mainline thought.

In exile, fundamentalism licked its wounds and nurtured its grudges—but it also set about building an alternative “righteous empire.” Fundamentalism had lost touch with the elite, but not with millions of believers. After World War II, the mainline became uneasily aware that there was another world out there. The stirrings became, quite unmistakably, a movement. Soon fundamentalists had colleges impertinent enough to apply for accreditation. Some fundamentalists with Ph.D.’s called for dialogue in place of derision, and they seemed to have a knack for the technologies of communication with all kinds of people who showed little interest in established Protestantism.

The first fundamentalists to return from exile were called neo-evangelicals. They were very civil and impressive until the “neo” was dropped, and some of the pushier types started to come back. It wasn’t long—1976 to be precise—before they acclaimed “The Year of the Evangelicals.” It was too late to shut the door, and by 1979, the noisiest and most aggressive types arrived, announcing themselves as the Moral Majority. They even called themselves fundamentalists. And that is when some mainline Protestants began to wonder whether they were now the ones in exile.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell had never heard of Italian social theorist Wilfredo Pareto’s “circulation of elites” (I know, because I asked him). According to Pareto, when an elite, for whatever reason, no longer fulfills its function, the function still needs to be done. But the function is not left undone; rather, it circulates to another, usually quite different, group. Thus, a new elite comes into existence.

But Falwell is playing Pareto’s game. He is not a well-educated man. He has written, for example, that the evils of secular humanism began with “the 19th Century German philosopher [Barthold Georg] Niebuhr, who said that God is dead.” Though not well educated, he, along with some of the leaders in Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and other organizations of the New Religious Right, is shrewd. Most of his opponents are not. I am convinced that these people cannot be discounted as Rednecks, Ku Kluxers, or neo-Nazis, nor discredited with some Elmer Gantry-type ploy. Secular and religious journalists long have been sniffing around in hopes of discovering that Falwell has been bedding someone other than his wife—preferably an underage black boy—on whom he has been lavishing embezzled riches. But these are people of enormous, indeed frequently insufferable, moral rectitude.

I believe the New Religious Right is a long-term phenomenon in American life. These people must be engaged as partners in the process of redefining America. Of course, they, as well as others, want to be the controlling partners, but this is a long-term process, with control going to whoever is able to communicate the better dream for America. The present contention is not between the Moral Majority and the immoral minority: it is rather a case of moral minorities in conflict. As one Roundtable leader puts it, “85 percent of the people go with the tide. Our aim is to direct the tide.”

Falwell says that on a majority of issues a majority of Americans agree with Moral Majority. He is probably correct. In the last decade and more, the potent symbols and issues of patriotism, family stability, and public decency have been permitted to gravitate to the Right. Prolife, profamily, promorality, and pro-America are the four planks in Moral Majority’s platform. Whether or not they like Moral Majority, most Americans endorse them. The New Religious Right has been shrewd, and sometimes ruthless, in exploiting the Left’s default.

The New Religious Right, misguided and potentially dangerous on several scores, rails against the symptoms of our social ills while celebrating the individualistic and materialistic drives that feed those ills. It does not understand a pluralistic society’s need for a mediating public language by which conflicts can be resolved without recourse to religious wars. It lacks prophetic backbone; its safe, middle-class issues pose no threat to its audience. It violates a fundamental aspect of the Judeo-Christian ethic by demonstrating little believable concern for the poor and socially marginal. It promotes a narrow nationalism that sometimes comes close to equating America with the purpose of God in the world.

The New Religious Right is also challenging and encouraging on several scores. It represents a recovery of social concern among fundamentalists—a concern they have lacked and for which they have been condemned for decades. It represents a Christian confidence that God is at work in the world, and that the church must combat social as well as personal sins. It emphasizes that Jewish people and the State of Israel have a particular and powerful claim upon Christian conscience. Finally, it alerts us to the fact that this nation, and all nations, are accountable to God.

Similarities between Jerry Falwell and Martin Luther King, Jr., are not immediately evident. Different in many and important ways, they are alike, however, in that both represent a bold assertion of religiously based values in the public arena, and so in fact are in the mainline tradition of religion and American life. But the New Religious Right is conceptually destitute, ethically undisciplined, and addicted to divisiveness, and therefore I neither hope nor expect it to become the new elite in giving moral definition to America.

Also among the encouraging signs today is widespread rethinking of American Jews about the merits of a secular society. In the 1930s, the leadership of American Jewry agreed that the more secular the society, the safer it would be for Jews. Today, however, there is a growing conviction that it is not good for Jews, or for any minority, to live in a secularized society where there is no absolute, no transcendent prohibition against evil, including the evil of anti-Semitism. The naked public square is a dangerous place.

Jews, Christians, and all Americans have a deep stake in cultivating an awareness that the great threat to our common life comes not from aggressive religion but from ideologies that deny the transcendent and thereby invoke the totalitarian impulse of the modern state, whether that totalitarianism be of the Left or of the Right.

Who, then, will take the lead in reconstructing the public philosophy of post-secular America? Three major groups have not yet been up to bat in Pareto’s game: the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, and the evangelicals. To be sure, Catholics were a crucial part of the old New Deal coalition, but because of both their own insecurities about the American policy and rampant anti-Catholicism they had neither opportunity nor inclination to develop a theologically serious and inclusive statement of America’s meaning. It seems to me they now have that opportunity, and, in many ways, they are the natural candidates for the circulating leadership of this endeavor. They have the numbers and a history rich in political philosophy. Yet, the question must be raised of whether the intellectual and episcopal leadership of American Catholicism has not been weakened by its excessive zeal in “Americanizing” itself in the image of mainline Protestantism. There is, of course, also the inspired leadership of Pope John Paul II, who is a profound teacher of the dignity of the human person and of the societal structures appropriate to that dignity.

The Lutherans as well have the numbers and a relatively intact sense of the transcendent. Most of them, like the Catholics, are new enough yet to America to sense its strangeness, and are able to ask both new questions and old questions in new ways. But Lutherans are handicapped by a theological tradition with few conceptual resources for ordering of democratic society.

As to the evangelicals, there are at least 10 different kinds, with the politicized fundamentalists but one subgroup. Evangelicals are so maddeningly diverse that it is almost impossible to deal with them as one category. But usually included in their number are the real Calvinists, who still ponder the grandly flawed attempt that was Geneva. Relatively few in number, their heritage is one of serious thought about how the City of God relates to the City of Man. I am impressed by how many there are among those today asking first-principle questions about religion and society who call themselves Calvinist.

But the task, finally, requires all of us. It requires Jerry Falwell, whom we will have to get used to having in the game, although we and he both need to discuss some rules about not fouling other players. And the task also requires those who have the mysterious number “475” written on their foreheads.

I suspect we will be better at the task if, by virtue of transcendent faith, we are able also to see it as a game—the playfulness and apparent absurdity of it all. Our playfulness defies secularism’s deadly sobriety, and it defies the imperiousness of the political that would seduce us into believing that the whole of life is politics. But the task is ultimately serious because human lives and the well-being of the earth may depend upon it, and because ultimately God cares, and invites us to join him in caring.

We Americans have been born from and borne by a liberal democratic tradition. Ours is still a fragile experiment, a new thing upon the face of the earth. Though today many who cherish the tradition of liberal democracy feel depressed and beseiged, I am persuaded this is a time of new openings and new obligations. Jews, Christians, and believers without a faith to believe in must join in the common enterprise of reconstructing a public philosophy that acknowledges the transcendent, which alone can humanize the mundane. It is to rediscover the American proposition.

Mr. Neuhaus is project director of the Council on Religion and International Affairs, New York City, and editor of Lutheran Forum. His article is adapted from the 1981 John Courtney Murray Lecture, sponsored by the John LaFarge Institute, which he gave at New York’s Harvard Club.