They'd Rather Switch than Fight

Politicians who follow their constituencies rather than their consciences have lost their vision for the common good.

The current politicization of the abortion issue (CT, Jan. 15, 1990, p. 46) ought to worry not only prolife proponents, but any citizen who believes important issues ought to be resolved by sound moral reasoning rather than special interest. For as the initial results of last summer’s Webster decision suggest, the side with the most power will determine how America treats its unborn.

The sight is not pretty. Bowing to strong lobbying from prochoice activists and with an eye on public-opinion polls, politicians who have previously supported prolife legislation have switched to the other side. More “conversions” are expected. Word is out that the Democratic party will not seriously consider allowing a prolife candidate to run for higher office. And some Republican party leaders—including Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater and Vice President Dan Quayle—appear eager to soften their party’s strong prolife platform plank.

Without oversimplifying the manner in which any leader must wrestle with issues before arriving at a decision—not to mention the fact that leaders can and should change their minds when confronted with convincing arguments—we suspect this rash of flip-flopping to be purely political. And it is just this kind of holding the political finger to the wind that turns elected officials into robots. Program the computer, punch in the numbers, and out comes the decision that will keep the largest number of voters happy. That this kind of policymaking will very likely result in continued smooth sailing for those who believe abortion should remain legal is important, but it is not our only worry. Of greater concern is the loss of a moral structure and purpose in the political process. Where is the statesman who places conscience above constituency?

The inclination, of course, is for the prolife community to step up their lobbying—to promise votes to the remaining prolife politicians, and strongarm the prochoice candidates with threats, demonstrations, and the same kind of shrill posturing one has come to expect from groups such as the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood. But when that happens (and it is already beginning), we will have allowed an issue affecting the very soul of America to become yet another political pawn on the chessboard of the power brokers. Meanwhile, the fate of more than one million unborn babies and another million pregnant women depends less on compassion than on political expediency. Any victory that depends solely on how an elected official votes will be fragile, susceptible to the election-year ritual of trading position for power.

We do not eschew the political process on which this and other important issues depends. Now more than ever, Christians need to encourage their elected officials to act on behalf of the unborn. And it wouldn’t hurt to write public servants such as Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan and New Jersey Congressman Jim Courter asking them to explain their conversion from prolife to prochoice.

But we also suggest the believing community ought to infuse at least as much spiritual as political energy into the debate. Fighting abortion on strictly political grounds will not produce a morally acceptable solution unless the language of reverence and sanctity becomes familiar to both the electorate and the elected. And teaching the world about reverence and sanctity is what we have always done best.

By Lyn Cryderman.

American evangelicalism and English evangelicalism may be traced to the same historical roots: the conversion in 1735 of an Oxford University student named George Whitefield, and three years later of his fellows, John and Charles Wesley. The Calvinistic Whitefield fanned the flame of the “Great Awakening” in North America, while the Arminian Wesleys sent itinerant Methodist preachers to these shores. On both sides of the Atlantic, both Calvinistic and Arminian streams of evangelical revival took hold, and the world is a far better place for it.

In our own day, American evangelicalism continues to owe a large debt to our British cousins. Fifty years ago, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship came to the United States (via Canada), establishing a conservative evangelical work in our institutions of higher learning. IVCF brought to American evangelicalism a balanced and positive attitude toward learning, working to counteract the fundamentalist suspicion toward university education and stressing the value of a godly mind disciplined by academic rigor. A statement in the first issue of His, Inter-Varsity’s student magazine begun in 1941, summarizes that bold tension: “The safest place on earth is in the un-Christian university, if God sends you there.… If you are on the university campus and in the will of God, remember this: … Every circumstance in life, if faced properly, serves as a springboard to a better understanding of His will and a prelude to a deeper growth in grace.”

This student movement prepared the ground for the seed to be sown by key publishing efforts. Through books and magazine articles American readers were able to share in English evangelicalism’s thoughtful yet warm faith. Key authors were Anglicans John R. W. Stott (Basic Christianity and Your Mind Matters) and J. I. Packer (Knowing God and Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God) and Brethren scholar F. F. Bruce (The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?). The reference works of Donald Guthrie and J. D. Douglas became the cornerstone of many evangelicals’ libraries. Mature evangelical scholars in Britain, such as F. F. Bruce and I. Howard Marshall, served as advisers to budding young American Christians who traveled to England and Scotland for their studies and returned to improve the quality of Christian higher education in America. Others, such as Geoffrey Bromiley, Philip Edgecumbe Hughes, Colin Brown, Ralph Martin, and John Murray came to the U.S. to help staff Fuller, Westminster, and other seminaries.

The British evangelical influence in America has reached beyond learning to personal holiness and social responsibility. The piety taken to England by Americans Hannah Whitehall Smith and her husband, Robert, returned to our shores in Keswick-flavored ministries, such as those of Alan Redpath and Stephen Olford. And thanks to the leadership of John Stott at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, American evangelicals as well as conservative Christians worldwide broke out of their conversionist cocoons and added serious social action to their kingdom-building activities.

On page 25 of this issue begins a Christianity Today Institute report on the changing British evangelical scene. Older leadership is passing. American Christianity is now influencing England. The expository preaching and teaching are fading as experiential worship grows in popularity.

England has become what we may become: a post-Christian, pluralistic society in which Muslims and adherents of other world religions are as common as active Christians. What will England have to offer us in the future? What of their more recent experience will translate from their culture to our own?

These questions cannot be answered as yet, but we shall be watching our English cousins, for we have profited much from their experience in the past.

By David Neff.

Whatever happened to the term cult? It went the way of heathen and pagan, two other words we seldom hear these days, and for good reason.

First, eager litigants and enterprising attorneys have made us all a bit uneasy about going into a courtroom to defend our use of pejorative labels. We do not question the viability of our defense as much as the expense of time and resources consumed by such legal disputes. Besides, the spirit of fair play suggests it is best to refer to groups of people as they refer to themselves.

There is also a theological reason for avoiding these terms. When Christ universalized the gospel, he erased lines of ethnicity, socio-economic class, and gender. Any distinctions between citizens of the kingdom of God and those outside his domain focus on belief. Pagans, heathens, members of cults—all are names for sinners, a label that applies to every person for whom Christ died. By using them, we imply that non-Western sinners (most of the “cults” we worry about have their origins outside the U.S.) are the worst kind.

Finally, it simply does not work well to use disparaging terms to describe the people whom we hope will come to faith in Christ. We must make people aware of their sinful condition but do so in a manner that respects them as beings made in God’s image. In fact, we are commanded to love them as ourselves.

It is important to remember this as we interact with our world. Although religious groups in our midst may seem cultlike, it does not serve our purpose to call them names. Likewise, the bleak godlessness present in many regions of the world does not disqualify those citizens from someday being reunited with God.

We must evangelize and re-evangelize with as much care and thoughtfulness as we can muster. One way to begin is to recognize that God created us all, and when we tell the unsaved about Jesus, we are attempting to reunite a creation torn asunder by sin. We are all sinners; may more and more of us be saved by God’s grace.

By Terry Muck.

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