Page 4645 – Christianity Today (2024)

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Ralph Reed, 35Executive director, Christian Coalition

“Vote for Ralph Reed: The Little Giant” was the motto of the then junior-high politico wannabe who was running for student council. Today, as executive director of the Christian Coalition—which represents, says Time magazine, “the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by a religious organization in this century”—Ralph Reed is no longer a wannabe. In 1989 Reed met Pat Robertson, who asked for the young doctoral student’s advice on how to revitalize his supporters after his failed presidential bid. After follow-up conversations, Robertson handed over his mailing list to Reed, which Reed translated into a community-based, local-issue-driven groundswell of politically active conservative Christians. Today his advice is solicited by a spectrum of leaders and politicians, usually Republicans, though he insists that CC members are not in the lap of the GOP: “They’re conservative, religious people that are pro-life.” Reed says he hopes that the CC will be a “long-term participant in American public life,” working “to see a day when the sanctity of innocent life is enshrined in our laws and in the Constitution.”

Bruce Main, 39Founder, Urban Promise

When Bruce Main was a freshman at Azusa Pacific University, he asked himself, “Where in the U.S. are children and teens most needy?” After college and Fuller Seminary, he and his young bride, Pamela, moved to the economically depressed city of Camden, New Jersey. Nine years later he is still there, heading the organization he founded, Urban Promise, with its 30 full-time paid and volunteer staff and an annual budget of $1 million. The ministry sponsors job workshops, after-school programs, summer day camps (for nearly 1,000 children), and two gospel choirs. It also gives high-school students tours of historic African-American colleges. “With a 60 percent dropout rate in our high schools here, and with less than 4 percent finishing college,” says Bruce, “we are excited that 15 of our youth are now freshmen and sophom*ores in college, and that 70 percent of our current high schoolers are now seriously considering college.” The next big project for Urban Promise: a Christian school in Camden to open September 1997. Tony Campolo, who first inspired Bruce to consider urban ministry when he spoke at Azusa, notes: “Bruce has created and developed one of the most significant urban ministries in America.”

Michael Teague, 37C.O.O., Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles

When Michael Teague goes to his office at the Union Rescue Mission in L.A. every morning, he is motivated by the conviction that “today’s rescue missions are as integral to cities throughout the United States as were Good Samaritans on the road to Jericho some 2,000 years ago.” Now chief operations officer at the largest rescue mission in the U.S. (annual budget: $14 million) and a sought-after consultant to other shelters, including one in Capetown, South Africa, Teague is convinced that today’s rescue missions need to go far beyond the stereotypes. Union, for example, sponsors job-training and addiction-recovery programs as well as runs a health center, a transitional-housing complex, and a youth center. “Today, less than 5 percent of the rescue mission population fit the stereotype—middle-aged, Caucasian alcoholic,” he says. “Instead, the fastest-growing population served is women and children, who make up one-third of all homeless people in shelters today. Minority men between 30 and 35 years of age make up another one-third of this population, with over 80 percent of them addicted to chemicals.” With a background in business (B.A. in business administration and three years as a financial analyst for Texaco) and ministry (a seminary degree, five years as an associate pastor, and three years at a Seattle rescue mission), Teague, says Stephen Burger, head of the International Union of Gospel Missions, “has moved quickly through the ranks of rescue mission leadership and is one of the outstanding young leaders in urban ministry today.”

DC Talk: Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait, Kevin Smith, 31, 29, 28Rappers

Take three good-looking college students, put them together to form a Christian rap group, and chances are you would end up with a flash in the pan. But since their debut album in 1989, DC Talk has moved beyond flash to phenomenon. Their 1995 release, Jesus Freak, entered the Billboard Top 200 at number 16, making it the highest-ranked debut ever for a Christian album. It also tallied record-breaking first-week sales, at 85,000. (By comparison, recent releases by Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant sold 51,000 and 55,000 respectively in their first week.) But Toby, Michael, and Kevin say they are less concerned with gold and platinum than with the thousands of teens in their audiences. “We’ve made it our goal to be missionaries to our generation,” says Toby. “We thought, ‘If we speak their language, they’re more apt to listen.’ For our generation, the language is music.” Recognizing the inherent dangers that come with success, Toby adds, “My number-one prayer has been for God to put a team of people around us who will keep us accountable. God has answered that prayer. We travel with a team of guys, including a pastor, who are willing to challenge us spiritually as well as creatively.”

E. Bailey Marks, Jr., 34Director, Youth at the Crossroads

Teens were dying of AIDS in Malawi. Could Campus Crusade help? Crusade’s workers in Malawi answered by developing an AIDS-prevention teacher-training curriculum, and Marks, working in 1994 for Crusade’s international division, spearheaded its use in areas outside Malawi. Now the program runs in nearly 20 countries, including Hungary, Honduras, Hong Kong, and Lithuania. In these countries, 2,100 teachers have been trained. These teachers, in turn, have reached 125,000 students with the aids-prevention message, 25,000 of whom have made decisions for Christ. With HIV infection rising at a staggering rate in some parts of the world (some areas of Africa are afflicted with a 20 percent infection rate; an estimated 10 million Asians will be infected with HIV by 2000; and the rate of HIV infection is up 60 percent in India since 1993), Marks hopes Youth at the Crossroads will have trained 250,000 to 375,000 teachers in more than 50 countries by 2000. About 22 million students would be exposed to the program’s philosophy—that the only way to stop HIV is through abstinence, that this requires character and value transformation, which is best accomplished through a “personal relationship to Christ.” Says Marks: “AIDS is a social problem that ultimately is a spiritual problem.”

Steven W. Fitschen, 39Executive director, National Legal Foundation

When founder Robert Skolrood retired last year after a decade as head of the Virginia Beach-based National Legal Foundation, he convinced the NLF board his successor did not need to be a lawyer. Enter Steve Fitschen, who had earlier spent eight years as a forester. Still working on his law degree, Fitschen has rejuvenated the public-interest law firm, which, like the Rutherford Institute and the American Center for Law and Justice, pleads religious-liberty cases. Fitschen, who formerly served as ACLJ’s executive vice president, says that NLF uses a “principled rather than pragmatic approach, from a theologically conservative point of view.” While NLF is still small, it is influential. This year, NLF helped introduce the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress, which was passed and then signed into law. Many viewed NLF as being on the fringe for proposing impeachment of the six Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down Colorado’s Amendment 2. NLF assistant administrator Steve Magnuson says it seemed too far-fetched for anybody else to address, “but Steve researched it, got the idea moving, and sold it to others.” Pastor Pat Crowder, who started a cell-based church with Fitschen, agrees: “Steve is good at seeing opportunities that others have missed.”

Miroslav Volf, 40Theology professor, Theological Seminary

Called the “Croatian Theology Wonder,” Miroslav Volf is considered by many to have one of the most fertile and provocative Christian minds today. Born in Osijek (in present-day Croatia) and raised in Communist Novi Sad (in present-day Serbia), this son of a Pentecostal pastor eventually earned a master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate at the University of T?n, studying under J?Moltmann. Now on the Fuller faculty, Volf stays in touch with his homeland by taking teaching tours to Europe. His theological genius is in recasting “molds.” In Work in the Spirit: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Work (Oxford), he critiques Luther’s doctrine of “work as vocation” and offers instead a theology of work based on Paul’s doctrine of spiritual gifts. In Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon), he suggests that the liberation theology categories of “oppression and liberation” are inappropriate in the contexts of cultural plurality and strife. Another major work, on the Trinity and community, is forthcoming this year. Volf locates his theology in “classical Protestant Christianity, with a dose of Anabaptist sensibilities” and says that he does theology “for the sake of God and of God’s kingdom,” but also “because it is so much fun.”

Darryl Starnes, 38Evangelism director, AME Zion Church

When Darryl Starnes was growing up, his family would gather each morning before dawn to hear their grandfather, a minister, lead the family devotions. During one such devotion time, Starnes met Christ, and since then he has been preoccupied with evangelism. That burden has led to his being elected to serve his entire denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, as director of evangelism. The 1.2 million-member body has excelled in social ministries, says Starnes; now it aims to complement that strength by entering the next century with aggressive evangelistic efforts. His office, Starnes believes, “must set the spiritual climate from which soul-winning sprouts.” Until his new appointment, Starnes served as pastor of the historic Metropolitan AME Zion Church in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. While there he gained recognition as an exceptional orator. Observes the denomination’s bishop, Richard K. Thompson: “Brother Starnes is a preacher anointed with power and conviction, undergirded by thorough preparation.” Adds his former professor, Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School: “He is a magnetic leader, a quick learner, a deep thinker, a highly effective preacher, and a very warm-hearted individual.”

Dwight Gibson, 37North American director, World Evangelical Fellowship

“I always wondered about the places around the world these stamps were coming from,” recalls Dwight Gibson about his first-grade stamp collection. Now, as North American director for World Evangelical Fellowship, an international association of evangelical associations, Gibson is the one licking foreign stamps in his effort to foster communication among international believers. Especially concerned with issues of religious freedom, Gibson was the force behind WEF’s International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, which many North American churches participated in this September. Before coming to WEF he worked for the Slavic Gospel Association, where he was struck by the impact and unity of the local churches in the Soviet Union. What he saw drives his vision today to “create a local church that is international.” Observes Gibson, “We’re missing a connectedness of the body of Christ. We need to understand what it means that when one rejoices, we all rejoice, and when one suffers, we all suffer.”

A. C. Green, Jr., Reginald “Reggie” White, 33, 34Green, Jr. – Forward, Phoenix SunsWhite – Defensive end, Green Bay Packers

Ferocious competitors on the court and gridiron, these professional athletes have leveraged their success and wealth into vibrant Christian ministries. A. C. Green, the Phoenix Suns’ scrappy 6′ 9″, 11-year veteran of the nba, heads the A. C. Green Youth Foundation and the Athletes for Abstinence program. His video, book, and personal lifestyle—a single, traveling professional athlete who refuses to live promiscuously—challenge young people and other athletes to a life of purity and integrity.

At 6′ 6″ and 300 pounds, Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers holds the career record for quarterback sacks. When he was named the NFC Defensive Player of the Year for last season, the press played up his moniker of “minister of defense” in reference to his position as associate pastor of his home congregation, Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. There he runs a summer sports camp for inner-city children and supports a variety of programs, including one that funds inner-city community-development banks. This past January, when his church fell prey to the rash of black-church burnings that swept the South, Reggie emerged as a national spokesperson calling the nation and church to face racism where it exists and raising money to rebuild destroyed churches. “The only thing that overcomes racism,” he says, “is the love of God and the unity amongst the ‘brethren.’ “

Michael Horton, 32President, Christians United for Reformation

Michael Horton believes evangelicals need a second Reformation. At age 13, Horton experienced a spiritual crisis while reading the Book of Romans, wondering, “How can I be right before God if I continue to be a sinner? How do I know I’m in a state of grace?” To find answers, Horton began devouring books on Reformation theology, and it wasn’t long before his reading turned into writing. To date, he has authored eight books, having completed a draft for his first book when he was only 15. “Evangelicalism as a movement,” he has persistently warned in his books, “is rushing headlong toward theological ambiguity, which is another way of saying apostasy.” As a sophom*ore at Biola University, Horton formed Christians United for Reformation (CURE) and eventually began a radio show, “The White Horse Inn,” now broadcast nationwide on 30 stations, as well as a magazine, Modern Reformation. Horton is also copastor of Christ Reformed Church of Placentia, California, and vice chair of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals-another organization decrying the loss of evangelicalism’s Reformation roots. Despite the multiplicity of his titles, his goal remains singular: the recommitment of evangelicals to the solas of what he hopes was only the first Reformation.

Kathy Rowlett, 36Area director, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

Before becoming a Christian her junior year at Wake Forest University, Kathy Rowlett says she was a “very wild and intimidating person.” While age and regeneration have done some mellowing, she still attacks her work, always willing to cross boundaries—whether political or personal—if it serves the gospel. When still a fledgling in the faith, she volunteered for two years to teach missionary kids in Mexico, and later, under InterVarsity, she organized and led a group of students on a summer evangelistic trip to Kiev State University in Ukraine; the trip was so successful that every summer since then other students have repeated it. Today, after 11 years as an InterVarsity staff member (mostly at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), she is seen as “a spiritual director in the movement for other staff and leaders in InterVarsity,” says Kim Green, a fellow staff worker and friend. Also, as the only female on both the Chapel Hill staff and her current team, she is a role model for many female students and staff. “People seek her out,” Green observes, because “she moves beyond just programs and asks the harder questions about the messy parts of staff members’ and students’ lives.” For her part, Rowlett says simply, “I love to invest in people. That’s my philosophy of ministry.”

Star Parker, 39Founder, Coalition of Urban Affairs

Star Parker, a former welfare mom who robbed a liquor store and had four abortions and a fifth child by age 23, never dreamed she would one day battle the social system on which she had depended. “I was living my ho-hum life, dropping my kid off at government-funded daycare, then hanging out at the beach and getting high all afternoon,” says Parker. But while trying to get work “under the table” at a Christian black-owned advertising agency, she ended up getting saved. Then she heard a preacher ask what felt like a question from above—”What are you doing on welfare?” he boomed—and the next day she canceled her welfare checks. Parker went on to earn a marketing degree, publish a magazine for black Christians, and found a conservative social policy research center. Now a pastor’s wife, Parker has debated the Reverend Jesse Jackson on CNN about moral decline, defended school vouchers on Larry King Live, and decried welfare on Oprah. Her forthcoming autobiography is titled I Can’t Cry Racism (Pocket Books). Parker hopes African Americans in the church will become more involved in making public-policy decisions. “In every area where we have social ills,” she says, “the church has the best track record in keeping people on the straight and narrow.”

M. Craig Barnes, 40Pastor, National Presbyterian Church

In Washington, D.C., every moment is an occasion for gaining power. Into this atmosphere, at the 2,000-member National Presbyterian Church where presidents and senators often worship, Craig Barnes preaches God’s grace and sovereignty. “Every Sunday all these high-powered people tell the world in the prayer of confession that they are sinners in need of a Savior,” says Barnes. “Then they hear the declaration of pardon and jump to their feet to sing the Gloria. That is high drama.” Just nine days after accepting the call to National Pres, Barnes learned he had metastatic cancer. Now, after surgery and radiation therapy, Barnes believes he has been healed. “It was a wonderful opportunity for the pastor to be a symbol of the truth that God’s good sovereign faithfulness is our only hope,” he says. But he had to struggle with the meaning of God’s sovereignty as his associate pastor’s son died of cancer even as Barnes’s health improved. His openness has endeared him to many. Says one parishioner: “You never come out of a Sunday service without feeling like he has been there [suffering] with you. That’s why someone so young can lead a large congregation like this, because he’s felt the pain.”

Susan Bergman, 39Writer

Bergman’s memoir Anonymity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the literary equivalent of exploratory surgery. In it she recalls her discovery of her father’s dual life as both a music director in an evangelical church and a closet hom*osexual who was the first recorded victim of AIDS in New York. Looking at both her own and her father’s lives, she asks: “Pretense—is that the unforgivable sin?” Schooled at Wheaton College and Northwestern University (Ph.D., literature), Bergman was awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Evangelical scholar Mark Noll calls Bergman’s book a refreshing “proof that solid up-to-date narrative form can wrestle with perennial Christian realities.” Bergman’s latest project has just been released, a collection of essays she edited called Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith (Harper San Francisco). Her introduction to the book was CT’s August cover story.

Greg Lillestrand, 35National director, Worldwide Student Network

“At the end of life when all our pursuits are finished,” Greg Lillestrand and his wife, Charmaine, asked themselves when they graduated from college in 1984, “what would we regret most deeply for not having given our all?” The answer was full-fledged service for Christ. In the years since then, the Lillestrands have focused their efforts on the 60 million students in universities worldwide, serving with Campus Crusade for Christ in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Russia. In the former Soviet Union, Greg pioneered the start of new campus ministries, and today there are 54 national staff in more than 20 locales. Now national director of Crusade’s Worldwide Student Network, Greg hopes to open 400 more overseas chapters in the years ahead. Described as a “Bill Bright-type” leader, Greg remains mindful of three lessons he says God taught him in Russia: “I can never outgive the Lord; when God moves, nothing can stop him; and no matter what is occurring in our lives, God is never caught off guard.”

Kelly Monroe, 36Founder, Harvard Veritas Forum

Today Harvard University is known as one of the main gatekeepers of secular orthodoxy, but Kelly Monroe has documented those who are Finding God at Harvard (Zondervan/HarperCollins). Monroe has edited a collection of 40-plus spiritual autobiographical reflections by Harvard alumni, professors, and speakers that represent what Monroe sees every day in her work as a chaplain to Harvard’s graduate students. Struck by the fact that Harvard was founded by the Puritans so that students would know truth in the person of Jesus Christ, Monroe and her friends banded together in 1992 to refocus on the university’s original mission. They called the group Veritas Forum. “We wanted to create a place where students could ask their deepest questions about the art of life, a place where we could explore the unity and beauty of the truth of Jesus Christ.” Since the founding of Veritas Forum at Harvard, Christians at 20 other schools, including Oxford in England, have opened their own forums modeled after Veritas, reaching an estimated 30,000 students.

Peter Cha, Dave Gibbons, 37, 34Cha – Copastor, Parkwood Community ChurchGibbons – Pastor, NewSong Community Church

Successful pastors do not usually jump for jobs with less pay and no guarantees for success. But both Peter Cha and Dave Gibbons left established positions to start churches for mostly second-generation Asian Americans—Cha in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and Gibbons in Irvine, California. Aware that a majority of Asian Americans are unchurched (despite many being raised in the church), Cha and Gibbons not only pioneered new ministry models, but also created Catalyst, a networking organization for pastors ministering to second-generation Asian Americans. The conferences have drawn so many pastors and laypeople in their first five years that they plan to hold two separate regional conferences next year. “Asian-American Christians in ministry are in a phase where we need to find direction,” says Susan Kim, a regular participant in the conferences. “People have been very blessed by the ministry of Peter and David.”

David P. Gushee, 34Ethics professor, Union University

Two years ago, when David Gushee and his wife learned the baby they were expecting would be stillborn, they chose to have labor induced rather than “have the fetus dismembered by an abortion doctor.” The procedure, they felt, “would have been an offense to the dignity of our child’s life.” Gushee, who is associate professor of Christian studies at Union University (Jackson, Tenn.) and “one of the most thoughtful and well-prepared ethicists in the evangelical world today,” according to Union’s president, David S. Dockery, has displayed such moral sensitivity since childhood. In high school he saw a film on the Jewish Holocaust and “was shattered to know I lived in a world where people could do this to other people,” he remembers. “So when I became a Christian, I was very practically and ethically oriented. I believed that if Christianity was true, it must hold the answers to human suffering.” His Ph.D. dissertation at Union Theological Seminary (N.Y.) and his first book, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust (Fortress), examined why some Christians, under Hitler helped Jews but others didn’t. “The question that drives my academic work is, ‘What is it the church is supposed to be doing in a suffering world?’ ” says the Southern Baptist former professor and acting associate theology dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For him the answer has included being the principal author of his denomination’s widely quoted 1994 statement on abortion-clinic violence and helping draft the historic 1995 SBC Resolution on Racial Reconciliation.

Alvin C. Bibbs, Sr., 34Urban ministries director, Willow Creek Community Church

Alvin Bibbs ventured into a Chicago neighborhood to start a Young Life group and found an Uzi pointed at his head. Five gang members told him never to come back: “This is our turf.”

“You might have won today,” Bibbs told his assailants, “but this is not your or my turf. This is holy ground.” Bibbs was never threatened again. It was not the first or last time he would overcome opposition. The first was making the leap out of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project and into a successful sports and academic college career. Next it was becoming Young Life’s first African-American regional director for a major city, during which he helped the organization see areas where it could be more sensitive to racial issues. Now, as founder of Hoop Dreams Foundation, he provides college scholarships for athletic students, and as director of Local Compassion and Urban Ministries at Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, he raises members’ awareness of social justice and racial issues. “I am driven by the question: ‘How do we bring people together?’ ” says Bibbs, who is ordained. “God calls us to reconciliation, so my goal is to help make what is not seen—God’s unity and call to reconciliation—visible.”

Dan Owens, 40Evangelist, Luis Palau Evangelistic Association

Dan Owens seemed an unlikely candidate to become an evangelist. Other children ridiculed him because of a speech impediment and because of his excess weight. By the time he had become a teenager he had fallen in with a carousing crowd. But at 17, Owens became a Christian, later attended Multnomah Seminary, and then became youth pastor for a Portland church. It happened to be the church that evangelist Luis Palau attended. In 1986 Palau asked Owens to join the Luis Palau Evangelistic Association, and Owens agreed, planning to stay for only a couple of years. Yet, in 1992, he became LPEA’s first associate evangelist. Today he is recognized as the apparent successor to Palau, who turns 62 this month. Owens has visited 35 countries with Palau, preaching at nightly crusades, training counselors, and organizing the campaigns themselves. Owens is handling much of the preaching this month in a Lahore, Pakistan, campaign. “He touches the conscience without being negative.” Palau says of Owens. “Yet he is a winsome person with a good spirit. He commands attention without being egocentric.”

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Crowds in the East Java town of Situbondo, angry at the sentencing of a Muslim who had been found guilty of insulting Islam, went on a destructive rampage October 10 leaving at least five Christians dead among several burned churches.

More than 2,000 Muslims destroyed two Christian schools, an orphanage, and 18 Reformed, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches in several East Java towns. In all, 25 churches were damaged in the riots, 17 of them by fire.

Ishak Christian, the pastor of a Surabaya Pentecostal church, his wife, daughter, niece, and a church-staff worker were killed when they became trapped in their burning church.

At least 52 of the rioters were arrested, and State Secretary Moerdiono promised to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. However, according to a Reuter news report, East Java Governor Basofi Sudirman wanted information about the riots hushed.

The crowds had been calling for the death penalty for a local Muslim sect leader named Saleh, who had been convicted of insulting Islam. Saleh received the maximum sentence of five years in prison. After setting the courthouse ablaze and temporarily forcing the judge and suspect into hiding, crowds targeted churches.

Muslim leaders in Indonesia expressed regret at the rioting. More than 200 Indonesian churches have been burned or vandalized since 1991, including 10 Protestant churches one Sunday morning in June (CT, Sept. 16, 1996, p. 112). According to International Christian Concern, the government has not brought charges against any rioters involved in the June incident.

About 85 percent of Indonesia’s population is Muslim, with more adherents to Islam than any other country.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Christian relief agencies are stepping up relief to North Korea due to a widespread food crisis observers say is worse than Ethiopia’s in the 1980s.

While the shortage is not yet a famine, Trish Jordan of Canadian Foodgrains Bank says starvation soon will intensify. “It’s as if you have 22 million people in a boat heading toward a huge waterfall, and we’re trying to do whatever we can to keep it from going over the edge.”

Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a partnership of 13 organizations, ranging from the Mennonite Central Committee Canada to Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. The group has shipped 4,800 tons of rice to North Korea since this summer. Parachurch organizations also are sending rice to North Korea, including the Seattle-based mission agency East Gates Ministries International, which forwarded 400 tons of rice in June. World Vision, which is leading a consortium of ministries in aiding the country, has sent 1,650 tons of rice, as well as $3 million worth of medicine, medical supplies, clothing, and seeds.

The United Nations World Food Program is overseeing the food distribution.

Hailstorms ravaged fields in the isolationist nation in 1994. Severe floods, which killed thousands of Koreans, have decimated rice crops for the past two years. About 700,000 tons of rice have been shipped to the Communist country since last year’s floods, mostly in bilateral assistance from China and Japan. The country continues its policy of repressing religious expression. There are three Christian congregations allowed to function in the country of 25 million people.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

I Object To Your Objectivity

Tim Stafford’s review of Marvin Olasky’s Telling the Truth: How to Revitalize Christian Journalism (July/August), while championing fairness and objectivity in the traditional journalistic sense, proceeds to turn Olasky’s argument into a cartoon devoid of nuance and dimension. Dismissing directed reporting as “Old Testament journalism,” Stafford accuses Olasky of arrogance in claiming the ability to determine the “God’s-eye view” of most issues. In fact, how-ever, Olasky presents six categories of issues in descending order of certainty. Only “class one” issues include an “explicit biblical embrace or condemnation.” Every other class allows for some measure of disagreement among Christians seeking to apply biblical principles to twentieth-century life.

As an example of Olasky’s arrogance, Stafford includes the following quote: “Biblical ob-jectivity means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools.” What he fails to mention is that Olasky is illustrating a class-two issue, one with only an “implicit biblical position.” Just before the controversial quote, in fact, Olasky nuances the issue: “Even though there is no explicit biblical injunction to place children in Christian or home schools, the emphasis on providing a godly education under parental supervision is clear.” Does this change the conclusion? No, but it does perhaps help to provide a flesh-and-blood portrait of Olasky rather than a caricature with a god-complex.

As a national correspondent for World magazine (which Olasky edits), I can testify that the values of directed reporting–while they may clash with traditional conceptions of media objectivity–do not preclude really listening to interview sources, as Stafford would suggest. Rarely, in fact, am I given the spin before I begin my reporting. Standard operating procedure is to begin probing and “see what turns up.”

Recently, for instance, I was in Southern California to report on Proposition 187, the state ballot initiative to crack down on illegal immigration. Though I went without any clear idea of a “biblical” position on the issue, my own law-and-order bias led me to favor efforts to crack down on lawbreakers of whatever stripe. However, after interviewing ten believers in Tijuana who had themselves hazarded the border crossing in an effort to support their families, I began to change my mind. The resulting story was full of ambiguities and Catch-22s–hardly the kind of smug reporting one would expect after reading Stafford’s review.

-Bob Jones

Notre Dame, Ind.

The Great Good Of Baseball

Philip Yancey convinces me that writing is a psychotic act. But this is no excuse for his mad judgment that watching two innings of Atlanta Braves baseball was “meaningless.” Yancey does need help, since it is true by definition that watching any innings of any baseball game cannot be meaningless. As one deeply suspicious of therapeutic interventions, I can only hope that Yancey will be helped by some kind of behavior modification so that he will appropriately appreciate the great good that is always present in watching any baseball game, if only for two innings. I certainly would not want Yancey to curtail his writing, but I do hope some friends will help him learn to watch a baseball game; for like writing, watching baseball is an acquired taste that demands great virtue. I like to think of it as that beacon of sanity in a world gone mad.

-Stanley Hauerwas

Duke University

Durham, N.C.

The Bible’s Strangeness

Daniel Taylor’s thoughtful review of Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels [September/October] prompts reflection on the endless challenge of Bible translation. It is true, as Taylor implies, that Price is too quick to reject the dynamic (or functional) equivalence method explicated by Eugene A. Nida and Jan de Waard, which is more sophisticated in its treatment of the text’s original historical sense than Price and other critics allege. Price also dismisses too hastily church-sponsored translations such as the New English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. When dealing with a text whose meaning is as contested as the Bible’s, there is much to be said for translation by an ecumenical committee–even if the committee eschews the sort of literalness Price prefers. Nevertheless, Price does not presume to offer Christians a new standard text; rather, he aims to surprise and enchant readers with the Bible’s strangeness.

Price’s agenda resembles that of the late Jewish philosophers and translators, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose German translation of the Bible sought to preserve Hebrew idiom and poetic structure. In the United States, the Buber-Rosenzweig philosophy of translation recently has been resurrected in the work of Everett Fox, Lawrence Rosenwald, Leora Batnitzky, and others. In his English translation of the Pentateuch [The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Books, 1995], Fox warns readers that they will find “no old friends” in his version of the Scriptures. Similarly, Price’s translation admonishes us to respect the historical distance between biblical times and our own and reminds us yet again that translation, no less than writing itself, is fraught with subjectivity. Thus the work of translation is never final, and no Bible–not even the King James Version–can ever lay claim to universal authority.

-Peter J. Thuesen

Princeton, N.J.

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Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE. November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 3

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On the eve of a presidential election for which I can summon no enthusiasm, I’ve been reading a wonderful book about “the political transformation of twentieth-century America”: The Inheritance: How Three Families Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, by Samuel G. Freedman (Simon & Schuster, 464 pp.; $27.50). Freedman’s thesis is that the Democratic Party coalition that dominated American government from 1932 to 1968 depended heavily on immigrants and their children, especially Jewish and Catholic immigrants. And, Freedman argues, it was the large-scale defection of the grandchildren of those Catholics who religiously voted Democrat in the 1930s that made possible the realignment that issued in the Reagan Revolution and the Republican majority in Congress in 1994. (For a different, though in some ways parallel, take on this slice of history, see Lucas Morel’s review of Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996, by Ronald Radosh, on p. 38 of this issue).

What interests me, though, is not so much the book’s argument as the stories it tells. As in his two previous books, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School and Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church, Freedman has created a powerful documentary narrative rich in individual detail. Here he tells the stories of three Catholic families, one Irish, one Italian, and one Polish, over three generations.

“The annals of politics and power rarely record such names,” Freedman says of his subjects. “History remembers presidents and not the voters who elected them. Yet America bears their imprint of obscure hands, the hands even of the three families. In their story lies the essence of the century.” If he lacks the virtuosity of James Agee, Freedman shares Agee’s passionate commitment to reporting that is faithful to the very texture of life. This is journalism raised to the level of art.

Elsewhere in this issue, political scientist John Green (p. 20) reviews a bagful of new books (and one reissued classic) dealing with Christian involvement in politics. He casts his net widely enough to include both Ralph Reed and Jim Wallis. Even so, one essay-review cannot begin to encompass all the significant new books that consider from various perspectives what it means to be both a Christian and a citizen. Following is a brief listing of several such books (the mention of which here does not preclude a full review in a forthcoming issue).

Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ’s Passion (Baker Book House, 96 pp.; $9.99, paper) consists of a paper by Mark Noll (the inaugural Kuyper Lecture, given at Calvin College in 1995) with responses by James Bratt, Max Stackhouse, and James Skillen and an introduction by Luis Lugo. What is distinctive about Noll’s piece is his emphasis on taking seriously the doctrine of the Incarnation when we attempt to “think and act like Christians in the political sphere.” Both the lecture and the responses are exceedingly sharp and provocative–you’ll finish this little book with your mind buzzing–but it would have been useful to feature one nonacademic respondent who might begin to connect these reflections with the gritty (not to say sleazy) practice of actual politics as described by Freedman.

In A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society

(InterVarsity, 276 pp.; $14.99, paper), Rodney Clapp is concerned not with politics narrowly construed but with the church as “a polis, a political body that promotes and sustains a distinctive way of living in the world.” When the church is seen from this perspective, as “an alternative culture,” then “liturgy is a political activity.” Rather than bemoan the marginalizing of Christianity in twentieth-century America, Clapp suggests that we should seize the opportunity to rescue a true understanding of our character as the people of God in this post-Constantinian age.

If Clapp represents what Ashley Woodiwiss has called the ecclesiocentric perspective in contemporary Christian thought (others engaged in this project include Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank), Robert Wuthnow represents a chastened liberalism with a strong empirical bent. In two new books, Wuthnow continues his remarkable ongoing work, combining in-depth social science research (including extensive first-person interviews) with moral exhortation. In Christianity and Civil Society: The Contemporary Debate (Trinity Press International, 112 pp.; $15), based on the 1996 Rockwell Lectures at Rice University, Wuthnow calls for “sophisticated” dialogue and engagement between Christians and groups with “different values and lifestyles.” (“To be sophisticated . . . means being willing to give up some control over one’s own claims to know the truth, subjecting them to self-evaluation and the critical commentary of others.”) Poor Richard’s Principle: Rediscovering the American Dream Through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money (Princeton University Press, 429 pp.; $24.95) contains the best account I have ever read of the role of money in American life. Read Wuthnow’s chapter, “(Not) Talking About Money,” and see if you don’t agree.

Finally, there is This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity, by Steven J. Keillor (InterVarsity, 464 pp.; $24.99), a stunning reinterpretation of American history that will force readers clear across the political spectrum to reexamine their assumptions. Keillor is a strange new breed of historian, well-schooled in the revisionist scholarship of the last 30 years (which he appropriates with critical discernment), but also unashamed to speak of God’s providence. You will be hearing more about this book, in our pages and elsewhere.

There is no consensus to be found in these books, except perhaps on one point: that Christian belief cannot be zoned off in a private sphere, separate from “politics,” but should inform every aspect of life. Which is precisely what we are trying to practice in this journal.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal

November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 4

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New York University physicist named Alan Sokal played a cruel practical joke this year on the editors of the postmodernist journal Social Text. “Pomos,” as the postmodernists are not-so-affectionately called by other academics, are noted for leftism in politics, relativism in epistemology, and murkiness in expression. Pomo writing is radically skeptical about the objectivity of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. This has led mainstream scientists to denounce the Pomos as enemies of science, far more dangerous than the despised creationists because they hold influential positions in universities.

Alan Sokal is himself a leftist, proud of his stint teaching under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but he is a rationalist–much like the sociologist Todd Gitlin (whose book I reviewed in the previous issue of this journal). To demonstrate that the Pomos are pretentious phonies who give the Left a bad name among sensible people, Sokal stitched together an incoherent article that combined quotations from Pomo authors (including some of the editors of Social Text ) with nonsensical scientific analogies. Then he ponderously titled it “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” signed his name and title, and sent the monstrosity off. The editors, pleased to be taken seriously by a real scientist, published the article in a special issue titled “Science Wars,” which had been meant to rebut their rationalist critics. Sokal then turned the Pomo counterattack into a debacle by gleefully revealing his hoax to the press in the May/June 1996 issue of the journal Lingua Franca.

The fun begins with Sokal’s preposterous title and continues throughout his brilliant parody, but in the endnotes, he really lets rip. You can almost hear him cackling as he crafted these notes, with their superb mimicry of Pomo pieties, their interweaving of genuine references with fabricated sources, and their inside jokes (many of which no doubt will be accessible only to a handful of readers), all conducing to a delicious absurdity. (The very first item in the reference list is the infamous piece by Hunter Havelin Adams III from the African-American Baseline Essays, which Sokal cites with a straight face.) Here is a sample of Sokal’s endnote style:

54. Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and “pro-choice,” so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented by the axiom of choice. But this framework is grossly insufficent for a liberatory mathematics, as was proven long ago by Cohen 1966.

Not since Nabokov’s Pale Fire have the notes to a text so richly rewarded close attention. (The full text of Sokal’s parody is available on his Web page at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/sokal/index.html.)

Commentators from the left and right of the spectrum jumped at the opportunity to ridicule the embarrassed Pomos. The editors made themselves look still worse by their response, saying among other foolish things that the article’s “status as a parody does not alter substantially our interest in the piece itself as a symptomatic document.” That confirmed Sokal’s point that a parody of Pomo science-talk is hard to distinguish from the real thing. The notoriously nihilistic Stanley Fish–who is executive director of Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text–added to the fun by warning that Sokal’s resort to deception would damage the relationship of trust that presently prevails in academic affairs.

Sokal’s prank gave a black eye to an interdisciplinary movement called “science studies.” Science studies is something like anthropology, focusing on the cultural and political aspects of the scientific profession. It includes everything from mainstream social scientists to literary theorists looking for texts to deconstruct. Some resentful scientists dismiss the whole field as a pack of English majors who couldn’t pass freshman calculus, but who presume to treat the scientific community as if it were a primitive tribe with a colorful mythology. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of the more respectable feminist theorists in science studies, complains that her scientific colleagues “readily confuse the analysis of social influence on science with radical subjectivism, mistaking challenges to the autonomy of science with the ‘dogma’ that there exists no external world.”

More discriminating scientists concede that the culture of the scientific community is a legitimate subject of study, and that scientific priorities are sometimes skewed by social factors like money and politics. But they also insist that science continually tests its theories against external reality by experiment, so that, unlike literary studies or philosophy, science produces a continually growing body of reliable, transcultural knowledge. As the physicist Steven Weinberg expressed it (in a fine essay on the Sokal hoax in the New York Review of Books [Aug. 8, 1996, pp. 11-15]), “if we ever discover intelligent creatures on some distant planet and translate their scientific works, we will find that we and they have discovered the same laws.” Scientists may have their prejudices, but these are relatively unimportant if they do not prevent science from progressing steadily toward a truth that is the same for everybody.

Biblical studies provides an analogy. The writers of the four Gospels have differing viewpoints and interests, and this is an interesting subject for scholars. But for believers, such matters are insignificant compared with the fact to which the Gospels all testify, the resurrection of Jesus. If the Resurrection is a fact, then what that fact implies is far more important than the cultural setting of the reporters. When a naturalistic age reinterprets the Resurrection as a myth, however, the mythmakers and their audiences become the main story. For the critics, Jesus himself–the so-called historical Jesus–then becomes something like King Lear. A man by that name may have existed, and perhaps he even had trouble with his daughters, but the Lear we know is the creation of Shakespeare and his culture.

John Horgan’s fascinating collection of interviews with leading scientists provides a very different model of how literary intellectuals might write about scientists. Horgan was an English major who abandoned literary criticism as pointless because it generates nothing but an endless variety of conflicting interpretations. He gravitated toward science as an activity that addresses questions that actually can be answered, and became a highly regarded writer for Scientific American. Far from challenging the objectivity of science, Horgan thinks its very success in discovering universal truth jeopardizes its future. The time is coming, he says, when the big questions that can be answered will have been answered. What will remain is details–filling in the pieces–and speculative theories invoking mathematical entities like superstrings whose physical existence may never be empirically testable.

It is best not to take too literally this “end of science” thesis, which Horgan used as a conversation-opener to give his interviews a common focus. Horgan understands that science still has major puzzles to solve, including the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, and the composition of cold dark matter. His claim is primarily that those puzzles will be solved within the boundaries of present theories, without the need for revolutionary new discoveries. Referring to the standard scientific materialist account of evolution, Horgan explains in curiously religious language that

My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true. Moreover, given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social, and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no great revelations in the future comparable to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick.

Again, Christian theology provides a rough analogy. With the Incarnation, God has spoken definitively. The Holy Spirit still has a lot to do, but Christians expect no comparable future revelation, and we certainly do not expect revealed truth to be replaced by something substantially different. Thus both science and theology affirm that there is a fundamental reality behind the changing patterns of language and culture, and that true knowledge of that reality endures even though various interpretations are culture-bound. Horgan’s prime example of a permanent truth is the Darwinian theory of evolution; I predict that Jesus Christ will be a living reality long after Darwinism has been relegated to the history curriculum.

There is a lot of middle ground between the “end of science” thesis and the “science is just another tribal belief system” thesis. Of course, science can transcend cultural differences to generate objective knowledge on some subjects. Rationalists like to point out that not even Pomos want to fly in an airplane designed by a committee picked for its multicultural diversity. Such examples can be misleading if applied too broadly, however. Science is determined to explain all aspects of reality, and that ambition sometimes tempts scientists to theorize extravagantly from part of the evidence, while ignoring or explaining away the facts that don’t fit the theory. When scientists do that, they really are culture-bound producers of texts. Our children can look forward to finding out whether the major components of the modern myth of creation are as permanent as Horgan thinks, or whether the twenty-first century will experience not the end of science, but the transformation of science.

“Science Wars”: A special issue of Social Text

Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2 (1996)

The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age

By John Horgan

Helix Books/Addison-Wesley

308 pp.; $24

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURENovember/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 5

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Mason’s Retreat

By Christopher Tilghman

Random House

290pp.; $22

It is 1936, and the French liner Normandie is plowing through the North Atlantic toward America. At least one family on its passenger list, the Masons, expatriates of a sort, will never be the same. For the previous dozen years, Edward Mason and his wife, Edith, and their sons, Sebastien and Simon, have lived in England. Edward, trained as an engineer, owns and runs a machine-tool plant in Manchester, but the Depression has nearly wiped him out. For the past few years, the family has lived in a series of increasingly bare or squalid flats, often loaned to them rent-free.

Now Edward is returning the family to an estate he owns in Maryland–as he explains with some irritation to another passenger, the pushy wife of a tire manufacturer from Akron whose husband has been cutting deals with the Germans. What he does not explain is that the estate was bequeathed to him by a dotty aunt, and he has never seen it; the “mansion” on a thousand acres has stood unoccupied during their years in England. Yet Edward has gone even deeper in debt to bring his family across the Atlantic–on a luxury liner, no less–and settle them at this place called (“improbably,” as the narrator puts it) The Retreat.

This narrator, as we learn through the effortless unfolding of his story, is the grandson of Edward Mason. His name is Harry, and his tale opens at a time before he was born. Generational effects, he suggests, are that ingrained, settled, and enduring; he “knows that this story, told to him over and over again for reasons that he can barely imagine, is now his to tell his own children, to be taken well or badly, to be believed wholly or in part, like a kiss.”

As details accumulate in the first dozen pages of Mason’s Retreat, in both broad and subtle strokes, with the assurance of a writer who knows his way, we come to feel we’ve known the Masons, or their exact counterparts, our whole lives. While Edward walks the decks of the Normandie in early morning light with the robust verve of Teddy Roosevelt, looking forward to a big breakfast, his wife, Edith, remains in the family’s three-quarter-scale stateroom, its wood bleached blond, in a frayed terry-cloth bathrobe that is falling open, trying to compose a letter to her parents in Winnetka, Illinois.

Edith is described as dark, with the looks of an Indian, though the hunter-gatherer-settler has passed from her family many generations before, the narrator comments; Edith’s father is a furniture mover with bonded warehouses, who lectures Edward on money. Edith would like merely to describe for her parents the high points of the trip but feels they expect explanations for the family’s return to America. She runs her hand over an exposed thigh.

Finally she pushes away from the desk to check on her sons, sleeping in the neighboring stateroom. Sebastien, the oldest at 14, is capable of moving silently; his father has punished him for eavesdropping, but it does not seem to make him change. From the time he could walk, Sebastien has prowled; when he is motionless, he lurks. As their dwellings became more and more modest over the past few years in England, he suffered cruelly from the lack of privacy; he has always needed more space than most children, and other children, especially, have a way of making him feel crowded.

In these few sentences, the latent tragedy–and I do mean tragedy–at the heart of the Mason family is exposed.

Sebastien, as Edith has feared, is out prowling the ship, and she gently brings her less complex (perhaps even simple, she thinks) son Simon into the world of the waking. He is the father of the book’s masterful narrator, Harry.

A few pages later, Edith tries to imagine the family is “going to a better life,” as a reward to her:

For being, at base, loyal to her husband, as difficult as that has been; for trying to understand his pain over the past several years and for forgiving two dalliances–two that she knows of–with office girls, and the one affair that was really not forgivable, the one that in many ways had killed her joy, just the way the Depression had killed his.

Once in Baltimore, the Masons’ finances are revealed in their awfulness; crowded with their belongings into a hotel room taken on promise of later payment, Edward is down to the coins in his pocket. He has borrowed from Edith’s father, we learn, to finance the trip back to America. Edward arranges with the tenant farmer at the Retreat, McCready, to meet the family at a ferry they must take to the East Shore. But before they leave, Edward, with his practiced geniality, meets a Mr. Hazelton, who claims to be related. A comic encounter with McCready, a kind of redneck, occurs at the ferry dock, and McCready drives the Masons in his musty Ford to the ancestral manor.

Though the reader suspects by now the place will be a shambles, it’s worse: An animal–not a mouse or a rat, but something large, like a fox or a dog–had died long ago in the center of the hall, leaving only the black stain of its dried juices and a moldy skeleton. In the dining room, there was a table for twenty-four that was covered by a confused jumble of plaster and lath, rodent nests and locust cocoons, all of it given forth from a rotten, water-damaged ceiling.

As the Masons explore the house and it yields its contents–“pictures rising three-high on the walls, every horizontal surface awash in pieces of art, items of interest, objects of brass and stone,” along with piles of silver in pantries–it begins to assume the life of a separate character, as a central setting should. As does the Chesapeake Bay area, wonderfully depicted.

There are black servants and workmen who go with the Retreat, and once the Masons arrive, as a buffer against ghosts (as it is interpreted), two women take over the house for Edith. Edward examines McCready’s books, finding them wonderfully in order, and realizes that the Retreat’s farm, largely a dairy operation, can support the family. He can maybe even pay back his father-in-law before he sets his lawyers on him, as he has threatened.

Simon’s relationship with Edward deepens, and in an excess of emotion, Edward says to his young son, indicating the Retreat, “All of this is yours, Simon”–then realizes that this should be addressed to Sebastien, the oldest.

Sebastien meanwhile is flourishing. He loves the open spaces, the farm work, the sunlight and sea air. He falls in love with Robert, a black man who is McCready’s most valuable worker–or if not love, the unwavering admiration a boy of 14 develops for a resourceful man of physical accomplishment.

As Edith muses, “The people and the farm itself seemed to have accepted Sebastien as a native son, just as this household seemed to have made room for her and Simon. But there was no place waiting for [Edward], just an owner’s prerogative, more respected the less it was used.” It is unfortunate, but perhaps expected, that Edward is determined to use it more. He wants to reinstate, after his suspect aunt, a registered herd of cattle, though both Robert and McCready warn him they won’t be profitable in the present economy; World War II is rumbling into place. Each historical detail is artfully placed in the filling jigsaw puzzle of the story, now firmly outlined.

The registered herd is not successful, as might also be expected, and Edward takes the failure nearly as a personal affront. In the interim, a beautiful yacht appears at the neglected dock of the Retreat, piloted by the “relative” Edward met in Baltimore, Hazelton. With him is his son Thomas, thirtyish, who confides privately to Edith, “My father is hopeless. He isn’t a Mason, Edith, not even by the tiniest drop of blood. My father is a Jew. His parents were born in Poland.”

Together, only moments after they’ve met, they conspire not to reveal Hazelton’s impersonation to Edward, for the pleasure the elderly Hazelton derives from it. The Masons invite the Hazeltons to dinner, and Edith feverishly dresses as she did when she had hope, then looks out her bedroom window where

she could see the mast of the boat, and then a line of movement through the cattails, and then the guests emerged, magical visitors from the sea. It was suddenly many years ago in Edith’s mind, perhaps many decades, perhaps an earlier era, and she was hiding in this protected vantage point like the daughter of the house, spying down for a look at the young man whose black tie was now being set straight by his father, and perhaps he was the girl’s only love since childhood.

The die is cast; Edith and Tom, after prying at one another to remove further barriers, enter into an adulterous relationship. They are abetted in this by Edward’s increasing absences. He not only travels to Baltimore, to sell some of the best pieces of silver from the pantries, but eventually sails again to England. History has vindicated him. His machine-tool plant is valuable to the war effort. He has already foolishly worked himself into a corner with McCready, encouraging him to buy the tractor the tenant has always wanted, for instance, and in a moment of utter thoughtlessness and disregard for the rest of the family, he allows McCready to buy all the land of the Retreat.

This brings death to the family, both metaphorical and literal, although Edith’s affair and Edward’s continuing dalliances, only hinted at, have begun the decay. And with the impending death, and then the death itself, the note of tragedy resounds though the whole of Mason’s Retreat–not the casually arranged catharsis of melodrama, but hard-won, and deepened by Tilghman’s undistanced emotional commitment.

I say hard-won because the prose has a frangibilty or brittleness at points, constructed with such scrupulous concern it seems nailed to the page, as though it better not dare move, and so conveys at times a sense of datedness. Rather than pouncing on some egregious examples (those moments when a novelist simply gives out), I will point to previous quotes I largely admire: Edward has punished Sebastien for eavesdropping, we read, “but it does not seem to make him change,” a phrase that seems leaned on too hard, when “it doesn’t seem to change him” would do as well and is more relaxed and direct; the jumble on the table being “given forth” seems an archaism; and “perhaps an earlier era” in the last quote seems to betray a need to drive home one nail too many.

Decades ago, when John Updike was an ambitious young writer, he said about the carefully fashioned prose of Saul Bellow that it was a style that gathered lint. Dandy lint, he added. But lint nonetheless. Indeed, Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March feel heavily breathed over here in the present, as Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King do not. As Bellow advanced in his work, he seemed to settle with confidence into the art of being a narrator, not a stylist–when it would seem that style, to judge by the prose, was the impetus behind his early writing.

I think I sense what Tilghman hopes to do–suggest or hint at the stateliness of another time. (This is certainly clear in the speech of most of the characters, especially Edward Mason, although the speech of none of the family approaches 1930s British idiom, even though the Masons have lived there for a dozen years; both Sebastien and Simon were born and raised there before the family’s return to America.) When stretches of narrative attempt to match the cadences of perhaps an earlier era, however, the writer runs the risk of mannerism. The work of James Gould Cozzens, greatly admired in its time (and especially his most popular novel, By Love Possessed ), now bears that stamp. Cozzens’s stately unfolding sentences give off a whiff of mothballs at most turns; the crafted texture of his work that won it so many awards (and it often indeed contains true acuity of insight into character) can seem merely fussy. Prose that is self-conscious of its contours dates at least as fast as the human body, not to mention the fashions we hide it under. We all are, to a certain degree, the children of our time.

Tilghman generally treads the dangerous tightrope he has stretched for himself with extraordinary grace. So when one finds oneself wanting to remonstrate with him in this way (as I do), as one might with Dos Passos or Faulkner about their quirks and locutions, a reminder is in order: Mason’s Retreat is only Tilghman’s second book; his first was In a Father’s Place (1990), a short-story collection many cuts above most. This is his first novel. And with that reminder the magnitude of his accomplishment stands clear.

None of Mason’s Retreat contains any of the self-congratulatory languor (if not verbal clangor) that limits the work of otherwise excellent writers who seem to be afraid that you will not notice how excellent they are. They’ll go nameless.

Prose that goes at reality head-on, as in Tolstoy, or entangles itself so much with reality that it appears to enwrap it or still it within another dimension, as in Updike, is the prose a storyteller should pursue. Novels must be as closely written as short stories, sentence by sentence, and they pursue the same accuracy. But the glory of a novel is that it can break into airborne sections that feel wholly governed by the narrative’s pace, and take their accuracy from pawing toward that speed. Tilghman seems to understand and to aim for this and does achieve it during Sebastien’s sail across Chesapeake Bay to hide from his parents.

And it is exactly here that the sonorous note of true tragedy, as exemplified by the Greeks or, even better, Shakespeare, begins to mount through Mason’s Retreat. That tragedy always arrives through locomotion, with a speed that can blur, like a collapsing wave, should be apparent when we think of the reckless way in which Shakespeare poured words through a king on his way down–that gabby storyteller whose store of words opened wider as he ran so the right ones rose to each occasion.

Mason’s Retreat is true tragedy in the American vein–not as in Fitzgerald, whose central quest is for Eldorado (though that is here), but as in Faulkner and Willa Cather. If Tilghman is measured against near contemporaries who sensed the potential in Salinger’s domestic upheavals and took off from there–Roth and Updike, Paley and Munro, for example–he rises to the mark in every instance. His concern, as in Cather, is with characters such as Oedipus or Lear or Othello, who commit insupportable acts against a spouse or a family, transgress against the balances that inhere in the universe–those unalterable armies of the law of God–and so bring about death and the fall of an entire household from grace.

It is a measure of Tilghman’s art that he doesn’t point a finger, or shake it with a superior moral sense at the offenders. All have sinned, as his novel clearly reveals, all have fallen short of the glory and perfection set before them-all the Mason family and its adherents have, the children as surely as the parents. Yet it is the parents’ failure or refusal to contain their children’s boundaries that brings about the destruction of life–a final feeling most readers will carry from Mason’s Retreat, once they surface from the awful death that takes place.

The title itself suggests the culpability of the parents, and the possessive apostrophe could as well fall after the s. Both parents have retreated in their separate ways from Sebastien and Simon, Edward in the fussy self-importance that undermines his business ventures, Edith in the sensuality she must conceal, especially from her sons.

The clearest and most salutary way to describe this book, perhaps, is that it is a biblical novel. It hews to a standard, the revealed Word of God, even though Edward may quote those very words to mock them. Mason’s Retreat evokes the terror and pity that the Greeks set as their standard but that can be found in its full expression only in the Bible, in those narrative passages that begin to edge near to the actual majesty of God or the bloody human sacrifice of his own son. And finally it seethes with the grace that only an insupportable sacrifice has the power to arouse.

Larry Woiwode is the author of many books, including most recently Silent Passengers, a collection of stories, and Acts, a meditation on the Book of Acts.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 8

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Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

By Michael Behe

Free Press

307pp.; $25

When light strikes the retina, a photon is absorbed by a molecule called cis-retinal, which causes it to change to trans-retinal.” Such scientific jargon was unfamiliar terrain for a Washington, D.C., think tank, and the audience grew hushed.

“The change in retinal forces a corresponding change in the protein rhodopsin, which allows it to interact with another protein called transducin.” Glances shot around the room as members of the audience furtively sought out others who were equally mystified.

“Transducin dissociates from a small molecule called GDP and binds to a different molecule called GTP, and this complex binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase. . . .” For several minutes the polysyllabic mysteries piled up, until finally embarrassed laughter broke out. But Michael Behe had made his point: Speaking to a group of educated nonscientists, he had walked them through the complex molecular interactions required for vision in a way they will never forget.

Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, does the same thing for readers, painting a vivid picture of the cell’s complexity. But his purpose is not simply to give a charming exposition of popular science, it is to challenge the Darwinist hegemony in biology.

Behe’s thesis is that life depends on a host of molecular systems that are irreducibly complex, a phrase he introduces to indicate that such systems consist of several interlocking parts, all of which must be in place before they can function. And since Darwinian processes kick in only after there is minimal function, the origin of an irreducibly complex system is out of reach of standard Darwinian explanations.

As an analogy, Behe invokes the humble mousetrap: You cannot start with a wooden platform and catch a few mice, add a spring and catch a few more mice, add a hammer, and so on, with gradual improvement of function. To function at all, a mousetrap requires a minimum number of interacting parts assembled from the outset. By the same token, an irreducibly complex organic system like vision must be assembled all at once. It cannot appear gradually, piece by piece. But the heart of Darwinism is precisely such a gradualist scenario.

Darwin himself obligingly offered a way to falsify his theory, writing: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Behe’s point is that the cell is chock full of molecular systems that could not have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications. Ergo, Darwinism has broken down.

To be fair to Darwin, he proposed his theory when scientists knew next to nothing about biochemistry. Living things were “black boxes,” their inside workings a mystery. The cell itself was thought to be nothing more than a blob of jellylike protoplasm. It was easy to draw large-scale scenarios about fins gradually turning into legs, or legs into wings, since no one had a clue how limbs and organs work from the inside. As Behe writes, it is as though we asked how a stereo system is made and someone answered, “by plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.”

Today that kind of answer won’t cut it, Behe insists. The “black box” of the cell has been opened, and biologists are intimately familiar with its inside workings–its nuts and bolts. In terms of biological function, molecules are “the bedrock of nature,” Behe writes. “Lower we cannot go.” Any theory of the origin of living things must explain molecular systems.

Consider the origin of vision, a problem Darwin said made him shudder. Richard Dawkins, a contemporary Darwinist, brushes it off as no problem whatsoever: We simply begin with a light-sensitive spot, Dawkins writes, move to a group of cells cupped to focus light better, and continue through a graded series of infinitesimal improvements to a true lens. The sequence is quite persuasive on the surface. But what about under the surface? To function, Behe points out, even Dawkins’s light-sensitive spot requires a cascade of factors, starting with cis-retinal and rhodopsin. About these complex molecular systems Dawkins is silent. And as for those cupped cells, dozens of proteins are involved in controlling shape and structure. About these complex proteins Dawkins says nary a word. It is the old strategy of telling us stereos are made by plugging in speakers and a CD player.

What we really want to know is whether Darwinism can explain how the speakers and CD players themselves were assembled. Behe maintains that it cannot, and offers two types of arguments. On one hand, he has combed the scientific literature and made the astonishing discovery that there are virtually no professional papers proposing detailed, testable hypotheses about the evolution of complex molecular structures. Explanations simply do not exist. And the reason they are nonexistent, Behe says, delivering his second punch, is that Darwinian explanations of irreducibly complex systems are exceedingly implausible.

At the heart of the book are five chapters that drive the point home by describing different types of irreducible complexity. Some systems consist of interdependent parts that must be assembled all at once, like our mousetrap. An example is the hairlike cilium, which functions like an oar and requires the interplay of more than 200 different proteins. Other systems are sequential, like a Rube Goldberg machine. An example is the blood-clotting mechanism, in which numerous steps are exquisitely timed by a series of catalysts to ensure that blood clots at the site of a wound and at no other place or time. Still other systems depend on delicate recognition signals. Certain molecules in the cell act as transport vessels that must recognize the right “pick-up” and “drop-off” zones, as well as the right materials to carry. Readers who follow Behe’s discussion example by example will find it hard not to agree that the complexity of these molecular systems is indeed irreducible–that they could not arise by any step-by-step, Darwinian process.

What alternative does Behe offer? Intelligent design theory. Structures that consist of interacting, co-adapted parts, he argues, are evidence of a purposeful, intelligent agent. At this point, many readers may balk, objecting that science is not equipped to deal with anything outside nature. To which Behe replies: Catch up with the late-twentieth century. It was 60 years ago that the Big Bang theory was proposed, and cosmologists had to confront the idea of an ultimate origin of the universe-no matter how philosophically “repugnant” (A. S. Eddington’s word) they found that idea because of its implication of a personal creator. Now it is biology’s turn to recognize that its data may likewise have discomfiting implications.

Behe is careful to limit his own discussion to that data and its immediate implications. Thus he denies that we can reason from design in nature to the existence of the Christian God. All we can say is that a natural object exhibits the characteristics of intelligent manufacture–no more. In Behe’s words, “inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer.” We might select a candidate based on philosophical or theological grounds but not on scientific grounds.

Behe’s tight focus on scientific data means he treats historical and philosophical issues only gingerly. Except for brief (though illuminating) discussions of Paley and Socrates, we hear little about the history of the concept of design. No mention is made of Georges Cuvier, who in the nineteenth century developed a similar notion of irreducible complexity (calling it “the correlation of parts”). Nor is there any discussion of contemporary proponents of design theory, such as Michael Denton (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis ) or Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (The Mystery of Life’s Origin ).

This narrow lens may be frustrating to some readers, and yet adopting it was probably good strategy. Behe is an associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, and he stays squarely within his own field of expertise. He crafts one basic argument, and he crafts it well. Even secular scientists grant him grudging praise. Alan Wolffe at the National Institutes of Health does not share Behe’s notion of intelligent design, yet he praises the quality of the book’s argument, saying that it “exposes our lack of knowledge concerning biochemical evolution.” Robert Shapiro at New York University, author of Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, says Behe “demonstrates clearly that current scientific theories cannot tell us the way in which this complexity [of life] arose from non-living matter.”

Despite the clarity of Behe’s writing, a few points may leave readers puzzled. Is Behe a creationist? He explicitly eschews the term. Though a Roman Catholic, he accepted Darwinism for many years without sensing any contradiction with his faith, and still accepts the idea of common descent. The conclusion of design is drawn from scientific data, he insists, and “not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs.” It is significant that the book came out from a major New York publisher, not a religious publishing house. Yet Behe may protest a bit too much. He rejects the label “creationist” only by limiting the term narrowly to those who insist on a young Earth (about 10,000 years old)–thus disqualifying a host of people who consider themselves creationists. Similarly, Behe accepts common descent only by giving that term a highly atypical definition. His idea is that an original one-celled organism contained the information for all subsequent biological development, which advanced through multiple, coordinated changes in large, sudden leaps (akin to Richard Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monster” theory except that the monsters appear not by luck but through the unfolding of an implicit design).

Behe’s book makes a powerful contribution to the literature on the Darwin controversy. The black box has been opened. Biologists had better get ready to face the implications of what they find there.

Nancy Pearcey is fellow and political director of the Wilberforce Forum and coauthor, with Charles Thaxton, of The soul of Science (Crossway).

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 10

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Does Trainspotting invest heroin addiction with a hip seductiveness, or is it simply uncommonly honest about both the pleasures and the price of drugs?

Three Edinburgh boys, midtwenties working-class, like heroin a lot. They each have a habit, on-again, off-again. A few years of their story is recalled by the liveliest, Renton (Ewan McGregor), whose voiceover riffs convey his strangely winsome view of potent drugs in his unlovely life. The world according to Renton, which is the substance of Trainspotting, features his take on drugs, bourgeois life, and meaning in general, and it is Renton’s voice that gives this episodic movie a kind of animating juice and coherence.

By any measure, Trainspotting is a bold flick: first, for its style, which has an in-your-face panache, and, second, for the view of addiction that the style serves up, a matter that gets murky fast and stays that way. For both reasons, but mostly for the ambiguities of “message,” the film has gotten huge press, audiences, and fuss on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, a movie that makes junkiehood look defensible or hip is a rare departure, for we have had anti-addiction pics aplenty. And in the present climate of American politics, the question of how to read the film quickly becomes yet another spat in the culture feud.

Exactly where Trainspotting comes out on drug use is the big question, and it is not easy to answer because the film is at odds with itself. In midstream, it abruptly changes tone and direction while still sustaining its ambiguities to the last shot. The story starts with a plain giddy, almost wild infatuation with drugs. Cinematically that is pulled off by director Danny Boyle’s kinetic camera and breakneck editing–a melange with kick, something of an urban Scot rap video.

The word critics repeatedly use to describe Trainspotting is “energy.” Fren-zied or manic might be more like it: there are long stretches when the average shot lasts somewhere between one and three seconds. The viewer is whirled and pulled along, trying to figure out who’s who, what’s happening, and, in perhaps the biggest challenge, what’s being said amid the thick, and often very scabrous, urban Scots dialect. Happily, the speeches of the thug Begbie (Robert Carlyle) never do come very clear.

Throughout, the view and voice belong to Renton, the poet-talker among his “mates,” and gab he does on just about everything, with vitality, intelligence, hipness, and candor about himself and his world, as cracked and bleak as both may be. The opening voiceover aria (spoken while Renton the shoplifter runs from security guards) mocks the notion that one must “choose life.” Instead, with abundant existential cheek, “I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reason? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin,” which he takes not because he’s stupid, but for its sheer intense pleasure: “Take the best org*sm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you’re nowhere near it.” Moreover, says Renton, “a sincere and truthful junk habit” constitutes the simple life, a pure and single-minded alternative to the cloying worries of middle-class existence. All that counts is doping and resupply to dope again; all else is bother and dross.

It is not that Renton and his crowd embrace the usual apologetic for drug use. They do not deem themselves economically oppressed; to victimhood, they make no pretense. What pushes them to drugs is what these days passes for “life”–a pervasive ether of petty materialism, an evasive banality that our tawdry commercialism celebrates as the fullness of being. Renton cannot abide a life on the “couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f– – junk food in your mouth” only to rot “away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f– – brats you have spawned to replace yourself.”

Romance and marriage offer no more than rutting and bother. Nor is friendship all that it’s cracked up to be. One of the group, Spud (Ewen Bremner), is a standard putz, aping coolness in laughable ways; another crony, a dapper fellow called Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), knows only, and obsessively, James Bond movies; and Begbie, a violence-tripping alcoholic, “does” people instead of drugs. For Renton, the “awful” part of being clean is having “to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness,” for they remind him “so much of myself I could hardly bear to look at them.” And family, well, while Renton’s parents seem nice working-class folks, Mom is a clandestine pill-popper. And so it goes.

When all the boys get clean, more or less, they find themselves aimless and mightily “bored.” Renton and Sick Boy amuse themselves with adolescent pranks. Or with women, and these encounters play as grotesquely comic mishaps. Or with excursions, such as a hike on the starkly empty Scottish mountainsides, which seem an apt symbol for the culture as a whole. So bland is this world that the boys make “a healthy, informed, democratic decision to get back on drugs as soon as possible.” After all, heroin has got “great personality,” says Sick Boy, just like the perfect James Bond heroine.

All this gets spelled out in the first half of the film, and it plays mostly as jaunty high-jinks comedy. Whenever Trainspotting approaches some realism about drugs, it promptly seems to undercut itself. In the film’s most outrageous sequence, Renton has decided to kick skag by going cold turkey, except for one last opium slam to ease him down. All he can locate are a couple of suppositories, which he duly inserts. Before those take hold, the effects of his last heroin dose wear off, and that poses a problem. Heroin constipates, and on his walk home, Renton doubles over with bowel spasms, and without a toilet in sight. He ends up in a facility captioned “the worst toilet in Scotland,” and the place really is a retching offense–ooze and offal swamp the floor and mold-green walls. Renton squats on the filthy rim, promptly evacuating only to remember too late the location of his last fix. Desperate, he kneels over the rim, gagging, thrusting his arm through the stool to find his lost treasure. Now that sequence is, to say the least, rather off-putting, and is oft cited as the evidence of the film’s earnest opposition to drugs. See: this is what can happen to you, downright put you right in the toilet, swishing through excrement to find a fix. The scene is a jolt and a good one at that.

However, what follows subverts this feint toward realism. Unable to find his stash, Renton lowers his face to peer into the bowl, only to be followed by his torso and legs as he dives through into an ecstatic world of sewer where he finds his brightly shining pearls (of great price?). Perhaps here is mordant satire or prophetic metaphor, something about the ignominy or glory of addiction, but to audiences the toilet dive plays funny–first the wince and then the laugh. And in either case, what this means for the gist of the film remains wholly unclear. One sequence after another ends with the comic snipe that dilutes its power.

The second half of Trainspotting shifts in substance and style. Something of a plot emerges, the pace slackens, and Renton wises up (and so maybe do audiences). Compared to the first part, the second seems almost meditative. Scenes last long enough for audiences to absorb their thematic and emotional clout, and the gist of events is grim. The neglected baby of a woman junkie friend suddenly dies, Spud goes to prison, Sick Boy turns mean, a pal dies of AIDS, and Begbie goes even more nutsy violent. Renton has an ugly detox and finds a job in London renting flats. The group ends up together in a drug deal, and in the last minutes, Renton swipes the proceeds for himself, again a thief and on the run, quite as he was in the beginning.

So what’s the difference, then, between the start and the finish? Mostly the drug scene has gone grim, exacting its slow, certain toll. As for the drugs themselves and their far-gone bliss, they retain all their original luster. It’s the stuff that goes with the drugs that makes Renton light out for the middle class: his futile, no-win friends, thugs and slackers all; illness and early death; the endless predatory hustle of resupply; and always the gnawing emptiness, the unkillable anomie. Still, even with 14,000 quid in his pocket, leaving the scene is not a happy choice, for the alternative is not so hot. In the parting voiceover as he walks off with the loot, Renton asserts his desire to “choose life” by going straight and accomplishing essential moral change. Again irony subverts, and his vows end up a threat: “I am going to be just like you: the job, the family, the f– – big television, the washing machine . . . dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisurewear . . . clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, to the day you die.” Et cetera.

Trainspotting is about drug use and, yes, in some small way labors to understand its appeal; but for novelist Irvine Welsh and screenwriter-physician John Hodge, who adapted Welsh’s best-selling novel, more is at stake than just saying no or choosing life. The unsettling thing about Trainspotting is the questions that double back on mainstream culture’s blithe nostrums about clean living. So we don’t use drugs; now what?

Ultimately, like Renton, the viewer runs smack into the discomforting fact of the West’s prevailing cultural depletion. After all, working-class taste differs little from glitterati indulgence. Trainspotting depicts the tragedy of a culture defined by sensate commercialism, a social enterprise that, in behalf of making a good profit, diverts and ultimately numbs the soul. And the horizon offers little else. The priapic James Bond takes us nowhere. That being the case, we all might just as well sit around and spot trains, for there is nothing else about to amuse or summon the withering heart.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 12

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After enjoying a devoted following on the cable network Comedy Central since 1993, Politically Incorrect is poised for a pop-culture breakthrough: In January, it will move to ABC, where it will follow a more serious approach to current events-a little show called Nightline. This young, scrappy program deserves the wider exposure, because in terms of breadth (if not always depth), it is the Mars Hill of popular television. Where else would the maverick Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong discuss theology with Ian Anderson, lead singer of Jethro Tull?

Like the Greek philosophers described in Acts 17:16-34, pi creator and host Bill Maher shows a boundless intellectual curiosity, but the show’s endless fascination with the new precludes finding authoritative truth in ancient sources. Maher has an infectious laugh, but the constant efforts at building a better one-liner sacrifice insight for a quick jolt of humor. And on the great Stoic-Epicurean divide, he casts his lot firmly with the Epicureans. (“Now, I’m not recommending excessive drinking, illegal drugs, and fast women–although they’ve always worked for me–but isn’t America all about at least having the choice?”)

Like Mars Hill, Pi has room for all gods; on the show, filmmaker John Milius once described himself as a pagan, to the cheers of the audience. Like Mars Hill, Pi is mostly bemused by Christians who make claims to knowing the one true God.

In its brief history, this irreverent show has addressed an impressive array of topics with moral or religious dimensions. In his book Does Anybody Have a Problem With That? Politically Incorrect’s Greatest Hits (Villard, 1996), Maher writes: –No longer will anyone need to reveal an abusive husband, a money-hungry boy, parents who drove them to murder by callously eating ice cream in front of the tv. Why? Because the last name in blame is now upon us: genetics.

–Recently, there’s been a trend in America that I find very disturbing . . . rewarding immoral and illegal behavior when that behavior is simply not as absolutely awful as it could be. For example, we now give free needles to junkies, which seems to me to be only a step away from giving condoms to rapists.

–My question is, is the downfall in manners merely annoying, or is it a harbinger of the fall of our civilization?

Maher has said that the last thing the world needs is another talk show. “You know, Letterman and Leno and those kind of shows are not like mine, where people come on and talk freely,” he said in Los Angeles magazine (February 1996). “They won’t even let you talk unless you have some act worked up that you can ‘pretell’ them. You can’t just go on and wing it with Dave or Jay.” Maher opens each show with a monologue about the day’s news. Then he introduces the day’s panel, which often balances intellectuals with celebrities, or conservatives with liberals. Tackling such topics as “Moral America,” “Interracial Adoption,” and “Kill the NEA,” he throws Roseanne in with National Review editor John O’Sullivan, or satirist Christopher Buckley alongside rap singer Sister Souljah. “Strange bedfellows are our stock in trade,” Maher said in Rolling Stone (March 21, 1996). “I’ve seen Marion Barry and G. Gordon Liddy become friends on my show. You know why? Because they’d been in the same prison, and they bonded.”

Spong meets Tammy Faye

Maher is the son of a Jewish mother and an Irish-Catholic father, and he jokes frequently about both ancestries. Although his remarks about church are more bitter than humorous, there is a lingering moralism about the man. Consider just one show from this summer. Maher convened a panel to discuss such wide-ranging issues as church burnings, air-conditioned confessionals, guilt, hell, hom*osexuality, Scripture, slavery, heaven, and the fear of death. The invited panelists: John Spong, the Episcopal Church’s idiosyncratic bishop of Newark, New Jersey; Tammy Faye Messner, the former wife of tv evangelist Jim Bakker; George Wallace (the middle-aged comedian, not the retired governor); and Star Parker, a conservative young black woman who founded the Coalition on Urban Affairs and is married to a priest of the decidedly non-Spongian Charismatic Episcopal Church.

“You all seem to be in a good mood, so let’s talk about church burnings,” Maher deadpanned, beginning a half-hour discussion that, amid frequent chuckling by the panel, illustrated the profound divisions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Star Parker sat in a red jumpsuit next to Spong, who wore the purple shirt of Episcopal bishops. Spong managed a tight smile as Parker spoke, but his eyes winced repeatedly. Tammy Faye Messner, dressed in an understated pantsuit, was her eerily giddy self. Both Messner and Wallace described faith in consumerist language: God wants only the best for you, church should make you feel good, and truth is whatever “works.” Spong preached his familiar message that “all great religious leaders have been accused of heresy,” leaving it to his fans to infer that this gallery of heroes includes one John Spong.

Maher turned his scorn on a new luxury line of confessionals that offered comfortable seating and even air conditioning. “I was raised Catholic, and I remember going to confession, and it was a scary situation,” Maher said. “I think religion should be scary, and I think this is ridiculous and wrong. . . . You shouldn’t be sitting. You should be kneeling. “

The conversation shifted to hom*osexuality when Maher asked Spong about the recent case against retired bishop Walter Righter, who had ordained an openly hom*osexual man to the diaconate in 1990. “He was acting as my assistant. I asked him to ordain that man, so I take full credit for that,” Spong said as Parker gasped.

Parker and Spong debated briefly about proper understandings of Scripture, but before long the crowd cheered Spong and drowned out Parker as she tried to speak.

“Why is hom*osexuality evil, intrinsically?” Maher asked Parker.

“Do you want me to give you Scripture references?” Parker said.

“No,” Maher said, “because that wouldn’t convince me.”

A new mission field?

Like other panelists, Christians tend to get onto pi only if they are celebrities or flamboyant. John Lofton, the double-barreled conservative and Calvinist syndicated columnist, once so agitated Sandra Bernhard, the lesbian comedian and singer, that she spat in his face. pi welcomes Spong periodically as a novelty act–a bishop of an establishment church who publicly denounces the faith he’s supposed to guard. (When Spong appeared with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, he managed to land to the theological left of the rock star.) John Tesh has appeared as a guest, but his faith was difficult to tease apart from his relentless Positive Mental Attitude and his wildly popular New Age wallpaper music.

Cut through Maher’s anger, and there is the soul of a man still looking for truth. “America has become a country where everything that used to be a sin is now a disease,” Maher writes. “The Ten Commandments? Oh, you mean the 12 steps. In a kind of psychological version of the way the government renames certain expenditures so they won’t have to be counted in the budget, Americans have found a way to keep sin ‘off the book.’ “

When the Republican Party met in San Diego in August, the Reverend Jerry Falwell filled in for U.S. Rep. Gary Franks one night on Pi. Maher was visibly grateful to Falwell, and jokingly referred to him as “our savior.” Maher asked Falwell if Jesus would be a Dem-ocrat or a Republican today. “To me, Jesus–with the compassion and all that–seems more like a Democrat,” Maher said, prompting applause and whoops. Falwell said he doesn’t belong to either party, and he doesn’t think Jesus would, either. “It was after I became a born-again Christian that I began voting for candidates, Republican or Democrat, who stand for the moral issues that in my heart I believe the Bible supports.”

In the same show, comedian Al Franken poked fun at Falwell and Oliver North. Col. North complained about the treatment, but Falwell was sanguine: “Bill, you paid me $10,000 to be here tonight, and I don’t mind being insulted at all.” With that sentence, Falwell may have confirmed some of the most cynical assumptions about tv evangelists and filthy lucre, but he also showed the humility of a Christian who knows how to laugh at himself. That’s the only way to survive, much less to gain a hearing, on Politically Incorrect.

Douglas L. LeBlanc contributes to the “Culture Watch” column in Moody Magazine and edits United Voice, a national newpaper that covers the Episcopal Church.

Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE(/I> November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 14

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