In 1986, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority in Bowers, upholding   Georgia  law forbidding sodomy, said:  “Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization.  Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards . . . . [Sir William] Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature’ as an offense of ‘deeper malignity’ than rape, a heinous act ‘the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature’ and ‘a crime not fit to be named.’  To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”  His historical perspective was accurate, and his citing Blackstone revealed his reliance upon one of the masterful authorities in jurisprudence.

Soon thereafter, however, the Court discarded Blackstone and millennia of moral teaching!  Seventeen years after the Bowers decision, the Supreme Court, in   Texas  , reversed itself and effectively legalized sodomy.   A few months later a Massachusetts Supreme Court case ordered the state legislature to draft legislation facilitating same-sex marriage.  Thus we’re alerted to what Alan Sears and Craig Osten consider in The Homosexual Agenda:  Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today Nashville  :  Broadman & Holman, Publishers, c. 2003).  R. Albert Mohler Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recommends the book, declaring that “The sexual revolution of the last half-century amounts to the moist sweeping and significant reordering of human relationships in all of human history.”  The revolution was orchestrated by a cadre of activists who now make “the legitimation and celebration of homosexuality” the next stage of sexual liberation.

Indeed, “As one observer of the homosexual movement [the Orthodox Jewish columnist Don Feder] has warned, ‘Gay activists are sexual Marxists.  Legitimizing same-sex unions as a warm-up act.  Ultimately they want to eliminate any barriers, and signposts, that limit or channel the exercise of human sexuality'” (p. 96).  As is evident in Sweden, they also want to eliminate any criticism, much less opposition, of their behavior.  The Swedish parliament recently forbade “all speech and materials opposing homosexual behavior and other alternative lifestyles. Violators could spend up to four years in jail” (p. 183).  Deeply influenced by sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the Swedes have sought, as Alva Myrdal urged, to treat all adults “in the same manner by society, whether they lived alone or in some sort of common living arrangement.”  Same-sex, as well as heterosexual, “living arrangements” are fine.   In the   U.S.  , under the guise of “hate crimes” legislation largely written to appease homosexual activists, teachers and pastors may very well become liable to prosecution simply for upholding biblical standards regarding sexual conduct.  Indeed, Senator Ted Kennedy, a constant supporter of hate-crimes bills,  has “called religious objections to homosexual behavior ‘an insidious aspect of American life'” (p. 202).

To attain their goals, sexual revolutionaries have known they must destroy (or at least immobilize) the family and the church, the two social institutions most opposed to sexual license.  To expand the definition of “family” to include many sorts of “loving” relationships, to force the church (in the name of “love”) to validate such bonds, has been a basic part of the homosexual agenda.  Courts have increasingly granted gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.  Revealingly, “Al Gore and his wife Tipper donated $50,000 to the Human Rights Campaign to help its ‘FamilyNet’ campaign promote homosexual adoption.  Their book, Joined a the Heart:  The Transformation of the American Family, prominently featured homosexual ‘families'” (p. 111).

One of the longest levers slowly easing the public’s hostility to homosexual activity is the entertainment industry.  Portraying gay and lesbian activities as healthy–and branding any criticism of such as hateful–have become pervasive in films and television.  Comedies have been especially effective by first disarming and then appealing to viewers for “tolerance.”  As Michael Medved noted:  “A Martian gathering evidence about American society, simply by monitoring our television, would certainly assume that there were more gay people in America than there are evangelical Christians” (p. 28).

Despite the ancient opposition of Christians to homosexual acts, today’s Churches have gradually moved from “loving the sinner” to endorsing sodomy as an appropriate expression of sexuality so long as it occurs within the context of “love.”   Though this is most evident in the consecration of an openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, evangelical activists, such as Tony Campolo and his wife Peggy, have aggressively promoted “the radical homosexual agenda (p. 128).  Peggy, particularly, has argued Paul’s apparent condemnation of same-sex relations in “Romans 1 does not apply to monogamous, ‘loving,’ homosexual relationships, and that evangelicals who feel differently than her are ‘grossly misinformed'” (p. 129).  Such statements appear in one of the books’ most disquieting chapters, entitled “The Silence (and Silencing) of the Church.”  Rarely these days does one hear words such as Martin Luther’s:  “The heinous conduct of the people of Sodom is extraordinary, inasmuch as they departed from the natural passion and longing of the male for the female, which was implanted by God, and desired what is altogether contrary to nature.  Whence comes this perversity:  Undoubtedly from Satan, who, after people have once turned away from the fear of God, so powerfully suppresses nature that he beats out the natural desire and stirs up a desire that is contrary to nature'” (p. 123).

In part, as the authors carefully document, Christians have been silenced through violence and intimidation–as when gay activists invaded S. Patrick’s Cathedral and disrupted a mass being conducted by Cardinal John O’Connor.  Others threw condoms in a service of Village Seven Presbyterian Church in   Colorado Springs because a prominent layman, Will Perkins, had supported an amendment to the state constitution which would have banned any preferential treatment of homosexuals.  In part, homosexuals have moved into the church through doors opened by radical feminists “who have tried to reshape the church and the gospel I their own image.  That dodge can be best summarized as ‘the Bible has to be interpreted in the context of the time it was written and therefore that passage is no longer relevant today'” (p. 126).  When churches rewrite the Scripture, using “gender-inclusive language” and approve praying to “Mother and Father God,” there is no reason to deny homosexual arguments regarding a new version of the Christian faith, suited to gay and lesbian desires.

In response to the homosexual agenda, Sears and Osten urge Christians to be true to Scripture and Tradition.  They cite the words of Titus Brandsma, a Dachau  martyr, who said:  “Those who want to win the world for Christ must have the courage to come into conflict with it” (p. 205).  There’s no question that opposing homosexual activists requires courage.  It’s the courage evident in the words of the Anglican archbishop of Sidney, who said:  “‘The Christian Gospel is the insertion of truth into the untrustworthy discourse of the world.  Some of us want to be kind, so loving that we will not speak the truth.  The therapeutic model of pastoral care has been perverted into mere affirmations of human behaviour.  Our love is no love, for it refuses this great test:  will it speak boldly, frankly, truthfully?”  Sadly enough, he continued:  “We have contributed towards the gagging of God, perhaps because we are frightened of suffering.  But there is one fundamental task to which we must be committed, come whatever may:  Speak the truth in love'” (p. 211).

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Christopher Wolfe has edited Same-Sex Matters:  The Challenge of Homosexuality  (Dallas  :  Spence Publishing House, 2000).    In his introductory essay, Wolfe argues that “there is no question that our current family instability–and the growing acceptance of homosexuality–reflects, among other factors, the influence of changing social mores on contraception, premarital sex, cohabitation, and no-fault divorce.”  The moral relativism pervading contemporary culture justifies “whatever is pleasant and does not immediately harm others in some relatively tangible way” (p. 17).     Refusing to condemn fornication and adultery, so long as they involve “consenting adults,” one cannot easily express outrage at homosexual acts.

Patrick Fagan, along with several of the other essayists, roots today’s sexual permissiveness in the contracepting culture that emerged in the 1940s.  He cites Sigmund Freud, interestingly enough, who asserted, “in ‘The Sexual Life of Human Beings’ that the separation of procreation and sexual activity is the most basic of perversions, and that all other sexual perversions are rooted in it:  ‘The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions.  We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it'” (p. 29).  The Anglican Church abandoned its historic opposition to contraception at the Lambeth Conference in 1930, other Protestant denominations soon followed along.

Religious reservations regarding homosexuality were also weakened as divorce and abortion gained acceptance.  Focusing attention on “hard cases,” cultivating compassion for “victims,” effectively pulled public opinion toward greater acceptance of what earlier generations condemned.  Just as “love” grown cold justified divorce so could “love” powerfully felt justify homosexual relationships.  Just as opposition to abortion was effectively branded “hateful” toward women, so opposition to sodomy was labeled “hate” and “homophobia.  Indeed, as Michael Medved makes clear in his essay, “the main threats to the family in America do not come from the gay community.  They come from infidelity, they come from divorce, they come from all the temptations heterosexuals fear and feel in a hedonistic culture” (p. 167).

For anyone interested in Church history, Robert Louis Wilken’s essay, “John Boswell and Historical Scholarship on Homosexuality” is most helpful, since Boswell’s “scholarship” is routinely cited by homosexual activists anxious to suggest that the EarlyChurch tolerated their lifestyle.  Though highly praised by The New York Times and similarly leftist media, Boswell’s work is, in fact, deeply flawed, indeed “bogus.”  His writings, such as Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,  and Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe illustrate “advocacy scholarship, pseudohistorical learning yoked to a cause, tendentious scholarship at the service of social reform, a tract in the culture wars” (p. 198).  From a first-rate scholar such as Wilken, this is a damning indictment.  And it properly extends to all “scholars” who try to reinterpret either biblical or historical materials to “christianize” homosexuality.

The impossibility of doing so becomes clear in Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz’s “Homosexuality and Catholic Doctrine.  After citing the official teaching documents of the Church, Bruskewitz reminds Catholics that their opposition to homosexuality is derived from a theology of creation, crediting Him with the goodness and design of all that is.  By nature, homosexual acts go counter to the created order.  They violate the essence of love.  Livio Melina, a professor of moral theology at the PontificalLateranUniversity in Rome, makes this clear:  “‘In the homosexual act, true reciprocity, which makes the gift of self and the acceptance of the other possible, cannot take place.  By lacking complementarity, each one of the partners remains locked in himself and experiences contact with the other’s body, merely as an opportunity for selfish enjoyment.  At the same time, homosexual activity also involves the illusion of a false intimacy that is obsessively sought and constantly lacking.  The other is not really the other.  He is like the self; in reality, he is only the mirror of the self which confirms it in its own solitude exactly when the encounter is sought.  This pathological narcissism has been identified in the homosexual personality by the studies of many psychologists.  Hence, great instability and promiscuity prevail in the most widespread model of homosexual life, which is why the view advanced by some, of encouraging stable and institutionalized unions, seems completely unrealistic'” (p. 222).

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Though written nearly a decade ago, I still regard Jeffrey Satinover’s Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, 1996) the best book on the subject. The author, a medical doctor, has been involved treating AIDS patients from the beginning of the epidemic’s outbreak in the early ’80s.  He knows the truth and is bold to declare it.  He is also deeply compassionate, distressed by the pain endured by those afflicted with the deadly HIV virus.

The truth is:  like alcoholism, homosexual behavior is deadly.   One study “found that the gay male life span, even apart from AIDS and with a long-term partner, is significantly shorter than that of married men in general by more than three decades.  AIDS further shortens the lie span of homosexual men by more than 7 percent” (p. 69).  They inordinately suffer chronic diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhea, such as hepatitis, rectal cancer, and bowel disorders.  They take their own lives and suffer mentally.

Amazingly, when AIDS began to do its deadly work, “the first priority” in the gay community “was to protect homosexuality itself as a perfectly acceptable, normal, and safe way of life” (p. 15).  Rather than trying to protect individuals from disease, something that would have required amending one’s lifestyle, the gay community orchestrated a political movement designed to protect it, by misleading the public, asserting that homosexuality is genetically programmed, irreversible, and normal.  In fact, there is no evidence for a “gay gene,” and homosexuality is largely a learned behavior.  It can, therefore, be reversed–and thousands of individuals have been restored, through “reparative therapy” to heterosexuality.  And it is, in fact, utterly un-normal, running counter to the most basic laws of nature.

To promote their deceit, homosexual activists engaged, skillfully, in politics!  In the ’70s they persuaded the American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees to declassify homosexuality as a “disorder,” though a large majority of psychiatrists still judged it such.  Political pressure applied behind the scenes, not scientific evidence, dictated the change.  Homosexual activists, by disrupting meetings and intimidating officials, gained “scholarly” validation for their sexual behavior.   The American Psychological Association soon followed suit.  With “science” supporting their cause, homosexuals then turned to legislatures and courts, slowly overturning the nation’s moral consensus.

What’s needed, Satinover says, is a recovery of the Judeo-Christian ethos that once characterized this nation.  Secularists have opened the gates to a resurgent Gnostic paganism, ever tolerant of “diversity” in many forms.  Himself Jewish, Satinover urges Orthodox Jews and Christians to join together in promoting a biblically based public, as well as private, morality.  Sin must be called sin!  Christians, especially, need to recover veneration for the Old Testament Law!  Ultimately, “it is not really a battle over mere sexuality, but rather over which spirit shall claim our allegiance, [for] the cultural and political battle over homosexuality has become in many respects the defining moment for our society.  It has implications that go far beyond the surface matter of ‘gay rights.’  And so the more important dimension of this battle is not the political one, it is the one for the individual human soul” (p. 250).

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In Legislating Immorality:  The Homosexual Movement Comes Out of the Closet (Chicago:  Moody Press, c. 1993), George Grant and Mark A. Horne evaluate the issue from a strongly Evangelical perspective.  Thus their main concern is “an uninformed and compromised church” which needs to discern “that whatever is right is actually good, that whatever is good is actually just, and that whatever is just is actually merciful.  The kindest and most compassionate message Christians can convey to homosexuals and their defenders is an unwavering Biblical message” (p. 5).

The authors provide both contemporary and historical illustrations, showing the pervasiveness of homosexuality, especially in non-Christian cultures.   With the resurgence of paganism in the Enlightenment, the West has increasingly tolerated it.  With refreshing candor, Camille Paglia, a highly secularized writer, asserts:  “Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. . . .  Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken out into the open. . . .  Historiography’s most glaring error has been its assertion that Jude-Christianity defeated paganism.  Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. . . .  A critical point has been reached.  With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media, Judeo-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam I the Middle Ages.  The latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality'” (p. 54).

Homosexuals have successfully infiltrated the media and schools, using their influence to dissolve opposition to their orientation and behavior.  School administrators, such as Joseph Fernandez in New York, seek to impose curricula containing books like Daddy’s Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies, books published by a company “that specializes in subversive homosexual works” (p. 79) and promoting the acceptance of homosexuality.   Though angry parents ousted Fernandez from his position as School Chancellor, the schools for two decades have increasingly urged tolerance–indeed often admiration–for homosexuals.

Churches, too, have eased or eliminated their opposition to homosexual acts.  Mainline denomination, especially, have divided over the issue.  Grant and Horne see this as a symptom of a more basic issue:  their integrity.  For one’s position on homosexuality cannot be severed from “the issue of biblical authority, the nature of church ministry, the scope of church discipline, and the church’s responsibility and relationship to the civil sphere” (p. 165).   Citing official declarations from United Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, et al., the authors demonstrate the degree to which the nation’s churches have gradually embraced the homosexual agenda.  Even self-professed evangelicals, such as Tony Campollo,  Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni, open doors of acceptance to gay rights.

What’s needed, the authors argue, is a recovery of the true biblical and historically Christian position.  In the   Early  Church, believers separated themselves from the sexually perverse Greco-Roman culture.  This included homosexual practices–something staunchly condemned by every extant pre-Constantinian text.  In time, as Christians become numerically dominant, laws reflected their convictions.  Thus Emperor Theodosius, in 390 A.D., “declared sodomy a capital crime and various Christian realms continued to enforce that standard for almost two millennia” (p. 209).

 

            When he argued the case for the ratification of the United States Constitution in Virginia , James Madison, the document’s most influential architect, warned:  “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.”  To protect the people’s freedom, the Constitution balanced powers in the federal government, safeguarding the rule of law from tyrannical usurpers.  Madison ‘s concern for the loss of freedom to “gradual and silent encroachments” was recently revived in an issue of Commentary (October 2003), wherein  distinguished contributors addressed the question:  “Has the Supreme Court Gone Too Far?”  Their essays demonstrate the extent to which recent Supreme Court decisions regarding affirmative action and sodomy–simply the latest of a list of similar judicial edicts–have forced many thoughtful folks to ponder the fate of constitutional law in America . 

            One of the contributors, Lino A. Graglia, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, argued that the Court has abandoned its assigned role–interpreting the Constitution–and now pursues “policy choices” designed to empower an elite, enlightened minority of like-minded liberals.  To Graglia, “Virtually every one of the Court’s rulings of unconstitutionality over the past fifty years–on abortion, capital punishment, criminal procedure, busing for school racial balance, prayer in the schools, government aid to religious schools, public display of religious symbols, pornography, libel, legislative reapportionment, term limits, discrimination on the basis of sex, illegitimacy, alien status, street demonstrations, the employment of Communist-party members in schools and defense plants, vagrancy control, flag burning, and so on–have reflected the views of this same elite. In every case, the Court has invalidated the policy choice made in the ordinary political process, substituting a choice further to the political left. Appointments to the Supreme Court and even to lower courts arc now more contentious than appointments to an administrative agency or even to the Cabinet–matters of political life or death for the cultural elite–because maintaining a liberal activist judiciary is the only means of keeping policymaking out of the control of the American people.”

            Another contributor to the Commentary symposium, Judge Robert H. Bork, had earlier and more amply set forth his views in Coercing Virtue:  The Worldwide Rule of Judges ( Washington :  The AEI Press, 2003).  As the book’s subtitle indicates, Bork believes that judicial activism now threatens peoples’ liberties everywhere, for they “are enacting the agenda of the cultural left” (p. 2).  As tenured members of the intelligentsia (labeled the “New Class” by Bork), judges increasingly consider themselves entitled to impose their political and cultural worldview.  They illustrate what G.K. Chesterton noted as a universal phenomenon:  “In all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. . . .  The men of a clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is the narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell” (Heretics, 5th ed., 1905, pp. 180-181).   C.S. Lewis similarly observed the persistent desire we all possess to enter the “inner ring” and thereby gain power over others. 

            When the “inner ring” consists of irreligious intellectuals, utopian ideologies replace theological dogmas and guide their thinking.  As Max Weber noted, in The Sociology of Religion, intellectuals who reject religion easily embrace “the economic, eschatological faith of socialism.” Most 20th century secular utopians have embraced a socialist agenda and seek to attain it through political means.  “The socialist impulse remains the ruling passion of the New Class” (p. 6), though it now focuses on cultural issues such as sex and education rather than economics.  Modern “liberalism,” with its commitment to social change through political coercion, is thoroughly socialistic, Bork says.  And it is equally authoritarian, for the cultural elites, everywhere failing to persuade the masses to democratically embrace their values, now seek to impose them through the courts. 

            Consequently, “What judges have wrought is a coup d’etat–slow-moving and genteel, but a coup d’etat nonetheless” (p. 13).  They also lend support to a collage of special interest groups–environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism–which share a socialistic commitment to reshaping the world.  Bork’s view was earlier espoused by the esteemed sociologist Robert Nisbet, who  noted that “‘crusading and coercing'” courts have preempted power so as to precipitate “the wholesale reconstruction of American society,” aiming to implement what Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham championed:  “sovereign forces of permanent revolution” (p. 10).  This revolution, embodied in activist judges, is both political and cultural and has significantly, if subtly, replaced “traditional moralities with cultural socialism” (p. 137).   

            Of particular interest to Bork is the internationalization of this agenda.   He devotes two chapters to Canada and Israel , whose courts are on the cusp of judicial activism.  Europe courts such as the International Criminal Court, established in 1998, have become aggressive in asserting the prerogatives of “international law”–generally understood as the edicts of elite tribunals.  “Crimes against humanity” were cited justify legal moves against Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, but not against China’s Li Peng or Cuba’s Fidel Castro!  Wars to combat communism are labeled unjust, whereas wars that advance causes favored by elite jurists are justified for advancing “universal human rights.”  American Supreme Court justices have, alarmingly, begun to cite non-American courts in issuing decisions.  Thus Justice Stephen Breyer has cited court decisions in India , Jamaica , and Zimbabwe !  The U.S. Constitution may have little bearing on the Court’s decisions, but Zimbabwe ‘s jurists apparently do! 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

            ReadingCoercing Virtue prompted me to re-read Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah:  Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York:  ReganBooks, c. 1996), a work of cultural commentary rather than legal analysis.  Modern liberalism, as Bork defines it, espouses apparent antinomies:  radical egalitarianism and radical individualism.  It triumphed as the New Left of the ’60s, represented by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, gained control of the nation’s institutions in the ’90s.   Teaching at Yale Law School , Bork saw a radical change in the class that entered in 1967.  Radicalized in their undergraduate years, they “were angry, intolerant, highly vocal, and case-hardened against logical argument” (p. 36).  Simultaneously angry and hedonistic, crusading for “social justice” and care freely cohabiting, they espoused a nihilism that now pervades the nation. 

            In time, the young radicals took their ideals and became “part of the chattering class, talkers interested in policy, politics, and culture.  They went into politics, print and electronic journalism, church bureaucracies, foundation staffs, Hollywood careers, public interest organizations, anywhere attitudes and opinions could be influenced” (p. 51).  They established a variety of special interest groups–environmental, feminist, abortion rights, ethnic, etc.   And they are leading us, Bork believes, down the slope to moral degradation, Gomorrah !

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

            Judge Bork also wrote an essay for a symposium that was provocatively titled “The End of Democracy?” and published in the journal First Things (November 1996).  At the heart of the controversy, says Richard John Neuhaus, the journal’s editor-in-chief, is the degree to which we still have a constitutional republic.  Neuhaus once attended a conference wherein a legal scholar concluded his presentation with the assertion that ‘we are no longer living under the Constitution of the United States of America .’  To which a Supreme Court justice in  attendance responded, ‘Welcome to the second half of the twentieth century'” (p. 244).  Though many were amused at the moment by the justice’s quip, the truth seems to be that we no longer live under the Constitution ratified in 1789.

            The essays elicited a flurry of controversy, with dozens of responses printed in various periodicals–and in subsequent issues of First Things.  All the relevant materials, plus a lengthy “Anatomy of a Controversy” by Richard John Neuhaus (including the anecdote regarding the Constitution cited in the prior paragraph), were collected into a single volume, edited by Mitchell S. Muncy, entitled The End of Democracy?  The Celebrated First Things Debate with Arguments Pro and Con” (Dallas:   Spence Publishing Company, 1997). 

            The journal’s editors, introducing the essays, wondered “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime” (p. 3).  The term “regime” ignited a storm of protest, but the editors used it by design to indicate the possibility that “we the people” no longer rule our own country.  “Democratic” means too routinely fail to attain the people’s ends and policies they clearly oppose, such as unrestricted abortion rights, are routinely imposed through judicial fiat, as was especially evident in two 1992 Supreme Court decisions:  Romer v. Evans and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

            Such decisions prompted a dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia to declare:  “Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize” (p. 10).  In Romer, the Court overturned the clearly expressed will of the people of Colorado , who had adopted, through a statewide referendum, a constitutional amendment specifically denying homosexuals the special protections and rights granted them by some municipalities.  Commenting on the case, Robert Bork notes that “Romer is a prime instance of ‘constitutional law’ made by sentiment having nothing to do with the Constitution.”  Rather, it established “the newly faddish approval of homosexual conduct among the elite classes from which the justices come and to which most of them respond” (p. 12). 

            Russell Hittinger, a professor of law at Tulsa University , argues that the amazing claims set forth by the Court in Casey asserted that even if Roe v. Wade was legally questionable it was legitimate since the American people had accepted it as law.  One of the dissenting justices, Byron White, called his colleagues’ decision in Roe an “exercise of raw judicial power,” and Casey locked in concrete that decision, making “abortion the benchmark of it is own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant” (p. 18).  The Court behaves as if the American people had established a new “regime” ruled by judicial edicts, not legislative enactments.  After examining crucial decisions, Hittinger asserts that the new regime is “a very bad regime” (p. 27) because it leaves the weakest among us–the unborn children and the helplessly infirm–at the mercy of those who want them dead.  It excludes the people from political power, rightly exercised through legislative elections and deliberations.  And, sadly enough “it has made what used to be its most loyal citizens–religious believers–enemies of the common good whenever their convictions touch upon public things” (p. 28). 

              Hadley Arkes, a professor of law at Amherst College when the essays were published, carefully considers the implications of Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court decision which nullified a constitutional amendment secured through a referendum whereby the people of Colorado sought to invalidate the preferential treatment homosexual activists had secured in certain localities.  This decision illustrates the propensity of judges to “advance the interests of gay rights and other parts of the liberal agenda” (p. 31).  Ultimately, Arkes insisted, the gay activists want to redefine the family and legalize same-sex marriages.  This is evident in the words of Nan Hunter, a lesbian activist Bill Clinton appointed, in 1993, “deputy general counsel/legal counsel” in the Department of Health and Human Services, who sought “to dismantle the legal structure of gender in every marriage'” (p. 35).  Such radical changes, of course, cannot be won through the democratic process, whenever the people are allowed to express and implement their convictions.  Only by enlisting an “enlightened” elite, only by pushing their agenda through the courts, can gay and lesbian activists attain their goals.

            In “Kingdoms in Conflict,” one of the more radical essays in the symposium, Charles Colson argued that we are now witnessing the culmination “of a long process I can only describe as the systematic usurpation of ultimate political power by the American judiciary–a usurpation that compels evangelical Christians and, indeed, all believers to ask sobering questions about the moral legitimacy of the current political order and our allegiance to it” (p. 41).  Supreme Court decisions, especially those securing abortion rights, cannot be prod devout citizens to ponder their allegiance to a regime responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children.  Citing theologians such as Calvin and Aquinas, who endorsed Augustine’s aphorism that “an unjust law is no law at all,” Colson wonders how much more must take place before Christians begin to challenge and even disobey their masters. 

            Sharing Colson’s discontent, Robert P. George, a professor of politics at Princeton University , suggested that we may very well be subjects of “The Tyrant State.”  Though America is still a democratic society, “even a democratic regime may compromise its legitimacy and forfeit its right to the allegiance of its citizens” (p. 54) when it endorses what John Paul II called “the culture of death.”  This has occurred, in the U.S. , primarily through legalized abortion.  Sadly enough, in our democracy “our judges–whose special responsibility it is to preserve the core democratic principle of equality before the law–are the ones whose edicts have betrayed this principle” (p. 56).  Reflecting on what we should do, right now, given the significant freedoms we still enjoy, Professor George urges us to heed Pope John Paul II, “‘to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper names, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception.’  Let us, therefore, speak plainly:  The courts, sometimes abetted by, and almost always acquiesced in, federal and state executives and legislators, have imposed upon the nation immoral policies that pro-life Americans cannot, in conscience accept” (p. 61). 

            These five essays constitute the heart of The End of Democracy.  The rest of the book contains a variety of responses, ranging from letters to First Things to lengthy essays published in other periodicals.  Most of them are quite critical, and some (Peter Berger and Gertrude Himmelfarb) on the editorial board of First Things resigned lest they be implicated in the questioning of America ‘s “democracy.”  Others (James Dobson and Mary Ann Glendon) endorsed the endeavor. 

            What becomes clear, in both the original essays and the responses to them, is the fact that abortion deeply divides this nation.  In an essay for The National Review, a “neoconservative” Jewish writer, William Kristol explained:  “the truth is that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics.  It is where judicial liberation (from the Constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores), and women’s liberation (from natural distinctions) come together.  It is the focal point for liberalism’s simultaneous assault on self-government, morals, and nature.  So, challenging the judicially-imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs” (p. 94). 

            Kristol’s analysis is amplified by Hadley Arkes, on of the original essayists, in an explanation of their intent.  Rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s appeal to the natural law–that by nature all men are entitled to certain rights, especially the right to life, he and other contributors “spoke no treason, and they took care not to incite people to a course of lawlessness.  But . . . we come to the very edge when our government tells us that the killing of unborn children must be regarded as a private right; that we may have no proper concern about the terms on which killing is carried forth in our neighborhoods; and that the meaning of ‘homicide’ is no longer part of the business of people living together in a republic” (p. 169). 

 One of the nation’s finest and most able scholars, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Professor of Social and political Ethics at The University of Chicago, provides helpful perspectives on our nation’s role in the Middle East in Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2003).  Prodded to write after America’s attack by Muslim terrorists, Elshtain defends President Bush’s response, especially when seen in the light of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against America, [entitled] “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (p. 3).  Unlike many naive folks in the West, bin Laden declares that the current conflict is at heart a religious struggle, a rekindling of a battle that has waxed and waned since Mohammed launched his conquests in 622 A.D. 

Summing up bin Laden’s agenda a Yale historian, Donald Kagan, has written:  “he and other terrorists have made it clear that the U.S. is ‘the great Satan,’ the enemy of all they hold dear.  And what these terrorists hold dear includes the establishment of an extreme and reactionary Muslim fundamentalism in all currently Muslim lands, at least which is a considerable portion of the globe.  Such a regime would impose a totalitarian theocracy that would subjugate the mass of people, especially women. . . .  No change of American policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance for past deeds or increase of national modesty can change these things.  Only the destruction of America and its way of life will do, and Osama bin Laden makes no bones about this” (p. 85). 

As a careful philosopher, Elshtain draws important distinctions between the terrorism of bin Laden  the just war tradition that has developed in Christian theology.   Islamic Jihad bears many of the marks of terror!   There is a striking similarity between the “reign of terror” orchestrated by the Jacobins in France in the 1790s and the policies of Moslem jihadists.  Elshtain grasped this when she attended a conference in Jerusalem in 1993 and heard a distinguished scholar, Bassam Tibi, explain that:  “[The] Western distinction between just and unjust wars linked to specific grounds for war is unknown in Islam.  Any war against unbelievers, whatever its immediate ground, is morally justified.  Only in this sense can one distinguish just and unjust wars in Islamic tradition.  When Muslims wage war for the dissemination of Islam, it is a just war. . . .  When non-Muslims attack Muslims, it is an unjust war.  The usual Western interpretation of jihad as a “just war” in the Western sense is, therefore, a misreading of this Islamic concept (emphasis mine)” (p. 131). Islamic jihad is simply a religious version of might-makes-right aggression.  Wars of conquest, waged to expand and install Islam, are just wars; terror tactics, so long as they advance the cause of Islam, are defensible.  The Muslim world is ever at war with the non-Muslim world.

The just war tradition, conversely, has ever sought to distinguish between moral and immoral conduct.  Given human sinfulness, there is a need for government, whose primary responsibility is to protect people.  Thus laws, judges, police, and soldiers are necessary to maintain order and punish evil-doers.  Early Christians, especially Augustine, accepted this and provided guidelines for Christians to follow in supporting the political order.  Elshtain rightly dismisses the historical errors of those who argue that the EarlyChurch was pacifist, indicating that the primary advocates of this position were theologians like Origin and Tertullian “who fell outside the Christian mainstream” (p. 51).  (In fact, soldiers were admired sufficiently to justify branding model Christians milites Christi, soldiers for Christ!)   “Jesus preached no doctrine of universal benevolence.  He showed anger and issued condemnations.  These dimensions of Christ’s life and words tend to be overlooked nowadays as Christian concentrate on God’s love rather than God’s justice.  That love is sometimes reduced to a diffuse benignity that is then enjoined on believers.  This kind of faith descends into sentimentalism fast” (p. 100). 

Following the admirably non-sentimental Augustine, Christian thinkers formulated the just war position, convinced that “To save the lives of others, it may be necessary to imperil and even take the lives of their tormenters” (p. 57).  Careful criteria were enumerated over the centuries and attained something of a consensus in virtually all branches of Christendom.  The late Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the most influential American ethicist of the 20th century, was “hardheaded [in his] insistence that Christianity is not solely a religion of love” (p. 109), showing that love and justice ever work together in solid Christian ethics.

Thus, Elshtain wonders: “is the war against terrorism just?”  After examining the evidence, she responds:  yes it is!  There are, of course, thousands of Elshtain’s colleagues in the academy and pundits in the press who say no!  They resemble, she thinks, the “humanists” portrayed in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.  Such folks refuse to judge things in terms of black and white–all is a fuzzy mixture of gray.  There are many sides to every question and every conclusion must be tentative.  Their talk, their terms, their preferences–but not discomfiting realities–define their world.  Consequently, they “are unwilling or unable to peer into the heart of darkness.  They have banished the word evil from their vocabularies.  Therefore, it cannot really exist.  Confronted by people who mean to kill them and to destroy their society, these well-meaning persons deny the enormity of what is going on” (pp. 1-2).  So, when Ronald Reagan called the U.S.S.R. an “evil empire” a chorus of criticism was unleashed against him.  When George Bush labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea “an axis of evil,” the same singers united in denouncing him. 

In fact, the mark of the modern academic is negativity!   Criticizing, finding fault, disagreeing with traditional views, earns one a seat in the faculty lounge.    As one experienced professor noted, “You don’t get tenure by praising American policy” (p. 88).  In most American universities, professors retain their anti-Vietnam War stance, ever questioning the legitimacy of the military and condemning America’s power in the world.  They seem trapped in a strange time-warp, unable to see the world apart from their youthful anger at the Vietnam engagement.  Thus you find professors alleging that America’s foreign policy is “fascist” and historian Mary Beard actually insisting that “the United States had it coming” when the terrorists attacked the nation on 9/11 (p. 93).         

Something of the same marks mainline churches.  In a chapter entitled “the pulpit responds to terror,” Elshtain demonstrates the degree to which American clergy share the leftism of the academy, for “a position best described as ‘pseudo’ or ‘crypto’ pacifism now dominates, certainly from our mainline pulpits”(p. 112).  Such preachers state the 9/11 devastation was less a murderous attack upon innocent people than a “wake-up call” for us Americans who need to examine ourselves and change our ways, to eliminate the “root causes” of terrorist anger.  A prominent evangelical, Tony Campolo (never one to allow historical ignorance to temper his rhetoric), as well as former President Bill Clinton, harked back to the Crusades, suggesting that Muslim terrorists were simply avenging the evils their ancestors suffered at the hands of Christian Crusaders.  Campolo and Clinton, of course, seemed often mute when confronted with the far greater numbers of Christians who have been slaughtered and enslaved as a result of Islamic Jihad!            Significantly, Albert Camus, in a 1948 statement, insisted that the “Christian has many obligations, and that the world today needs Christians who remain Christians.”  Camus professed that he did not share the Christian hope.  But he did share “the same revulsion from evil” (p. 123).  Elshtain clearly prefers the atheist Camus to the sentimental Christians, arguing that when confronting Terrorisism we must have the courage to both denounce and actively oppose it.   

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Immediately following September 11, 2001, one of the nation’s premier military historians, Victor Davis Hanson, wrote a series of articles that provided Americans historical and analytical insights with which to put things in perspective.  Those essays have been collected and published as An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 And the War on Terrorism (New York: Anchor Books, c. 2002).   “At the very outset,” he says, “I was convinced that September 11 was a landmark event in American history, if not the most calamitous day in our nation’s 225 years” (p. xiii).  In response, “we must be retold that we war to remember the dead, to save the innocent, and to end the violence” (p. 12). 

We must understand the Muslim threat, which Hanson thinks is primarily a reaction against the West’s economic and military success in the Middle East.  Islamists hate Israel primarily because “Israelis have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly, decisively, at will, and without modesty” (p. 195).  Even more, the very existence of Israel illustrates “that it is a nation’s culture–not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves–that determines its wealth or freedom” (p. 195).  Similarly, the United States, both as Israel’s ally and as the world’s foremost example of a successful modern society, incurs Muslim wrath.  “The Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, and other assorted fundamentalists despise the United States for its culture and envy it for its power” (p. 15).  We should have heeded early alarms, such as the PBS documentary, American Jihad, and intelligence reports that showed the rapid growth of terrorists rather openly operating in the United States during the 1990s.  Taking advantage of the freedoms–and frequently generosity–of their host country, they malignantly awaited opportunities to destroy her. 

Importantly, Hanson says, weakness–even the voluntary weakness of pacifism–never copes with the systemic hatred that fuels radical Muslims.  Long ago the Greeks decided that war, though often horrendous, was at times necessary to destroy evil powers and preserve civilization.  Today, if we understand the world, we must understand what we really are fighting for–”preserving Western civilization and its uniquely tolerant and human traditions of freedom, consensual government, disinterested inquiry, and religious and political tolerance” (p. 73).  Only military power can do this.  “It is an iron law of war that overwhelming military superiority, coupled with promises to the defeated of resurrection, defeats terrorists–in the past, now, always–whether they be zealots, dervishes, or Ghost dancers” (p. 155). 

But he wonders if we have the will to empower the military to do the same today.   Americans responded to Pearl Harbor, in 1941, with an anger and resolve that enabled them to support military action, despite horrendous battles, such as that at Okinawa, where kamikaze attacks destroyed 34 American ships and 12,000 servicemen died.  Folks at home wept, but they never marched in the streets demanding an end to the war.  Following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, however, many Americans seemed more fearful of offending Muslims’ feelings than responding with strength to their assault.

As was evident in Vietnam, “One of the first casualties of war is language” (p. 75).  This is often true of those who wage it, but it also distinguishes many of those how oppose it.  Hanson pointedly condemns those American university professors who posture and pontificate while undercutting their nation’s morale.  Having taught at FresnoStateUniversity for two decades, he anticipated that his colleagues would protest any military response to terrorism, such as the attack upon Afghanistan.  The ordinary working class people he knows (in addition to teaching Hanson farms his family farm) supported President Bush’s response.  But “nearly all of the opposition to our conduct in this war was expressed by professors and those in law, the media, government, and entertainment, who as a general rule lead lives rather different from those of most Americans” (p. xvii).  This elite tenth of the population, dominating “the media, the university, politics, foundations, churches, and the arts–is adamantly and vocally at odds with most Americans” (p. 92).  Anti-war protesters, marching in the streets and urged on by folks in classrooms and churches imagine “peace” comes through appeasement.  The courage of Churchill, the toughness of an earlier America, seems absent in too many sectors. 

Though some anti-war rhetoric appeals to an authentic Christian conscience, Hanson argues that it is secular, humanistic pacifists, including the “deviant offspring of the Enlightenment–Marxists and Freudians–[that] gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to ‘prove’ to us that war was always evil and therefore–with help from Ph.D.s–surely preventable” (p. 66).  Consequently:  “Pacifists shamed us into thinking that all wars were bad, relativism convinced us that we are no different from our enemies, conflict resolution and peace studies hectored us that there was no such thing as a moral armed struggle of good against evil” (p. 98), and the nation’s elite chattered about a principled policy of appeasement.

                Hanson reminds us of the intelligentsia’s penchant to distort the truth to serve its own ends.  Remember Vietnam!  American soldiers fought well, but the war was lost when the people lost the will to support it.  Yet the truth was rarely told.  “At the so-called bloodbath at Hue, the U.S. Marines lost 147, killed over 5,000 of the enemy, and freed the city in the worst street-fighting since the Korean War.  The siege of Khe Sahn was an enemy failure and resulted in 50 communist dead for each American lost.  In the horrific Tet offensive, a surprised American military inflicted 40,000 fatalities upon the attackers while losing fewer than 2,000” (p. 20).  Watching Walter Cronkite on CBS–or listening to Peter Arnett’s fabrications on CNN–in those years, however, one would never have guessed that Americans were prevailing in the struggle for Vietnam.                                                      

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Much that Victor Davis Hanson says in his essays grows out of his study of military history.  Carnage and Culture; Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, c. 2001) illustrates the scholarship and analytical skill he brings to the discussion.  Importantly, as he admits, his “interests are in the military power, not the morality of the West” (p. xv), and there is little of the Christian concern for “just war” principles in the book.  He mainly argues that the citizen soldiers of the West, for a variety of sound reasons, have proved militarily superior to tribal warriors (such as Shanka Zulu), mercenaries (such as Hannibal’s corps), and despot’s conscripts (from Darius’ Persians to Japanese aviators).  “Warriors are not necessarily soldiers” (p. 446).

The famed Greek physician Hippocrates’ perceptive observation wears well:   “Now where men are not their own masters and independent, but are ruled by despots, they are not really militarily capable, but only appear to be warlike. . . .  For men’s souls are enslaved and they refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else.  But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory.  So institutions contribute a great deal to military valor” (Airs, Waters, Places {16, 2}).

Hanson begins his book with an examination of the Greeks’ victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 B.C.  The numerical odds certainly favored Xerxes’ forces, but one thing enabled the Greeks to prevail:  personal freedom, eleutheria, something unknown elsewhere in antiquity.  “No Greek citizen could be arbitrarily executed without a trial.  His property was not liable to confiscation except by vote of a council,” and to the Greek “the ability to hold property freely . . . was the foundation of freedom” (p. 36).  At Salamis, the Greeks were not merely resisting a despot’s designs, they were struggling to secure their most absolute moral values.  Free people, as Herodotus emphasized, “are better warriors, since they fight for themselves, their families and property, not for kings, aristocrats, or priests.  They accept a greater degree of discipline than either coerced or hired soldiers” (p. 47).  A century later Aristotle noted: “Infantrymen of the polis think it is a disgraceful thing to run away, and they choose death over safety through flight.  On the other hand, hired soldiers, who rely from the outset on superior strength, fell as soon as they find out they are outnumbered, fearing death more than dishonor” (Nichomachean Ethics {3.1116b16-23}). 

Thus began the West=s military tradition fully evident in republican Rome’s legions.  “The Roman republican army was not merely a machine.  Its real strength lay in the natural elan of the tough yeoman infantry of Italy, the hard-nosed rustics who voted in the local assemblies of the towns and demes of Italy and were every bit as ferocious as the more threatening-looking and larger Europeans to the north.  In the tradition of constitutional governance . . . the Romans had marshaled a nation of free citizens-in-arms” (p. 118).  In fact, the Romans transformed the Greek’s allegiance to the polis and developed “the concept of nation:  Romanness” that extended beyond the barriers of race and geography.  In time, Roman citizenship could be attained and enjoyed throughout the world by those who were willing to assent to and abide by its provisions.  As Hanson catalogues subsequent world-shaping battles at Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, and Midway, it becomes clear that a free people–and only the West granted such freedom–almost always prevails against totalitarian regimes.  Economic freedom, for example, provides the wealth that ultimately translates into superior weapons. 

The final chapter deals with the Vietnam war, with the Tet offensive as the focus.  Hanson demonstrates that the American military fought well and could have won the war.  But the media systematically distorted the truth concerning the war, exaggerating American atrocities and refusing to report far greater Viet Cong atrocities, manipulating the public to support an essentially socialistic agenda.  So too dissenters at home–Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, David Halstrom and Noam Chomsky–helped jaundice the nation concerning the war’s conduct and prospects.  These folks, of course, turned their backs on the millions who were liquidated by Communists when the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia in the 1970s. 

Broad in its scope, Carnage and Culture provides a thoughtful and readable overview of military history, certainly a significant segment of man’s past. 

 

P.C. TYRANNY  

 

                SmithCollege, an elite women’s school, recently decided to eliminate the pronouns “she” and “her” from its student constitution.  This was done, a college representative explained, because “a growing number of students identify themselves as transgender, and say they feel uncomfortable with female pronouns.”  Lest anyone feel “uncomfortable” on campus, free speech is limited.  For more than a decade, SmithCollege administrators have been trying to disabuse students of various prejudices.  Thus any language smacking of oppressive attitudes must be banned.  Categories spelled out for students include: ableism; ageism; classism; heterosexism; lookism; racism; and sexism.  Even positive comments concerning a person’s appearance, it seems, makes one guilty of “lookism.”  Ludicrous as it may seem, such speech codes have become normative on thousands of American campuses. 

                Political correctness has slowly constricted Americans’ ability to speak freely, illustrating Justice Louis D. Brandeis’ warning that “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding” (p. 4).  The “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s 1984 has subtly extended its tentacles throughout America’s culture.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the nation’s schools, as Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, demonstrates in The Language Police (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).  Ravitch has carefully sifted through various state examinations, boards of education policies, and textbook publishers’ guidelines (that often proved difficult to obtain) prescribed by the language police. 

                Some pressure comes from social conservatives.  Fearing to offend them (as in the case of Darwinian evolution or Islam) educators increasingly avoid dealing with subjects that may incite their protests.  Thee religious right clearly wants to censor certain educational materials, but its limited success is evident in the established position still enjoyed by evolution in science texts and curricula.  The secular left, on the other hand, has quite effectively imposed its agenda.  Revering the New Left’s idols of race, class, and gender (standard mantras of current neo-Marxist philosophy), school boards and textbook publishers are carefully imposing a hardened ideology upon the nation’s students. 

                Flying the flag of “multiculturalism,” educators carefully crusade against prejudice and discrimination, even if it means deleting great works of literature and glossing over historical truths.  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, is routinely attacked as a “racist” book and left unread in the schools.  History must be rewritten so as to favorably portray formerly slighted or disparaged groups.  To avoid hints of ethnocentrism, no culture can be called “primitive.”  “Even those that had no literacy and only meager technology are described as advanced, sophisticated, complex, and highly developed” (p. 141).  Democratic, constitutional political systems are no better than dictatorial, nepotistic regimes.  One would never suspect, reading today’s textbooks, that Mao and Castro were brutal, genocidal killers, since they are generally accorded a sympathetic treatment. 

                Accordingly, a widely-used history text, To See a World “lauds every world culture as advanced, complex, and rich with artistic achievement, except for the United States” (p. 142).  Such texts “condemn slavery in the Western world but present slavery in Africa and the Middle East as benign, even as a means of social mobility, by which slaves become family members, respected members of the community, and perhaps achieved prosperity and high office.  The Aztec ritual of human sacrifice is glossed over as something that their religion required to ensure that the sun would rise the next day, a minor detail in what was otherwise a sophisticated and complex culture that valued education and learning” (p. 143). 

                The same slant appears whenever “class” and “gender” are considered.  Today’s language police insist that the “poor” be defended and the “rich” despised.  Mathematics are now be taught to emphasize economic inequalities!  Consider one exam question:   “Jose’s mother is a prizefighter, and his father is a receptionist in a hair salon.  If his mother makes $40,000 in a fight, and his father earns minimus wage, how many years will it take for Jose’s people to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression?”  Marx’s “proletariat” (the working class) now appears under the rubric of the “marginalized” and “exploited” of the world.  To advance their commitment to an egalitarian society, textbooks also portray a utopian world in which “class distinctions did not exist, not now and not in the past, either” (p. 13).  Consequently, Democrats are generally given positive treatment whereas Republicans receive condemnation for their support of the “rich.”            Even more pervasively–and reflecting the powerful presence of feminists in educational circles–there is an effort to abolish “gender” distinctions.  Women must never be presented as homemakers or as even minimally domestic or emotionally tender-hearted.  Men must never be portrayed as brave or strong or working with tools–though it’s fine to show them as weak and emotional.  Men must never be shown to be bigger, or stronger, than women.  Female plumbers are acceptable–males, never!  Female, but never male, attorneys grace the pages of today’s texts.  Daddy may stay at home with the kids, but Mommy always goes to work in a plush office.  In general, the historical role of women is exaggerated and their “rights” and eminence in non-Western cultures falsely portrayed.  Language, especially, must be rigorously controlled in this area.  “Gender bias is implied by any use of the term man, as in “mankind” or “man in the street” or “salesman” (p. 25).  In a 30 page appendix, “a glossary of banned words, usages, stereotypes and topics,” Ravitch documents, simply by listing words proscribed by the language police, the extent to which this extends.  Banned words include: actress; average man; boyish figure; brotherhood; busboy; cameraman; career woman; cattleman; caveman; chairman; clergyman; cowboy; cowgirl; craftsmanship. 

                Responding to all this, Ravitch concludes: “The question before us, the battle really, is whether we have the will to fight against censorship.   I, for one, want to be free to refer to “the brotherhood of man” without being corrected by the language police.  I want to decide for myself whether I should be called a chairman, a chairwoman, or a chairperson (I am not a chair).  I want to see My Fair Lady and laugh when Professor Higgoins sings, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”  As a writer, I want to know that I am free to use the words and images of my choosing” (p. 169).  She supports, by endorsing, an ancient American commitment, expressed by John Adams in 1765 when he wrote:  “‘Let us dare to think, speak, and write. . . .   Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.’  Even in our schools” (p. 170). 

                The evidence set forth in The Language Police should concern us all.  Whether in the schools, press, or churches, there are folks determined to sanitize our speech, even when truth is compromised.  To speak or write sensitively, tactfully, does not require politically correct shackles.  A free people must be free to think and speak without fear.  That freedom is currently eroding, and it will take a struggle to regain it.

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                Impressed with Ravitch’s scholarship, I secured a copy of her Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Touchstone, c. 2000) and found it to be a fine historical account of the past century, finding therein developments that help explain the current concern for political correctness.  In brief: school reformers, “progressives”  personified by John Dewey, sought to dislodge traditional academics (developing proficiency in subjects such as Latin and mathematics) and establish societal change as the main aim of education.  Though stoutly contested until mid-century, the cultural revolution of the ’60s finally implanted progressivism in the nation’s schools.

                Dewey–and his less famous colleagues at ColumbiaUniversity’s Teachers College–saw the public schools as a tool with which to collectivize society.  Rather than liberating individual students’ minds–the traditionalists’ notion of education–these progressives wanted to make society more egalitarian and socialistic.  Teachers were to be social workers rather than scholars.  Indeed, to Dewey, the teacher is “‘the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God'” (p. 459).  Students were to have “fun” doing various things, engaging in group projects and discussions instead of working hard to master difficult subjects.  To William Kilpatrick, a highly-regarded colleague of Dewey, “dancing, dramatics, and doll playing” were preferable to classical languages and mathematics (p. 181).

                Both Kilpatrick and Dewey admired the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s and wanted to reconstruct the U.S. in accord with it.  Dewey admired “the Soviet’s efforts to dismantle the traditional family, which Marxists considered ‘exclusive and isolating in effect and hence as hostile to a truly communal life'” (p. 206), and replacing the family with the school has always been a mainstay in the progressives’ agenda.  Dewey especially praised the Soviets’ use of the school to promote social change, shaping children in accord with socialist ideology, what he termed “‘a unified religious social faith'” (p. 208).  Dewey and Kilpatrick particularly admired the “project method” used in Soviet classrooms–students working together to solve problems rather than listening to teachers lecture.  “We teach children, not subject matter” was their mantra.      Another Columbia professor, George Counts, also visited the USSR and lavished praise on both the nation and its dictator, Stalin.  During the 1930s, he “became the most forceful advocate for radical ideas in American education” (p. 211).  That Stalin relied on censorship and propaganda hardly disturbed the professor, for his cause was noble and the world was being transformed.  Doing his own propagandizing back home, Counts addressed the National Education Association in 1932, calling for “elimination of capitalism, property rights, private profits, and competition, and establishment of collective ownership of natural resources, capital, and the means of production and distribution” (p. 217).  He also worked within the American Historical Association, helping draft a 1934 report declaring that the era of individualism and laissez faire economics was ending, to be replaced by a “‘new age of collectivism'” (p. 228).  Broadus Mitchell, an economist at Johns Hopkins, urged teachers, “‘above all others, to become propagandists’ against the economic system and to stir discontent ‘into the mind of the millions'” (p. 230).

                Ironically, at the very time Americans were praising the USSR’s educational system it was being discarded by the Soviets!  In the mid-30s, Russian schools reverted to a very traditional curriculum!  Subsequently, especially following Stalin’s bloody purges, some scholars (including George Counts) changed their minds and began to support the formerly-despised liberal tradition in education.   Counts even turned against state-controlled education and its potential for mind-control.  Dissenters and critics of progressive education, notably Robert Maynard Hutchins, made the case for traditional, academic studies, and large numbers of ordinary Americans supported them.  Consequently, students in the ’40s and ’50s (such as myself) continued to take Latin and math–though we’d been subjected to progressivism’s  “see and say” reading techniques rather than phonics in grammar school.

                The cultural revolution of the ’60s, however, revived progressivist ideology, and “the zeitgeist in American education swung wildly toward the liberationist, pseudorevolutionary consciousness that was roiling the rest of the culture” (p. 384).  Radical books, such as Summerhill, by A.S. Neill, and Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, proved highly influential.  (I confess to using the Postman book in my Philosophy of Education classes for several years in the ’70s!)  Carl Rogers’ psychological views, calling for “personal growth” through “encounter groups” and “sensitivity training” powerfully impacted teachers and preachers alike. 

                Consequently, Ravitch shows, SAT scores steadily declined.  Foreign language enrollments collapsed.  Mathematics and science classes lost allure.  Students took fewer classes, studied less, learned less.  They did, however, enjoy “values clarification” classes that allowed them to construct (in small group discussions groups) their own ethics.  Indeed, constructivism became something of a religious dogma for educators–students do not discover, but rather design for themselves, what they take to be true.  Flattered by their “facilitators” in the classroom, students excelled in self-esteem but little else.  In sum: “the hedonistic, individualistic, anarchic spirit of the sixties was good for neither the educational mission of the schools nor the intellect, health, and well-being of young people” (p. 407).  And neither was the progressive education it implemented!

                Ravitch writes well, making the story she tells both compelling and alarming.  To understand why our schools are as they are, Left Back provides answers.

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                The developments Ravitch describes in the public schools have also occurred in the nation’s universities, as Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate demonstrate in The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (New York: The Free Press, c. 1998).  Kors is a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Silverglate is an criminal defense attorney who has taught at HarvardLawSchool and an active member of the ACLU.  They wrote the book because they wanted to alert the nation to an immanent peril:  “Universities have become the enemy of a free society, and it is time for the citizens of that society to recognize this scandal of enormous proportions and to hold these institutions to account” (p. 3).  Since, “morally and practically, none of us enjoys more freedom of speech than is accorded the least popular speaker” (p. 101), what takes places on campuses should concern everyone.  Commending the book, Wendy Kaminer wrote: “unlike most critics of political correctness,” the authors “have no political agenda of their own to advance, except the preservation of liberty.  They take seriously the obligation to defend the rights of all individuals, adversaries as well as friends.  The ShadowUniversity is a scrupulously fair, painstakingly documented account of repression on America’s campuses, where students and faculty members are regularly denied fundamental rights of speech, conscience, and due process.  I never knew it was quite this bad” ( book jacket endorsement). 

                For Professor Kors this threat became very real at his own university when a Jewish student, Eden Jacobowitz, was disciplined for yelling “Shut up, you water buffalo!” to a noisy group of black women disturbing the peace of his dormitory.  The women claimed they’d been subjected to “racial harassment,” and the university’s disciplinary machinery swung quickly into action.  Jacobowitz was accused of violating Penn’s speech code, and faced expulsion.  Thanks to the intervention of Kors and Silverglate, as well as national media attention, and after a drawn-out series of hearings, the charges were dropped.  But the case illustrates the extent to which university administrators will go in seeking to suppress free speech and the deviousness of their techniques.

                The authors carefully examine the constitutional meaning of free speech and the university tradition of academic freedom, noble principles basic to America’s free society.  (Though a bit technical, one of the virtues of this book is its sterling scholarship, citing court cases and telling examples.  The authors have examined hundreds of university speech codes, and anyone wanting to truly understand the implications of these issues will benefit from their analyses.)  Such freedoms have always had their foes, but today’s threat comes mainly from the “political and cultural left” (p. 67).  EmoryUniversity’s faculty senate, for example, rejected a resolution “specifying that ‘all judgments under this policy related to freedom of expression would be consistent with First Amendment standards'” (p. 160).  PC preempts freedom!

                Though university professors contribute to the fervor for political correctness, the real assault on individual liberty, Kors and Silverglate say, is the “shadow university” that has boomed under the aegis of “student services.”   “Increasingly, offices of student life, residence offices, and residence advisors have become agencies of progressive social work whose mission is to bring students to mandatory political enlightenment” (p. 211).  Here we find compulsory orientation sessions, designed to browbeat students into accepting feminist rhetoric and homosexual activity.  Wendy Shalit, for example, was forced to attend a “Feel-What-It-Is-Like-To-Be-Gay” sensitivity session at WilliamsCollege (p. 226).  Dormitories are policed to make sure nothing offends racial or sexual sensitivities.  

                Identifying the source of such views, the authors write: “The contemporary movement that seeks to restrict liberty on campus arose specifically in the provocative work of the late Marxist political and social philosopher Herbert Marcuse . . . who gained a following in the New Left student movement of the ’60s” (p. 68).  Though he claimed to believe in “freedom,” he redefined its meaning in accord with the thought Rousseau, Marx, and Gramsci, something quite different from Jefferson and Madison. And his “prescriptions are the model for the assaults on free apeech in today’s academic world” (p. 71).  Marcuse’s freedom was highly selective and admittedly “repressive”!  Some should enjoy it, others should not.  Radicals should be free to say literally anything, but conservatives should be gagged.  “The use of the epithet ‘nigger’ by a white toward a black would be outlawed as sracist, whereas Malcolm X’s famous characterization of Caucasians was the ‘white devil’ would not” (p. 75).  Spike Lee’s rants must be allowed, but not Mark Twain’s novels.  Education should be propaganda aimed at social leveling; teachers should be revolutionaries intent on social change.  “Thus, for example, history would be taught so that the student understands ‘the frightening extent to which history was made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression'” (p. 71).  To see Marcuse’s shadow in the workings of todays “language police” requires no great imagination!  “The struggle for liberty on American campuses is, in its essence, the struggle between Herbert Marcuse and John Stuart Mill” (p. 110). 

# # #

Just when the advocates of “contemporary worship” and “user-friendly” churches have succeeded in revamping large sectors of the Christian world, young people seem to be rejecting it.  There’s a growing hunger, it seems, for a more traditional, more ancient, more orthodox version of the Faith–a hunger for the spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible study, and the sacraments–rather than self-esteem psychobabble and entertainment.  Such is evident in The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Chicago: LoyolaPress, c. 2002), by Colleen Carroll.   An award-winning and widely-published journalist, Carroll (a Roman Catholic) became fascinated with this phenomenon and took a year to research and write her account, traveling extensively and interviewing some 500 appropriate spokesmen.  “If you are making plans for your church in the next decade, you can’t afford to leave this book unread,” says Benedict Groeshchel (book cover), and I suspect he’s right.  The “contemporary” worship and “relevant” preaching that has frequently alienated “senior citizens” now  seems spurious to the coming generation as well.  Marrying the spirit of the age, it’s often said, leaves one a widow in the next!

As a journalist, Carroll provides illustrations to document her thesis, summed up by BostonCollege philosopher Peter Kreeft:  “It’s a massive turning of the tide” a fundamental rejection of  “the old tired, liberal, modern” version of Christianity (p. 3).  Young folks aren’t drawn to the watered-down Catholicism set forth by the ’60s generation.  A convention of liberal Catholics in 2000 featured “gray-haired radicals, priests wielding canes, and nuns dressed as defiantly as septuagenarians can. But young adults were scarce” (p. 281).  Liberalism, in both its theological and political forms, has lost its luster.  Younger priests are more conservative than their baby-boomer elders, supporting priestly celibacy and opposing women’s ordination.  Traditional seminaries bulge with candidates, while their liberal counterparts lament empty corridors.  There is a  resurgence of interest in Thomas Aquinas, who “argued that laws are just when they are based on the way God designed the universe.  So certain moral actions are right or wrong in their very nature, depending on their conformity to God’s law.  And human beings instinctively know it” (p. 171).

The relativism that shaped their parents’ culture seems less alluring to younger folks hungry for some sound moral standards.  “A former Wall Street Financier,” John McCloskey, became an Opus Dei priest and now works with Ivy League students.  He says “that when students are presented with ideas and teachings that sharply contrast with campus culture–church teachings against abortion and contraception, for instance, and orthodoxy’s insistence on absolute standards of right and wrong–they often respond with surprise and interest” (p. 21).  McCloskey notes that “College campuses are the refuge of the sixties liberals,” who now discover that “they are the old fogies”(p. 182) upholding increasingly antiquated ideologies.  “‘People are getting sick of trite little phrases.  “God is love” and “God loves you”–what does that mean?'” asks a young Notre Dame student, planning to enter the priesthood.  Demanding, ascetic orders, such as Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity,  the Friars of the Renewal, and the Legionaries of Christ, are far more appealing to younger Catholics than temporizing organizations like the Jesuits.  “Today, it is increasingly those hard-core, demanding religious orders and seminaries that are experiencing a surge in religious vocations” (p. 98).

In Evangelical circles the same trend appears in the growth of “Campus Crusade for Christ, a conservative evangelical group that stresses strict moral standards and salvation by Jesus Christ” which grew, in five years, from 21,000 to 40,000 members (p. 8).  “About a thousand graduate students belonged to the e-mail list of Harvard’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in 2000–twice the number that were signed

up four years earlier” (p. 161).  Evangelical colleges are booming and attract some of the nation’s finest young thinkers.  Churches upholding the inerrancy of Scripture, traditional devotions, and rigorous morality enroll the children of liberal Protestants.  Such young people often lament the fact that they heard little about sin and salvation (the “hard gospel”) in their childhood, while platitudes espousing tolerance, social reform and leftist politics abounded.  Consequently, as a 2001 Hartford Institute for Religion Research study demonstrates, there is “a strong correlation between the vitality of a congregation and its commitment to high moral standards.  According to the survey, “Two out of three congregations  that emphasize personal and public morality also report healthy finances and membership growth” (p. 69).

Part of the “hard gospel,” of course is sexual chastity.  Remarkably, growing numbers of the “young faithful” favor high sexual standards, and there is a significant surge of support for sexual abstinence before marriage.  “‘The new sexual revolution is not being led by adults, but by young people,’ roared Mary-Louise Kurey, Miss Wisconsin 1999, top-ten finalist for Miss America, and author of a book about abstinence.  ‘We are seeing a complete turnaround in young attitudes toward sex and relationships'” (p. 121).   (Interestingly enough, the reigning Miss America also emphasizes chastity and had to do battle with the pageant’s hierarchy to make it the standard theme of her public addresses!)  This is truly significant, for, as Conner makes clear, “The connection between faith and sex is a powerful one.  Pastors often say that transgressions of Christian sexual morality lead young believers away from the faith faster than any other moral lapses.  Their explanation: sexual intercourse is an intimate, potent experience, and the desire for sexual activity often clouds moral judgment” (p. 140).

This is a readable, well-organized book, meriting study by anyone concerned about the future of the Church.  Chuck Colson’s endorsement is telling: “Colleen Carroll does more than simply chronicle the embrace of Christianity by young adults, as important as that is.  Her interviews and meetings with young American adults serve as documentation of the spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy of postmodernism.  The New Faithful is a reminder that when the idols of our age crumble, it is the truth of Christianity that remains standing” (book jacket).

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Carroll’s findings in The New Faithful have been anticipated for decades by Thomas C. Oden.  His   Agenda for Theology (1979), After Modernity . . . What?  (1990), three volume Systematic Theology, and  editorial supervision of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture all indicate the depth of his commitment to rediscovering orthodoxy.   What he’s called for seems to be happening, and he describes it  in The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, c. 2003).  “Turning from the illusions of modern life, the faithful are now quietly returning to the spiritual disciplines that have profoundly shaped their history, and in fact have enabled their survival.  This is the rebirth of orthodoxy” (p. ix).  Orthodoxy, as he defines it, is the “integrated biblical teaching as interpreted in its most consensual classic period” (p. 29).  The spiritual disciplines sustaining it, consequently, include:  “close study of scripture, daily prayer, regular observance in a worshiping community, doctrinal integrity, and moral accountability” (p. ix)

Orthodoxy is a very personal issue for Oden, and some of the most interesting sections of this book are autobiographical.  Reared in Oklahoma, he was baptized in his parents’ (fashionably liberal, social-gospel) Methodist church and nominally embraced the Christian faith.  Off to college, he was prepped to acquire “my agnosticism from Nietzsche, my social views from radical Methodists and existentialists, and my theology (God help me, I confess) from Alan Watts” (p. 84).  He then acquired a Ph.D. at Yale and began his teaching career.  “Although it was assumed that I was teaching theology, my heart was focused on radical visions of social change and on the blatant politicizing of the mission of the church” (p. 84).  He now confesses that he entered the “ministry” as a political strategy, looking for a lever of power with which to foment revolutionary social change.  In a revealing footnote he confesses that “For me Marxism became  radicalized early in the 1950s, and personalized in the figure of Ho Chi Minh, whom I unreservedly idolized as an agrarian Communist patriot ten years before America’s entry into the Vietnam war.  My major mentors were almost all socialist or quasi-Marxist.  Long before Vietnam I was a pacifist.  Before Vietnam my ideology was formed around the group they wrote the Port Huron Statement; that same group later shaped the founding of the Students for Democratic Actoin” (p. 197).

His early years very much resembled Hillary Clinton’s!  Both were reared Methodists, attended YaleUniversity for graduate work, avidly embraced the radical rhetoric of Saul Alinsky (an “unprincipled amoralist” who was the subject of Hillary’s senior thesis in college), espoused situation ethics, and avidly read motive, a radical religious journal for college-age Methodists.  “That magazine fueled me intellectually during my heady years as a pacifist, existentialist, Tillichian, and aspiring Marxist” (p. 84-85).  Hillary has kept all the issues she received, notes Barbara Olsen in Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Clinton.  Consequently, Oden says,  “When I look now at Hillary’s persistent situational ethics, political messianism, statist social idealism, and pragmatic toughness, I see mirrored the self I was a few decades ago.  Methodist social liberalism taught me how to advocate liberalized abortion and early feminism almost a decade before the works of Germaine Greer and Rosemary Radford Reuther further raised my consciousness” (p. 85).  He was a prototypically “modern” religious studies professor, “only pretending to be a theologian” (p. 84).

The devastation wrought by thinkers such as himself cannot be ignored.  Liberal churches have been imploding 40 years.  Liberal leaders, controlling mainline seminaries and denominations, refuse to accept responsibility for the massive loss of members, still caressing “the fantasy that they have the high moral ground on sexuality issues, politically correct policing, and standard theological issues such as universal salvation” (p. 149).   Conversely, conservative Evangelical churches have prospered, proving the thesis of Dean Kelly’s Why Conservative Churches are Growing.  They uphold “scripture as the norm of faith and life, with a stress upon the believer’s experience of a personal relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior, the only Son of God, and the Holy Spirit as enabler of a world-wide mission of proclamation.  They maintain a biblical doctrine of the incarnation, atonement, and the Lord’s return.”  They believe the Bible is God’s Word and that they are “saved through faith active in love”(p. 149).

Providentially, Oden (though remaining within his denomination) shifted from a Liberal to an Evangelical position as a result of his reading of Scripture and the Church Fathers.  He discovered what he’d not found in his formal education:  life-changing Truth, a Truth preserved, for 20 centuries, by “consensual” teaching, clearly evident in Church tradition.  Eminent Fathers (especially Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory I,  Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus,  John Chrysostom) and Church councils (especially the first Seven Ecumenical Councils) laid a sound foundation for biblical interpretation and theological assertions.   As a Methodist, Oden reveres John Wesley, and he cites, with approval, Wesley’s reliance upon  “‘the most authentic commentators on Scripture, as being both nearest the fountain, and eminently endued with the Spirit by whom all Scripture was given. . . .  I speak chiefly of those who wrote before the Council of Nice.  But who would not likewise desire to have some acquaintance with those that followed them?  With St. Chrysostom, Basil, Jerome, Austin [Augustine]; and above all, the man with a broken heart, Ephraim Syrus?'” (p. 99).

There is, thus, today a significant theological return to the sources of Christian dogma.  If nothing else postmodernism has freed folks from the shackles of modernity.  One can even espouse the allegedly antiquated positions of premodernism!  To take the Bible as God’s Word, to uphold the facticity of the Resurrection, to take seriously the positions of Augustine and Aquinas and Wesley, are now permitted.  And Oden shows how numbers of unusually talented young theologians are doing precisely that.

In that consensual tradition one also finds a basis for ecumenical harmony.  What modern churches have failed to find through bureaucratic maneuvers is remarkably evident in a “new ecumenicism” drawing together devout Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox.  This makes sense since from the beginning Christianity has been gloriously multicultural!  All around the globe believers respond to the Gospel, embrace Christ, and are brought into the fellowship of the redeemed.  And they increasingly find themselves bound together by shared commitments to the same Lord.   “The decisive classic text for orthodox ancient ecumenical method,” Oden says, is Vincent of Lerins’s Commonitory, a fourth century synthesis of those positions widely espoused by the Church.  Vincent explained that when believers differed in their interpretation of Scripture they heeded traditional judgments.  Vincent recognized man’s “‘insatiable lust for error,'” graphically evident in “‘a permanent desire to change religion, to add something and to take something away'” (p. 175).  Thus, though they all embraced the Bible as their ultimate authority they recognized that not everyone had the right to interpret it on his own.  To resolve differences he proposed what we know “as the Vincentian rule:  In the worldwide community of believers every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.  Its Latin form reads: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (p. 162).

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Somewhat similar views are set forth by Robert E. Webber, a distinguished Evangelical professor (long at Wheaton, now at North Park Seminary), in The Younger Evangelicals:  Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, c. 2002).  Endorsing the words of one of his sources, Steve Gerali, Webber asserts: “‘the ContemporaryChurch, having been built and enmeshed in the generational values of the baby boomer, is alienating a generation of adolescents'” (p. 156).  Younger Evangelicals are divorcing themselves from their “boomer” parents–much as their parents too frequently divorced each other!  In a series of chapters–essentially repeating the same story, and generally citing the same sources and  informants–Webber explains the positions and portrays the pastors, youth ministers, educators, and worship leaders who personify them.

Webber believes that Evangelicals have passed through three distinct stages since WWII.  First, folks like myself (now “senior citizens”) identify with “traditionalists” like Billy Graham.  Second, baby-boomers, born in the post-war era, developed the “pragmatic” approach best evident in mega-churches such as Willow Creek and Saddleback.  Third, the coming generation–the “younger” evangelicals–seems increasingly distinguished (especially following 9/11/01) by its interaction with “a new form of American patriotism, a wave of conservative political philosophy, a new form of civil religion, an new economic tightening of resources, and a more disciplined life” (p. 47).  Importantly, this new “world has led to the recovery of the biblical understanding of human nature.  The language of sin, evil, evildoers, and a reaffirmation of the deceit and wickedness of the human heart has once again emerged in our common vocabulary” (p. 48).  Accordingly, though reared in a relativistic culture, they hunger for absolute truths sufficient for guidance in life.

These younger evangelicals, in brief, reject modernity and look for guidance in the pre-modern world of orthodox theology and traditional morality.  They’re interested in history, especially the story of the AncientChurch.  They’re open to theological dogmas, particularly as defined by the Nicene Creed–sensing, as Flannery O’Connor said, that “‘dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality'” (p. 74).  Preaching the Cross, calling for self-denying commitment, upholding high moral standards, they envision and hope to establish a different form of “church,” one more akin to that primitive believers.   Exposed int public schools to classes in “values clarification” that prescribe purely subjective standards for morality, they understand the need for objective ethics.  Though they seem anxious to find some absolutes, however, Webber’s younger evangelicals (paling themselves on the horns of an overt contradiction) also embrace some of postmodernism’s relativism.  Taking an “anti-foundationalist” stance, they insist that Christianity is a story to be pondered, not a proposition to be understood.

As a seasoned professor, Webber richly documents his presentation.  Anyone interested in the subject will find, in his notes and bibliography, ample books and web sites to pursue.  He has contact with a large number of the younger evangelicals and obviously endorses their endeavors.  (In part, one suspects, this is because they endorse positions he has advocated for some time!)  Unfortunately, there are some distracting glitches and disquieting generalizations that detract from the book.  Webber refers to “Armenians” when he means “Arminians.”  He routinely refers to the “EarlyChurch” as a pattern for both himself and today’s younger evangelicals, but too often his assertions lack solid basis in the sources of that era.  His notion, for example, that early Christians were disinterested in intellectual apologetics, preferring to illustrate their convictions through their lives, cannot square with the actual writings of Justin Martyr and Tertullian, two of the earliest apologists.

Finally, though there is a refreshing desire to escape “modernity” and be fully counter-cultural, these “younger evangelicals,” I suspect, are as enmeshed in their secular culture as were their predecessors in theirs.  If one compares some of the tenets of Postmodernism with the views of Webber and his protagonists, one wonders if they have merely replaced the cultural compromises of modernism with similar compromises with postmodernism!

# # #

In unique ways Bob Dylan, Chuck Colson, and Billy Graham have left formative impressions on post-WWII America.  During my 17 years as Chaplain at PLNU, I often quoted lyrics from Bob Dylan’s songs.  Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan (Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books, c. 2002), by Scott Marshall, illustrates why I did so.   For Dylan has not only been one of the major forces in popular music for 40 years, he has also illustrated a persistent hunger for God, evident in the biblical themes that resound in his songs.  Marshall makes little effort to probe Dylan’s lyrics, relying instead on published interviews and books to illustrate his concerns.  He wisely acknowledges the difficulty of determining exactly where the singer stands, noting his Dylanesque disclaimer, “Well, you never  know.”  He’s sung folk, rock, country, and Christian music.  Neither Jews nor Christians nor agnostics know exactly what to make of him.  In fact: “Bob Dylan refused to be categorized–or, perhaps better, simply cannot be categorized” (p. xiv).  He’s “always simply been his own man.  More accurately, Bob Dylan has always been God’s own man, long before he knew it” (p. xiv).

For a few years (ca. 1980) he openly espoused Christianity, releasing three distinctively “Christian” albums.   Then he seemed to move in different directions, and many folks assumed he’d abandoned his faith in Christ.  But he still includes some of his Christian songs in his concerts, and (in 1997) when he received an award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts he led a standing ovation in response to Shirley Caesar’s rendition of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” probably his most famous Christian tune.  “If Caesar had not been permitted to perform that night, Dylan would have been a no show” (p. 3).

Dylan’s interest in Gospel music began when he listened, late at night, to music broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana.  Jewish by birth, he has always read the Bible, and his music has consistently reflected its influence.  He told a Rolling Stone reporter that he was a “literal believer” in the Bible, holding both the Old and New Testaments to be inspired of God (p. 74).  The lyrics of his 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited–one of his greatest–were described by one journalist “as a translation of the Bible in street terms” (p. 8).  In his notes to Biograph, a magnificent multi-record collection of his music, he said he “‘wanted to expose people to [gospel music] because [he] loved it and it’s the real roots of all modern music, but nobody cared'” (p. 89).

Dylan’s religious quest became quite public when, in 1979, he embraced the Christian faith.  Influenced by “born again” musicians, like T-Bone Burnett and Jerry Scheff, he was “‘willing to listen about Jesus'” (p. 27).  A Vineyard Church pastor, Larry Myers, visited him and remembered that no one tried to pressure him, but “‘God spoke through His Word, the Bible, to a man who had been seeking for many years.  Sometime in the next few days, privately and on his own, Bob accepted Christ and believed that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah'” (p. 28).  As he explained, in 1980, “‘Jesus put his hand on me.  It was a physical thing . . . I felt my whole body tremble.  The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up'” (p. 143).  To another journalist he said, “Let’s just say I had a knee-buckling experience'” (p. 143).

Subsequently Dylan involved himself in serious Bible studies and even attended some classes.  He recorded Slow Train Coming, with its explicitly Christian lyrics, including “Gotta Serve Somebody.”  He began singing his new faith in concerts–and quickly encountered mounting hostility.  While many of his fans  adjusted to the ever-questing pilgrim, others protested.  Secular critics, particularly, panned his performances.  Ever willing to be controversial, however, Dylan was undeterred, producing, Michael Long said, “some of the greatest songwriting and recording of his career'” (p. 59).  He released Saved and Shot of Love, with their fervently evangelical message, greatly distressing Columbia Records, which had long profited from his productions.  He also spoke his mind, condemning homosexuality for example, eliciting predictable venom from the Hollywood and media elite, who were “downright ruthless in their coverage of the ‘new Dylan'” (p. 53).  In a radio interview, Dylan was asked if Jesus is the answer to the world’s needs.  “‘Yeah, I would say that,’ Dylan replied.  ‘What we’re talking about is the nature of God . . . in order to go to God, you have to go through Jesus'” (p. 56).

Then, after publically espousing his faith in Jesus, Dylan seemed to abandon it.  His new tunes moved in different directions.  Some critics suggested he’d returned to Judaism, others declared he’d lost his religious interests.  Dylan’s explanation is simple:  “‘I’ve made my statement, and I don’t think I could make it any better than in some of those songs.  Once I’ve said what I need to say in a song, that’s it.  I don’t want to repeat myself'” (p. 56).  He clearly, in the mid-80s, explored Judaism with new intensity.  An Orthodox Jewish community used one of his songs in a charity telethon conveniently, though they omitted one of the verses that explicitly acknowledged Jesus.  Indeed “how a Jewish person can believe in Jesus and still be Jewish–is perhaps the one that ultimately gets to the heart of Dylan’s spiritual journey” (p. 110).  In Marshall’s judgment, however, this fits in with his “completed Jew” belief in Jesus as Messiah.  Those who have interviewed him, and musicians who work with him, describe him as still a believer.  Backup singers who have recently (2001)  performed with him say “they prayed with Dylan before each show.  These were Christian prayers'” (p. 70).

As Marshall explores the past 20 years of Dylan’s life, he finds much evidence of his continued Christian commitment.  His songs, for example, often deal with biblical themes of sin and salvation, the need for repentance and righteousness.  In a 1986 tour of Australia, he closed each concert with “In the Garden,” one of his most moving Gospel songs.  Explaining the song, he said:  “‘This last song now is all about my hero.  Everybody’s got a hero.  Where I come from, there’s a lot of heroes.  Plenty of them.  John Wayne, Clark Gable, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen.  They’re all heroes to some people.  Anyway, I don’t care nothing about those people [as heroes].  I have my own hero.  I’m going to sing about Him right now'” (p. 86).  In Jerusalem, facing a Jewish audience, he sang “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Slow Train.”

Albums like Oh Mercy, recorded in 1989, though not explicitly Christian, certainly have biblical messages.   “Shooting Star,” the song which rather sums up the album’s message, declares that it’s the “‘last time you might hear the Sermon on the Mount'” (p. 97).  In Marshall’s opinion, Oh Mercy “was practically a companion piece to the album of a decade earlier, . . . Slow Train Coming” (p. 98).  At his concerts during the ’90s he routinely included songs from his “Christian albums.”   For example, in 1991, he sang “Gotta Serve Somebody” some 80 times, “I Believe in You” 29 times, and “In the Garden” 10 times (p. 107).  In 1997 he performed, as requested by Pope John Paul II (who later spoke), at a concert in Bologna, attended by several hundred thousand people, singing, among others, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”  He opened a 1999 concert in Pensacola with an old Christian hymn, “Rock of Ages,” and a few weeks later sang Fanny Crosby’s “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” in Buffalo, doing the same a few days later in Amherst, Mass.  Later that year, touring with Paul Simon, he sang “Hallelujah, I”m Ready to Go,” a song “which became something of a staple during the tour, [that] included these lyrics: ‘Sinner don’t wait / Before it’s too late / He’s a wonderful Savior to know / I fell on my knees / He answered my pleas / Hallelujah, I’m ready to go'” (p. 142).

In 2001, as Dylan turned 60, he “agreed to participate on a track for the forthcoming tribute album, Pressing On:  The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan.  Considering that the project only featured songs from Slow Train Coming and Saved, his participation would have seemed odd if he no longer believed in Jesus as the Messiah” (p. 156).  In his 2002 concerts he included “Hallelujah, I’m Ready to Go” and “I am the Man, Thomas,” a “song about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection” (pp. 170-171).  Still more: “when Dylan included ‘Solid Rock’ in the first set list of his European spring tour of 2002” (p. 172), a song he’d not sung since 1981, he astounded many of his fans because it is one of his most clearly Christian compositions.  To Marshall, in words summing up this fine treatise, “These are not the words and sentiments of a man who has forsaken belief in Jesus” (p. 172).

For Dylan fans such as myself, this book provides a handy guide to Dylan’s spiritual journey.  Drawing upon published interviews, some of them in obscure periodicals, Restless Pilgrim brings us up to date on one of the nation’s most enigmatic, but engrossing, songwriters.

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In Charles Colson: A Story of Power, Corruption, and Redemption (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, Publishers, c. 2003), John Perry focuses on the crucial years when Colson served in the White House, followed by his spiritual transformation in the wake of Watergate, emphasizing the difference Christ made in the life of President Nixon’s “hatchet man.”  Though many of the details will be familiar to anyone who read Colson’s best-selling Born Again, Perry brings to the story information gleaned from Patty Colson and other sources as well as providing an outsider’s perspective of the man.  Though not an “authorized” biography, it benefitted from interviews with Colson carries his informal approval. 

Born in 1931 to hard-working parents in Boston, Charles Colson excelled academically and was accepted by both Brown and Harvard universities.  Harvard’s elitist snobbery alienated him, however, and he attended Brown on a ROTC scholarship.  Fulfilling his ROTC commitment, he joined the Marine Corps and proved himself to be an able officer.  After two years of active duty, he joined the reserves, found a job with the Navy Department in Washington, D.D., and entered law school at George Washington University, taking evening classes.  He would graduate in 1959 and be admitted to the bar later that year.  The next year he was offered a job in Senator Leverett Saltonstall’s office, making him “the youngest senior congressional staff member on Capital Hill” (p. 24).  He orchestrated the Massachusetts’ senator’s successful re-election campaign in 1960 and was touted as one of the ten Outstanding Young Men of 1960 by Boston’s Camber of Commerce.  The next year Colson opened a law office as a trade representative of the New England Council in Washington and quickly succeeded in attracting clients and wielding influence in the nation’s capital.

Impressed with Richard Nixon, Colson supported his 1968 election campaign and was asked to join his administration as a special counsel.  Though it meant considerable financial sacrifice, Colson readily accepted the invitation and quickly became a trusted insider, though he often clashed with others in the Nixon White House.  He particularly delighted the President by getting things done, even when it meant cutting various bureaucratic corners.  “By the summer of 1970 Nixon was regularly giving Colson direct assignments, bypassing White House protocol and, in particular, cutting Bob Haldeman out of the loop” (p. 61).  Nixon once boasted, to some guests, “Colson–he’ll do anything!” (p. 103).

As the election of 1972 approached, Colson supervised various endeavors to assure Nixon’s re-election.  Some of this involved trying to get him portrayed as positively in the press.  Dealing with the growing dissent concerning the Vietnam War also called for considerable attention.  When Daniel Ellsberg clandestinely  orchestrated the release of the “Pentagon Papers”–a major setback for Nixon and a blow to Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic work with the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris–Colson was ordered to expose Ellsberg.  Complying, he leaked a damaging FBI file on Ellsberg to a reporter, one step in discrediting him.  Colson also secured the cash which enabled Howard Hunt and associates to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, hunting damaging details, though he knew nothing about the burglary itself.  The more famous burglary, at the Watergate Hotel, was also done without Colson’s knowledge.  Though critics sought to implicate him, the famous “tapes” and other documents demonstrate his innocence.

Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 was followed, within a month, by Colson’s resignation from his administration.  Haldeman and Erlichman, apparently, desired to minimize his influence, and Colson was disinterested in anything less than a major position, so he left the White House, still deeply committed to the President.  Quickly reestablishing his law practice, he assumed the next few years would be devoted to acquiring wealth and solidifying his position within Washington’s beltway.  Quickly, however, the Watergate scandal swept him into a cauldron of controversy.  Informally he offered advice to Nixon and his inner circle, urging them to simply tell the truth.  Publically he defended the President and denied any personal awareness of (much less involvement in) the Watergate burglary.  Nevertheless he had to deal with accusations in the press–some the result of John Dean’s duplicity and mendacity.  (Dean sought to save his own skin by incriminating others, however innocent!)  As the Nixon presidency collapsed, Colson was sucked into the chaos.

In the midst of it all, he met Tom Phillips, president of the Raytheon Company, who briefly testified to “the most marvelous experience of my whole life,” coming to faith in Jesus Christ (p. 140).  He further encouraged Colson to chat with him about it later.  Burdened by all the pressures of Watergate, Colson decided to visit Phillips at his home on August 12, 1973.  One of the most successful men in America, Phillips  had increasingly found life meaningless, and out of curiosity went to a Billy Graham Crusade in New York.  There he responded to the message and accepted Jesus as Savior.  Having told his story, Phillips then gave Colson a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and urged him to consider its claims.  Following the conversation, Colson drove a short distance, parked, and broke into tears.  Sobbing, he prayed, “God, I don’t know how to find You, but I’m going to try.  I’m not much the way I am now, but somehow I want to give myself to You.  Take me!” (p. 146).    He’d turned life’s most important corner.

Subsequently, Colson carefully read Mere Christianity and found it intellectually persuasive.  He returned to Washington and found a growing circle of Christian friends (unanticipated folks like senators Mark Hatfield and Howard Hughes) who confirmed and encouraged his new-found faith.  Along with his faith, however, he faced a growing conviction that he’d wronged Daniel Ellsberg by seeking to discredit him.  To be a Christian, he sensed, meant doing what’s right without regard for the consequences.  Thus, though he was innocent of many accusations, he voluntarily confessed to slandering Ellsberg.

The judge, inexplicably, decided to make an example of Colson and sentenced him to prison.  It was devastating, but it also opened up an entirely new world for him.  While in prison he developed a compassion for inmates and later established Prison Fellowship to minster to them.  This increasingly led him to speak not only in prisons but in other venues.  He wrote the best-seller, Born Again, and quickly became one of the most prominent Christians in the country.

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For several years I’ve intended to read Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1997), but was put off by its length–750 pages!  Recently tackling the tome, however, proved to be most rewarding.  There is no doubt that Billy Graham is one of the greatest Christians the Church as produced in two millennia.  Though such calculations are difficult to tabulate, he’s no doubt preached the Gospel to more people than any other evangelist.  He’s also met–and witnessed to–many of the most notable people of his generation, served as a trusted counselor for eight (no doubt nine now, since he’s certainly close to the Bush clan) American presidents, and (most importantly) distinguished himself with personal integrity and graciousness.

Graham tells us about his early years, working on his father’s farm in North Carolina, his “180-Degree Turn” in response to a Mordecai Ham revival message, his call and preparation to preach, culminating at Wheaton College, where he met his wife, Ruth, and several friends who would become an important part of his growing ministry.  Opportunities to preach in the Chicago area led to an association with Youth for Christ, as well as an invitation to become President of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.  These positions opened doors for him to preach across the nation, holding “campaigns” in various places.  Early on it was markedly evident that Billy Graham had the gift of evangelism, as numbers of hearers routinely responded to his simple Gospel messages.

In 1949 a major turning point occurred in Los Angeles, where he preached for eight weeks, attracting significant numbers of people and gaining national attention as a result of William Randolph Hearst’s instructions to “puff Graham” in his newspapers.  Prominent entertainers, such as Stuart Hamblen, were converted, enhancing Graham’s image.  Featured in Time Magazine and other publications, he became (almost overnight) the spokesman for a resurgent revivalism in America, a movement that would soon be identified as “evangelicalism.”  This led, during the next five decades, to an endless number of “crusades” throughout the world, detailed in this autobiography, impacting millions of people.  He’s preached in Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, baseball and soccer stadia, open fields and primitive huts.  Graham also began to utilize other outlets to spread the Good News–films, radio, TV, conferences, training centers.  Christianity Today, for example, came into existence solely because of his vision and commitment to provide the reading public with a thoroughly Evangelical journal.

Especially interesting, to me at least, are Graham’s chapters on the presidents he’s known.  Early on met Harry Truman, but alienated the president through immature aggressiveness.  Having learned his lesson, he developed cordial, and often deeply warm relationships with every subsequent president.  Though he may have (privately) differed with them politically, he related to them as a friend and spiritual advisor.  He admires and commends, perhaps a bit naively, each of them.  One certainly finds in Graham a helpful correction to some of the critical views of Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, Clinton, all of whom he liked and trusted. Importantly, we find many of these men sincerely hungry for spiritual counsel and assurance.  One cannot but be grateful that there was a man named Billy Graham who could speak, with authority, about God to the leaders of the nation.

Graham also met the world’s most eminent leaders, ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Jawaharlal Nehru to Mikhail Gorbachev to John Paul II.  In one way or another, he seems to have encountered most of the most important people of his era.  And he unfailingly sought to talk personally with them about Jesus Christ.  Whether addressing thousands of people in a mass meeting, or speaking privately and confidentially within the corridors of the Kremlin, Billy Graham has sought to be an evangelist.  One reads this book with growing amazement at the sheer scope of his influence around the world!

Graham also tells us much about his family, his many friends, his personal perspectives.  Whatever he discusses, one senses that Billy Graham is an honest, authentic man, fully devoted to God, and ever aware of his own limitations.  There’s a winsome humility–never false or overly self-critical–that explains much of his success.  Just As I Am is not only a great invitation hymn (routinely used in the Graham crusades) but an apt title for his life.  Well worth the reading!

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“NO FREE LUNCH”  

One of the most self-evident propositions is this:  from nothing comes nothing.  Similarly self-evident is the observation of Thomas Reid, the great 18th century Scottish common sense philosopher:  “From marks of intelligence and wisdom in effects, a wise and intelligent cause may be inferred.”  To establish such eminently reasonable propositions, a number of erudite thinkers have launched the “intelligent design” movement, intent on refuting naturalistic theories of origins with the increasing evidence provides us by contemporary science.  One of the most articulate and aggressive proponents of this view, William Dembski, recently sets forth his position in No Free Lunch:  Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (New York:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2002). 

The book’s initial paragraph replicates Aristotle and sets the agenda:  “How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward:  (1) A designer conceives a purpose.  (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan.  (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions.  (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials.  What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer’s purpose” (p. xi).   Few question the clear evidence of design in houses and cars, hybrid corn and computers.  But the big question Dembski wants to answer is this:  does creation–both the cosmos and the living world we inhabit–indicate a similarly clear, rational design.

He argues that of the three proposed cosmological explanations–necessity, chance, design–the latter makes most sense as “a legitimate and fundamental mode of scientific explanation” (p. 3).  This becomes evident as he sets forth “specified complexity” as a “third mode of explanation” when dealing with empirical data.  A ball rolling off a roof, for example, necessarily falls to earth as a result of gravity’s tug.  A ball breaking a window, as a result of an errant and unexpectedly long hit in a sandlot baseball game, is largely due to chance.  A series of balls (curves, sliders, fast balls) thrown by a pitcher, consistently hitting the strike zone, leading to a no-hitter, nicely reveals design.  Intelligent, well-executed effects illustrate “specified complexity,” the trademark of design.

To defend his position, he explains and rejects alternative explanations.  This involves intricate mathematical formulae and discussions of probability far beyond my ability to fathom.  What is clear is Dembski’s conclusion that “the universe is too small a place” for random events, following the law of probability, to produce the world we confront.  Citing one scientist’s work with proteins, for example, he shows that for accidental collisions of particles to produce “proteins of length 200” (p. 84), the universe would have to be almost infinitely old instead of current estimates of 10-15 billion years.  When one fully understands the incredibly complex information we find in tiny cells, to say nothing of truly complex organisms like ourselves, it takes an almost irrational faith in “chance and necessity” to insist that everything that exists is a result of purely natural, irrational causes. 

But that, of course, is the strongly entrenched scientific mindset, evident in an assertion by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin in The New York Review of Books:  “‘We take the science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e., naturalism].  It is not that methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated'” (pp. 370-71). 

Such counterintuitive commitments, Dembski argues, explain the “‘free lunch'” form of magic in which it is possible to get something for nothing” (p. 367).  Almost precisely like Medieval alchemists, convinced they could transform lead into gold, today’s scientists propound even more fanciful notions.   Learned cosmologists “claim that this marvelous universe could originate from quite unmarvelous beginnings,” and biologists reduce the mystery of life to simple mechanical processes (p. 368).  Neurologists claim that the human brain is nothing but the accidental result of a “cobbled together” process that “gave rise to human consciousness, which in turn produces artifacts like supercomputers, which in turn are not cobbled together at all but instead are carefully designed.  Out pop purpose, intelligence, and design from a process that started with no purpose, intelligence, or design.  This is magic” (p. 369). 

Rather than resort to magical explanations, Dembski urges us to weigh the evidence, the evidence for a world packed with information, that prods us to grant that such a world not only appears to be but actually is intelligently designed. 

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Dean L. Overman, an attorney who served as Special Assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and wrote several law books, is one of the nation’s best thinkers in finance and banking, employs some highly mathematical arguments in A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (New York:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 1997).  Alister McGrath, an eminent English theologian, says:  “This is a well-argued and immensely readable engagement with some profound questions centering on the origins of our universe and ourselves.  Overman’s clear and informed arguments cast serious doubt on the plausibility of the naturalist approach, and reopen the case for divine design.”  One of his German counterparts, Wolfhart Pannenberg, agrees, writing in his Foreword:  “This book argues persuasively against the assumption that the origin of life and the origin of the universe can be accounted for as random events.  According to Overman, it is mathematically not possible to derive the origin of the high level of information necessary for organic life in terms of random fluctuations in pre-organic processes” (p. xiii).   

In his Preface, Overman notes that he “never intended to write this book” (p. xvii).  As a lawyer he had little interest in cosmological and theological debates.  However, he had devoted his life, as a lawyer, to ascertaining the “logic and the validity of premises, inferences and conclusions as they relate to an examination of evidence” (p. xvii).  By chance, however, he read an article describing the Miller and Urey experiment that led him to write a letter objecting to some of its assertions.  That letter led to more study and more writing, and ultimately to this book.  As he studied, he soon realized that “Many otherwise rational persons make unwarranted conclusions which are not based on evidence, but are made in the absence of evidence and contrary to mathematical probabilities because of their faith in the ideology of materialism” (p. 1). 

To free one from irrational ideologies, Overman prescribes logic!  This lead him to explain, in a very understandable chapter, the value of “verbal and mathematical logic.”  A valid syllogism–ab universali ad particulare valet–provides as much certainty as is available to us.  Conversely, invalid syllogisms–a particulari ad universale no valet consequential–lead one astray.  Mix in various fallacies–exptrapolating from limited data to unwarranted inferences, equivocations in the use of words, hidden assumptions (often buried in mathematical formulae), circular reasoning, post hoc, ergo propter hoc–and you have the tools with which to detect erroneous reason.

Logical errors abound, Overman shows, whenever molecular biologists declaim theories explaining how living beings emerged from lifeless matter, because “proponents of the origin of life by accident or chance processes rarely make the mathematical calculations of the probabilities which lie at the foundation of their hypothesis” when in fact “the odds are so overwhelmingly against” it (p. 31).  After showing that “life” is best defined in terms of non-material information, he demonstrates how “chance” or “random abiogenesis,” so routinely cited in biology textbooks, simply cannot account for it.  “The information filled molecules of life are much more complex and structured than previously thought, and calculations of the mathematical probabilities of unguided, chance processes forming life call the theory of accidental abiogenesis into question” (p. 40). 

The Miller-Urey experiments, often cited to explain life’s origin, ignored the fact that oxidizing conditions in the early earth’s atmosphere would have prevented it.  The “prebiotic soup” often credited with incubating life, surely would have left some deposit in ancient sedimentary rocks, but no trace of abiotic compounds appears.  As Herbert Yockey explained it:  “‘the absence of evidence'” is the “‘evidence of absence'” for the prebiotic soup” (p. 47).   Miller and Urey simply manipulated elements known to constitute life in a test tube, ignoring the extraordinary mathematical improbability that such an event could have accidentally happened.  “To paraphrase Louis Pasteur, in experience only life produces life” (p. 49).  

The best current estimates, dealing with the age of the earth and the emergence of life, indicate that “only a maximum of 130 million years were available for random processes to produce life.  Calculations of mathematical probabilities unequivocally demonstrate that it is mathematically impossible for unguided, random events to produce life in this short period of time” (p. 51).  To illustrate this, Overman takes a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth containing 379 letters.  The mathematical probability of these 12 lines being accidentally typed is 26379  or 10536, an incredibly improbable number, given that “there are only 1080 atoms in the known universe” (p. 55).    Twelve lines from Shakespeare are relatively simple, however, compared to a simple cell.  Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe calculated the odds involved in accidentally producing a simple bacterium at 1040,000–an utterly impossible event.  As Wickramsinghe noted:  “‘The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747′” (p. 60).  

Then, even if you grant that life could have appeared by chance, the odds against it developing in such profusion during the short time allowed on earth defies all logical canons.  The various complexities of the living world, especially evident in our growing grasp of DNA and RNA, reinforce the words of Michael Polanyi:  “‘all objects conveying information are irreducible to the terms of physics and chemistry'” (p. 88).  The non-material information that’s important in such molecules is markedly different from their  material sugars and phosphates. 

Moving from the microscopic realm of molecules to the macroscopic world of he universe, the same truth stands clear:  the world is intricately designed.  Though controversial when first set forth, few physicists today question the “Big Bang” beginning of the cosmos.  An incredibly dense point, of quarks and leptons, exploded and hurled into space all the matter that makes the universe.  Studying the intricate balance of strong and weak forces, gravity and thermodynamics, grasping mind-bending theories such as the superstring theory, with its ten dimensions, makes one cognizant of the intricacies of our world.  Astronomers and physicists, calculating how it could all happen within 10-15 billion years, increasingly rule out purely material chance and necessity. 

In fact, when all the factors are figured, the probability of the universe simply taking its present form is calculated as “on part in 1010(123)–”an extraordinary figure” (p. 140) impossible to even fully write down.  It even looks as if the whole universe was designed for us!  Freeman Dyson, one of the finest physicists of the 20th century, noted the “fine tuning of the universe” by saying:  “‘The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming'” (p. 159).  More theologically, Dyson said:  “‘God is the Creator with a plan and an intention for the existence of the entire universe.  The very structures of the universe itself, the rules of its operation, its continued maintenance, these are the more important aspects of creation'” (p. 167). 

This is a well-argued, persuasive treatise.  Even though Overman, on a very high level, deals with mathematical and scientific matters, he almost always explains things in ordinary language and easily guides the reader through some tangled thickets.  Unlike scientists and theologians, who often make assumptions simply as a result of residing within a certain intellectual arena, lawyers like Overman bring to the discussion a fresh spirit of inquiry, an ability to get at the essence of the question, and a lack of concern for how their presentations will be received by the academic guilds that tend to stifle unorthodox views. 

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For readers not quite ready to plow through the heavy mathematical and scientific material in the two books reviewed above, William Dembski and James M. Kushiner have edited a collection of essays, Signs of Intelligence:  Understanding Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, c. 2001).  These essays originally appeared in a special issue of Touchstone (a monthly “journal of mere Christianity” that I highly recommend for its staunchly orthodox stance, committed to the tradition extending from Athanasius to C.S. Lewis).  The essays in this book are short, to the point, and written for the general reader.  Contributors include some of the guiding lights of the Intelligent Design movement, such as Dembski, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells, as well as gifted analysts like John Mark Reynolds and Patrick Henry Reardon. 

In chapter one, Phillip E. Johnson, for years a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the Intelligent Design movement’s challenge to naturalistic evolution.  Something of the progenitor of the movement, announced in Darwin on Trial more than a decade ago, Johnson’s forte is clear explanation of terms and carefully reasoned argument.  He never pretends to be a scientist, but he insists that scientific claims be made rationally, with demonstrable evidence and coherent logic.  Indeed, he believes that “Once it becomes clear that the Darwinian theory rests upon a dogmatic philosophy rather than the weight of the evidence, the way will be open for dissenting opinions to get a fair hearing” (p. 26). 

The dogmatism of Darwinism stands clearly illustrated in a statement by   Francisco Avala, former president of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, who put it this way:   “‘The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. . . .  Darwin’s theory encountered opposition in religious circles, not so much because he proposed the evolutionary origin of living things (which had been proposed many times before, even by Christian theologians), but because his mechanism, natural selection excluded God as the explanation accounting for the obvious design of organisms'” (p. 146). 

Avala’s assertion, Robert Dehaan and John Wiester insist, is “monumental.”   He, and folks like him, present evolution not as a process explaining observable changes, such as the variations in finch beaks Darwin observed.  Ayala is making vast metaphysical claims, crediting “natural selection” for the existence of all that is.  He also dismisses any notion of “intelligence” in the cosmos.  There’s no order or logic to creation, since all comes about through chance.  “In the pre-Darwinian view, life was planned and purposeful. In the Darwinian view, life arose and evolved solely by what Ayala calls ‘the creative duet of chance and necessity,’ without purpose or a “preconceived design” (p. 146). 

Statements such as Avala’s enable Philip Johnson to point out the difference between “materialistic science,” the philosophically entrenched worldview (“naturalism”) that prevails in the modern academy, and “empirical science,” the openness to data that leads to hypotheses equally open to experimentation and testing.  The dogma of materialistic science, as Nancy Pearcey shows in her essay, is fully evident in the opening sentence of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos:  “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”  Nothing else matters because matter is all there is.  And yet, when read carefully, Johnson shows, materialists like Sagan routinely invoke invisible (and thus possibly non-material) factors such as agency and reason to explain things.

CHRISTIANS AND WAR

 In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis explains the “just war” position I’ve come to embrace as my own:  “Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him?  No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment–even to death.  If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged.  It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.  I have always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace.  It is no good quoting “thou shalt not kill.”  There are two Greek words:  the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder.  And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew.  All killing is not murder any more [p. 92] than all sexual intercourse is adultery.  When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army:  nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major–what they called a centurian.  The idea of the knight–the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause–is one of the great Christian ideas” (pp. 91-92). 

Since I deal with the issue of war in some of the classes I teach, during the recent war in Iraq I read or re-read several treatises devoted to the broader issue of Christians engaging in combat.  One of the most widely-cited and most respected is Roland H. Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace:  A Historical Survey and Critical Re-Evaluation (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, c. 1960).  Since Bainton is an eminent historian, the author of Here I Stand, one of the finest biographies of Martin Luther, one might expect a dispassionate, objective survey of the evidence. I’d read the book 30 years ago and accepted it as something of a definitive survey.  Returning to the treatise, however, I realize that one should begin reading it from at the end!  In the next to the last chapter, Bainton declares that “pacifism” is the only legitimate Christian position (p. 248).  This leads him, in his final chapter, to as invalidate natural law arguments that support “just wars.”  Then he reveals the bias that underlies his work, for he urged the United States to “disarm unilaterally,” hoping the USSR would honor such a move, and subordinate the nation’s sovereignty to a “world government” of some sort (p. 256).  Still more:  this world government should institute a “planned economy” (p. 258) of a clearly socialist sort.  Aligning himself with leftists such as Norman Cousins and Bertrand Russell, Bainton seems to reduce the “kingdom of God” to the social gospel utopia so popular in 20th century liberal academic circles..

With Bainton’s bias in mind, his book certainly provides much valuable historical information.  His meticulous footnotes are especially useful in locating the sources he discusses.  He touches on concerns for war and peace in the Greco-Roman world, noting the development of “just war” thought in Cicero.  He acknowledges that the Old Testament, recording the conquest of Canaan–and more especially the deuterocanonical books detailing the Maccabbees’ revolt–provided a certain basis for Medieval  “crusading.”  The New Testament, he insists–especially Jesus’ teachings–provides a basis for “pacifism,”  the position he argues that was embraced by the pre-Constantinian Church. 

Since I’ve read most of the primary sources in this era, and since Bainton says that “the early Church” is “the best qualified to interpret the mind of the New Testament” (p. 66), I carefully scrutinized this section, reading the original sources cited in his footnotes.  What one finds, when reading the alleged “pacifists” of the EarlyChurch, is passing references to war within passages devoted to idolatry or personal purity.  Some of the citations, put in context, are frankly irrelevant to the discussion.  Some of them merely stress the importance of loving everyone, including one’s enemies.  Clement of Alexandria is cited for opposing war–but the passages where he says otherwise are not noted!  Both Tertullian and Origin, two of the four most generally cited “pacifists” in this era, warmly supported the Empire and stressed that by praying for Roman soldiers they did more to protect the state than they would by joining the army.  He acknowledges that writers, such as Tertullian, opposed military service, while Christian soldiers, at the same time, “were not excluded from communion” (p. 66).  He notes that pacifism “flourished” in safe enclaves like Alexandria and Carthage, where there was no war, though Christian soldiers evidently served on the frontier (in Armenia, for instance) where barbarians threatened.  He makes absolutist statements, such as “no Christian author approved of participation in battle,” followed in the very next sentence by the acknowledgment that “the position of the Church was not absolutist, however” (p. 66).  In sum:  there’s no solid evidence, but Bainton chooses to believe that pacifism better reflected the mind of the EarlyChurch! 

The “just war” doctrine decisively developed following Constantine’s edict of toleration, when Christians increasingly assumed responsibilities for their society–magistrates, police, courts, soldiers, etc.  Understandably, apart from the vigorous monastic movement, Christians found that they could not withdraw from the world and hope non-Christians would do the “dirty” work necessary to enact and enforce laws and protect people from evil-doers.  Ambrose and Augustine, especially, justified war as an , when fought according to Christian principles.  Augustine’s position proved to be “of extreme importance because it continues to this day in all essential to be the ethic of the Roman Catholic Church and of the major Protestant bodies” (p. 99). 

Subsequent centuries generally supported Augustine’s position, though scattered  pacifists registered their protests.  During the Middle Ages, Christians added crusading to the just war position, and Bainton, predictably, has little good to say about these efforts to retake lands lost to the Muslims.  Some sectarian movements, such as the Waldensians and Cathari, espoused pacifism, as did some humanists during the Renaissance.  The magisterial Protestant Reformers, of course, supported “just war,” while Anabaptists made pacifism something of a rule of faith. 

During the Enlightenment, secular thinkers like Emanual Kant, in Perpetual Peace espoused a prudential pacifism, and during the 19th century opposition to war increased.  And to the degree Protestant Liberals promoted the “social gospel” a commitment to peace, as well as social justice, marked their agenda.  William Ellery Channing, the famous Unitarian, for instance, inveighed against the inhumanity of all war, and the Quakers served at the front lines of he pacifist movement.  With Leo Tolstoy, increased numbers of Christians exalted the kenotic Christ, who renounced all power to lead the exemplary life we’re called to embrace.

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Another pacifist manifesto, The Early Christian Attitude to War:  A Contribution to the History of Chrisitan Ethics (New York:  The Seabury Press, 1982), by C. John Cadoux, though written in 1919 as a volume in the “Christian Revolution Series,” has remained a staple in the anti-war library.   A deeply learned examination of the sources, Cadoux’s treatise deals honestly with the sources, documenting that the EarlyChurch allowed diverse opinions concerning war. 

He argues that Jesus’ teaching underlies the pacifist position, though he acknowledges that certain passages in the New Testament authorize military action.  He insists that the Early Church disapproved of war, he also admits, that handful of anti-war dissenters, such as Tertullian, Hippolytos and Lactantius (primary sources for pacifism), were never accepted as teaching authorities by the established Church.  On the other hand, just war advocates, such as Augustine, were elevated to the position of Doctors whose positions were generally taken to be normative.  He also notes the Old Testament’s approval of righteous warfare and examines the various documents that indicate the presence of Christian soldiers in the period before Constantine as well as thereafter. 

Apart from my appreciation for the many sources examined and documented, I found Cadoux’s position seriously flawed on at least three counts.  First, the book seems to be written with little concern for the broader Roman world within which the EarlyChurch flourished.  The Pax Romana, as the words indicate, insured empire-wide peace for nearly two centuries (28 B.C.-180 A.D.).  Certainly there was warfare on the frontiers.  Obviously there were internal conflicts, such as the Jewish insurrection that led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  But one must always remember that one reason Christians said very little about war was there were few wars.  Still more, Cadoux says little about what military service involved–and that the religious commitments required of soldiers, more than fighting in wars, best explains the anti-military pronouncements of rigorists such as Tertullian.  Secondly, Cadoux admits that a score of highly regarded historians (i.e. Harnack, Troeltsch, Ramsey) do in fact differ with his assertions, but he fails to effectively explain why his interpretation of the evidence should be accepted–other than providing ammunition for the pacifist movement. 

Like Bainton, Cadoux helps guide us to the sources–and their footnotes and bibliographies are quite helpful.  Both, however, must be read with an awareness of the argument being advanced. 

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Radically differing from Bainton and Cadoux, a positive perspective on the “just war” tradition has recently been published by Darrell Cole, a professor at DrewUniversity, entitled When God Says War Is Right:  The Christian’s Perspective on When and How to Fight (Colorado Springs:  WaterBrook Press, c. 2002).  The book enjoys Chuck Colson’s commendation:  “For many years I have read about, thought about, written about, and spoken about just war.  Nothing I’ve studied, however, has taught me as much as Darrell Cole’s book.  Cole’s in-depth research and clear writing style yield what I believe will become a new classic work in the field.  The fact that our nation is attempting to prosecute a just war on terrorism makes Cole’s book both timely and an indispensable resource for policymakers and the citizens who hold them accountable.”

Cole’s goal is “to present the traditional Christian just war doctrine in a clear, accessible manner” (p. 2), accurately explaining the position finely honed by Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin in particular.  That these two theologians–arguably the greatest Catholic and the greatest Protestant thinkers–agreed in teaching the responsibility for waging a “just war” lends credence to Cole’s view that war is rightly considered a “good” endeavor when carefully implemented.  This is because Christian love, rooted in the very character of God, prompts one to use force when appropriate to protect innocent people and to establish the peace that is good for everyone.

To defend his position, he evaluates the pacifist option.  He shows where those (like Bainton and Cadoux) who argue that the EarlyChurch was pacifist are wrong.  The best recent historical studies simply present a mixed picture.  Before Constantine the few references available to us show that some Christians opposed and some supported taking up arms and serving the state as a soldier.  Interestingly enough, they almost all admired soldierly virtues such as courage and employed military imagery in their descriptions of spiritual valor.  They also, without exception, supported the Empire’s police and military personnel–urging, as did Origen, that Christians pray for the triumph of Roman armies.  With the triumph of Constantine, of course, Christians increasingly assumed various responsibilities for secular rule, and the greatest theologians of the 4th and 5th centuries–Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose, Augustine–worked out the “just war” criteria that would subsequently shape Christian thinking on the subject.  “In Ambrose’s eyes, the Christian who stands idly by while his neighbor is attacked is no virtuous person, and perhaps not even a Christian” (p. 21). 

Defining the just war, Cole says that five criteria have generally been invoked on behalf of jus ad bellum (just reasons for going to war).  They are:  “(1) proper authority, (2) just cause, (3) right intention, (4) war as the only way to right the wrong, and (5) reasonable hope of success” (p. 78).  Added to that are the criteria for jus in bello (justly waging war), that prescribe “discrimination” (fighting without deliberately taking civilians’ lives) and “proportion” (appropriately limiting the means employed).  Cole carefully explains that one can foresee bad things happening, when one pursues a certain course, without specifically intending for them to occur.  So “collateral” casualties inevitably accompany armed conflict, but that does not negate the righteous intent with which one pursues his goal. 

Having explained what constitutes a “just war,” Cole then looks at WWII, the Vietnam and Gulf wars, the possibility of nuclear war, and the current conflict with Muslim terrorists.  It’s clear that many wars–at points at least–fail to meet just war criteria.  Even WWII, when one looks at things like saturation bombing, had it’s unjust aspects.  But, Cole insists, wars will erupt, and Christians must assume responsibilities for their world, including an effort to wage truly just wars. 

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A handy compendium, War and Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, c. 1975), ed. by the distinguished WheatonCollege philosopher, Arthur F. Holmes, is still one of the best volumes available.  After a helpful introduction, there are selections from Plato and Cicero, illustrating the “Pagan Conscience.”  Then documents from the EarlyChurch illustrate the “conflict of loyalties,” pitting the non-violent views of Athenagoras, Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius against the just war positions of Ambrose and Augustine.  The Medieval and Reformation eras reveal a virtual consensus in support of just wars. 

Martin Luther’s statement is both strong and typical:  “‘For example, a good doctor sometimes finds so serious and terrible a sickness that he must amputate or destroy a hand, foot, ear, eye, to save the body.  Looking at it from the point of view of the organ he amputates, he appears to be a cruel and merciless man; but looking at it from the point of view of the body, which the doctor wants to save, he is a fine and true man and does a good and Christian work, as far as the work itself is concerned.  In the same way, when I think of a soldier fulfilling his office by punishing the wicked, killing the wicked, and creating so much misery, it seems an un-Christian work completely contrary to Christian love.  But when I think of how it protects the good and keeps and preserves wife and child, house and farm, property, and honor and peace, then I see how precious and godly this work is; and I observe that it amputates a leg or a hand, so that the whole body may not perish'” (p. 143).   

Moving to more recent times, pacifists such as Robert Drinan have argued that the Gospel mandates pacifism whereas Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey insisted that it does not.   To Niebuhr, pacifism is not simply an alternative Christian position.  It is, he insisted profoundly wrong, for “there is not the slightest support in Scripture for this doctrine of non-violence” (p. 306).  Pacifists have, Niebuhr says, “reinterpreted the Christian gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man” (p. 307), a faith pervasive in modern Christian circles that emphasize the earthly establishment of the “Kingdom of God.”

Finally, addressing a related but somewhat different issue, is Stanley N. Gundry, ed., Show Them No Mercy:  4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide (

Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2003).   Four distinguished scholars advance their views in brief essays and respond to those of the other three, providing an open and challenging debate that nicely explores God’s role in the conquest of Canaan.  In “The Case for Radical Discontinuity,” C.S. Cowles, of PointLomaNazareneUniversity, argues that the God who authorized the killing and conquest described in the Old Testament cannot be harmonized with the God of love revealed in the New.  He finds inadequate all efforts to reconcile a loving God with a Warrior Lord.  Loving, not conquering, one’s enemies is the way of Jesus–and since Jesus reveals God the Old Testament wars simply do not reveal Him truthfully.  Unwilling to affirm “the inerrancy and infallibility of all Scripture” (p. 15), Cowles takes the Old Testament as only a partial (and in parts seriously flawed) revelation of the God revealed in Christ.

Eugene H. Merrill, a professor of Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, makes “The Case for Moderate Discontinuity,” arguing that the “Jahweh war” called for in passages such as Ex. 23 and Dt. 20 must be understood as a “war against spiritual darkness and wickedness in realms that transcend the human and earthly” (p. 76).  Thus the conquest of Canaan is part of God’s plan for man’s salvation, and the wars authorized therein must be restricted to that time and place and purpose.        Daniel L. Gard, a theologian at Concordia Theological Seminary in Forth Wayne, IN, argues “The Case of Eschatological Continuity” by aligning the Old Testament’s wars with the Second Advent of Christ revealed in Matt. 25 and the book of Revelation.  Then Tremper Longman III, a professor of Old Testament at Westmont, builds “The Case of Spiritual Continuity,” refusing to grant any difference between the God of Israel and the God of Jesus.  God fought, in the past, as a Warrior, and he will come as a Warrior at the end of time, sitting in final Judgment. 

The issue discussed in this book is one of the most difficult one encounters reading the Bible.  To listen to the four positions, to weigh the evidence, to come to a conclusion, is facilitated by these essays.

I never voted for Ronald Reagan and often criticized his policies. Towards the end of his presidency, however, it dawned on me that he was in fact an unusually gifted leader. By the mid-1980s I’d also discovered how politicians like Jimmy Carter–and propagandists for the “evangelical left” such as Jim Wallis and Sojourners Magazine–had misled me. I naively embraced Carter’s praise for Nicaragua ‘s Sandinistas as well as his doomsday scenarios regarding ecological destruction. By 1990, however, I began to admit that Jimmy Carter had nearly ruined the country whereas Ronald Reagan had revived it. And I began to suspect I knew very little about the real Reagan. So, better late than never, I’ve begun to rectify my knowledge by reading some studies of the man. One of the best is Peggy Noonan’s When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan ( New York : Viking, c. 2001).

Noonan was a young speech-writer in the Reagan White House, and her “insider” contacts enable her to add illuminating anecdotes to her story. Others provide more scholarly studies, but she brings a journalist’s skill to portraying him in a compelling manner. Her chapter on his ranch, for example, explains much about Ronald Reagan. He loved the land, the hard work involved in clearing trails, the opportunity to ride horses, the simple lodging, the beauty of the natural world. “The people who came to this house always described it the same way: humble, basic, simple, plain, unpretentious. And then they’d always say: Like him” (p. 109).

Her favorite story confirming this occurred in the hospital following the assassination attempt just two months into his presidency. Vice President Bush visited him in the hospital and found him on his knees mopping up water around the sink. Amazed to see the President in such a posture, Bush asked Reagan what he was doing. He replied that they wouldn’t let him take a bath so he’d given himself a sponge bath and slopped water on the floor, so he was cleaning up his mess. Bush reminded him that nurses did that sort thing. But Reagan insisted that he wouldn’t think of having a nurse do the dirty work for him! “When I try to tell people what Reagan was like,” says Noonan, “I tell the bathroom story” (p. 187).

Noonan’s book takes a chronological approach, explaining the importance of Reagan’s his family and Illinois youth. His devout, evangelical mother, deeply influenced his moral development–and it was her Bible he used when sworn in as President. His resolve and willingness to work led to a college education at Eureka College , success in in radio broadcasting during the Great Depression, and ultimately Hollywood stardom. Following WWII he became deeply involved in a labor dispute, due to his position as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He further discovered the power of Communism in certain Hollywood sectors. Months of intense negotiations, multiplied physical threats, the collapse of his first marriage–all thrust Reagan into a different, demanding arena. But he learned. And much that served him well in politics was learned from these Hollywood conflicts. His movie career declined, but fortunately he managed to make a living giving speeches and hosting TV series. He married again, finding in Nancy a woman who singularly devoted herself to him.

Doors opened for him to enter politics, especially following his 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater that was telecast and brought him to the attention of the nation. Reagan made the case for Goldwater “that Goldwater had never managed to make for himself. And in making the case for Goldwater, he made the case, in effect, for modern political conservatism” (p. 87). Two years later he was elected Governor of California and served two successful terms. Then he unsuccessfully challenged Jerry Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Four years later he was elected President.

As President, Reagan demonstrated his character by carrying through on his promises. He promised to cut inflation, and it fell from 14 to 3 percent. He promised to cut taxes, and the top tax rate fell from 78 to 35 percent. He promised to get the economy going, and the Dow Jones soared from 800 to 2400. He promised to reduce unemployment, and he did. He promised to lower interest rates, and by 1989 they were less than half what they had been in 1980. He promised to constrict federal regulations, and the Federal Register shrunk from 87,000 pages of rules and regulations was reduced to 47,000. And, except for the first two years, he had to work with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives!

Dinesh D’Souza, born in India and educated in the United States , served as Senior Domestic Policy Analyst under Reagan from 1987 to 1988. His Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: The Free Press, c. 1997), provides an admiring analysis of the President’s political accomplishments. Like many conservatives, he early admired Reagan the man but underestimated him as a statesman. He now ranks him along with Washington and Lincoln as one of the nation’s greatest presidents, preeminently in two areas: foreign policy and domestic economy.

He begins, with some arresting vignettes, contrasting the alleged wisdom of the Harvard elite with that of Reagan. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for example, asserted in 1982 that folks imaging the Soviet Union would soon collapse were only “kidding themselves.” Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, highly revered within the Democratic Party, praised the USSR’s “great material progress” and asserted ordinary Russians were prosperous and happy. Furthermore, he asserted, in 1984: “the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower'” (p. 2). Lester Thurow, another eminent economist, praised, in 1989, the “remarkable performance” of the USSR, equaling that of the US.

The intellectual elite, of course, loved to ridicule President Reagan. Clark Clifford dismissed him as an “amiable dunce” (p. 14). But from the beginning of his presidency he insisted that “The Soviets can’t compete with us” (p. 4). He deeply believed that America was, in all ways, superior to the USSR. Marxist ideology, he believed, was profoundly wrong and could not stand the light of truth. “In 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. ‘In the communist world,’ he said, ‘we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards. . . . Even today, the Soviet Union cannot feed itself.’ Thus the ‘inescapable conclusion’ in his view was that ‘freedom is the victor.’ Then Reagan said, ‘General Secretary Gorbachev . . . . Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall'” (p. 4).

The wall came down two years later, largely because of Reagan’s steely resolve and policies. In Margaret Thatcher’s opinion, “‘Ronald Reagan won the cold war without firing a shot'” (p. 23). To Henry Kissinger, his success was “‘the greatest diplomatic feat of the modern era'” (p. 134). He did so, in part, through his words. His “evil empire” speech in 1983 angered the dovish Washington establishment (especially State Department functionaries), but it brought hope to millions suffering Soviet oppression. That speech demonstrated “what Vaclav Havel terms ‘the power of words to change history'” (p. 135).

He was also committed to “peace through strength,” the main plank of the “Reagan Doctrine.” Whereas Jimmy Carter vitiated the armed services, Reagan initiated a massive rebuilding of America ‘s military. Whereas Carter stood meekly aside while dictatorships and Communism dramatically advanced around the globe, Reagan steadfastly resisted it at every turn. In Iran , in Nicaragua , Reagan refused to appease regimes he considered “evil.” Supporting (often covertly) Solidarity in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan’s efforts ultimately enabled lovers of freedom to triumph in various places. Though highly controversial, his invasion of Grenada, where thousands of Cubans were helping to establish a Marxist regime, proved a highly significant move, restoring democracy to a troubled island. Responding instantly to Muslim terrorism, he bombed Libya into reticence.

In addition to his accomplishments in foreign affairs, Ronald Reagan helped ignite economic developments in the 1980s. His hostility to big government moved him, in the early ’60s, from FDR’s Liberalism to Goldwater Conservatism. He realized that “we are all eager to play the role of the selfish looter; we all like to get money for nothing. Thus we are always tempted to support government measures that impoverish other citizens to enrich ourselves. The principle was stated by that Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw: ‘A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on Paul’s support'” (p. 100). Disillusioned with the galloping centralization of power–manifestly evident under LBJ’s “Great Society”–he pilloried its strategy: “‘If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it'” (p. 53). “He once likened the government to a baby: ‘It is an alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other'” (p. 67).

Arriving in Washington , though unable to implement his deepest convictions, he did shift the nation’s course in several significant areas. What’s now called “Reaganomics” took shape–a combination of Milton Friedman’s monetarism and Arthur Laffler’s supply side thinking. Few folks thought it would work, and spirited discussions ensued even within conservative circles. Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labor secretary, dismissed it as “hopelessly contradictory” (p. 92). Kevin Phillips laughed at those who imagined “that Reagan could solve the nation’s serious problems with policies based on ‘maxims out of McGuffey’s Reader and Calvin Coolidge'” (p. 106). But the newly-elected Reagan was undeterred. Demonstrating its truth took time, and he had to “stay the course” through a recession at the beginning of his first term.

But as a candidate he’d “predicted that if his program was implemented, the economic woes of the Carter era would end and the United States would enjoy lasting economic growth and prosperity” (p. 85). And he was right! Inflation, raging at 21% in 1980 fell to three per cent within eight years. Tax cuts actually led to increased federal revenues! Unemployment went down and productivity soared. The Reagan years proved to be some of the “biggest peacetime economic boom in U.S. history” (p. 109). Despite Reagan’s critics, such as the Clintons , who criticized it as a “decade of selfishness,” in fact the 1980s witnessed “the greatest outpouring of private generosity in history” (p. 116). ************************************ Ronald Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, adopted a boy and named him Michael. Though divorce disrupted normal family ties, Michael admires his father had compiled (with the assistance of Jim Denney) a worthy book of quotations entitled The Common Sense of An Uncommon Man: The Wit, Wisdom, and Eternal Optimism of Ronald Reagan (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, c. 1998). One can easily locate the “Great Communicator’s” views on topics ranging from Acting to the Welfare State, from Communism to Prayer, from Horses to Taxes. Each topic is introduced, in illuminating ways, by Michael Reagan.

Concerning acting, Michael says “Both of my parents saw acting as a process of revealing truth, not creating illusions” (p. 1). His father, responding to critics who dismissed him as merely an actor who knew how to speak, defended his craft: “Because an actor knows two important things–to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with his audience. That’s not bad advice for a politician either. My actor’s instinct simply told me to speak the truth as I saw it and felt it” (p. 3).

A great patriot, Ronald Reagan frequently cited Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of America ‘s strength: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret and genius of her power. America is great because he is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” In his own words, Reagan said: “I believe this blessed land wa set apart in a very special way, a country created by men and women who came here not in search of gold but in search of God. The you ld be a free people, living under the law, with faith in their Maker and their future” (p. 12).

Resolutely opposing Communism, he believed it would collapse because it was rooted in deceit. “The Marxist vision of man without God,” he said, “must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith–the second oldest in the world–first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation: ‘Ye shall be as gods'”

(p. 37). He looked at this false faith as “evil” and dared to say so. “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin. There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might” (p. 101). More pungently, he said: “Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid” (p. 102).

The quotations are short, as is the book. But they reveal Ronald Reagan as witty, wise, and optimistic, as the subtitle suggests. **********************************

Reagan’s quips and phrases were often attributed to gifted speech writers, and certainly they provided much of the material he used while he was President. Recently, however, the Reagan archives provided researchers an unexpected treasure: handwritten speeches revealing how truly gifted he was as a writer, how much he read, how deeply he thought about public policy before he became President. Reagan In His Own Hand, ed. Kiron K. Skinner et al. ( New York : The Free Press, c. 2001) reveals a man largely unknown to the public. The editors give us a thoroughly scholarly work, including the original text with its emendations, suitable footnotes, and selected photocopies, of the 670 handwritten drafts Reagan wrote for radio talks he gave from 1975-1979.

Even George Schultz, Reagan’s secretary of state and long-time friend, was surprised by the cache of papers discovered in his archives. He was not surprised, however, that the paper reveal an intelligent man who read and thought and wrote throughout his life. “I was always struck by his ability to work on an issue in his mind,” says Schultz, “and to find its essence, and by his depth of conviction” (p. ix). He also appreciated the President’s “intense interest and fondness for the spoken word, for caring very deeply about how to convey his thoughts and ideas to people–not only to the American people, but to people living all over the world” (p. ix.)

The person who knows Reagan best, his wife Nancy, also remembers his life-long commitment to writing out his ideas. While many of his critics scoffed at the movie actor reading others’ scripts, Nancy says that the President “continued to write in the White House. He wrote speeches in the Oval Office, and he had his own desk in the living quarters of the White House. He was always sitting at his desk in the White House, writing” (p. xiii). Time constraints, of course, demanded that he use speech writers for many of his addresses, but he invariably played a role in their composition, at times stubbornly insisting on his own language even when more cautious diplomats sought to smooth over his rhetoric.

Reagan also read a lot! Referring to the years when the radio speeches were delivered, Nancy says: “Nobody thought that he ever read anything either–but he was a voracious reader. I don’t ever remember Ronnie sitting and watching television. I really don’t. I just don’t. When I picture those days, it’s him sitting behind that desk in the bedroom, working” (p. xv). Reading his radio talks–and noting the footnotes that refer one to the books and policy papers he referred to–persuades the reader that during the late ’70’s Reagan studied diligently as he prepared for his 1980 presidential campaign. The editors note: “We have checked dozens of references in his writings and, in virtually all cases, Reagan correctly cited or quoted his sources” (p. xxii).

The editors arrange the materials thusly: Reagan’s Philosophy; Foreign Policy; Domestic and Economic Policy; and Other Writings, which include items from 1925-1994. The policies he pursued during his eight years as president are clearly set forth in the things he wrote. His opposition to Communism, which he likened to a “disease,” his resolve to oppose every expansive move of the Soviet Union , was oft-expressed. He believed: “The ideological struggle dividing the world is between communism and our own belief in freedom to the greatest extent possible consistent with an orderly society” (p. 13). Winning the Cold War–something all the “experts” decried during the ’70s–was doable, Reagan believed. And he was, of course right. His analyses of communism in Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Africa, 25 years later, prove remarkably prescient.

In domestic and economic affairs, Reagan continually decried needless government interference in the free enterprise system and called for a reduction in taxation. He believed in sound monetary practices as an antidote to the rampant inflation that marked the Carter administration. As President, he brought about a dramatic reduction in inflation–and interest rates have never soared as they did in the ’70s. He believed that reducing taxation would stimulate economic development actually harked back to what he’d learned as an economics major in college. So the “Reagan Revolution” of the ’80s was hardly a new notion for the president. Rather he believed that ordinary people, free to pursue their own goals without undue interference, would creatively shape a booming economy.

What one finds, reading this book, is that Ronald Reagan was not merely “The Great Communicator.” He had something to communicate!

Educated in England, receiving a PhD at the University of Southampton, and doing postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institute, Serge Trifkovic has worked as a broadcaster for BBC and a reporter in southeast Europe for U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Times.  In The Sword of the Prophet (Boston:  Regina Orthodox Pr3ss, Inc., 2002), he sets forth a “politically incorrect” perspective on Islam, its “history, theology, and impact on the world.”  He sees today’s conflicts as simply a recent manifestation of an ancient religious struggle. 

In his Foreword to the book, a former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, endorses Trifkovic’s position, noting that “something is wrong in the Muslim world” (p. 3).  It’s a poverty-stricken, dictator-dominated realm, and the recent resurgence of militant Islam poses “the greatest danger to ‘Western’ values since the end of the Cold War” (p. 4).  “This is a book,” Ambassador Bissett says, “that deals with what many consider to be the major issue of our time–the question of whether the Western and Muslim civilizations can live together in peace” (p. 5).  Sadly enough, he admits, it seems “that, just as the Western democracies refused to acknowledge the danger inherent in the rise of Nazi and Communist ideologies, our refusal to confront militant Islam may cost us dearly” (p. 5). 

Trifkovic begins his book with the assertion that the Muslim attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, demonstrated an antipathy against the Christian world deeply rooted in Islam.  That so many refer to Islam as a “religion of peace” shows that “the problem of collective historical ignorance–or even deliberately induced amnesia–is the main difficulty in addressing the history of Islam in today’s English speaking world, where claims about far-away lands and cultures are made on the basis of domestic multiculturalism assumptions rather than on evidence” (p. 8).  Just as pro-communist publicists long avoided condemning the evils of Stalinist Russia, pro-Muslim “experts” have skillfully spread skillful propaganda to gloss over the truth concerning Islam.  To set forth the facts–to counteract the propaganda–this book was written.

First, we learn much about Muhammad.  Born in Mecca in 570 A.D., early orphaned, he spent his early years working at utterly menial jobs, including shepherding sheep.  Then, fortuitously, he met a wealthy widow, Khadija, 15 years his senior, for whom he worked and ultimately married.  Freed from survival concerns, he began to spend time in the solitude, especially in some caves near Mecca, and, in A.D. 610, received a message from an angel designating him as “the Messenger of God.”  When he shared his message, he won as converts only his wife and a few kinsmen. Most of the folks in Mecca merely scoffed at the new zealot.  But his visions continued, and his wife and a politically powerful uncle protected him from persecution for a few years. 

In A.D. 622, however opposition in Mecca escalated to the point that Muhammed and 70 followers fled north to the more hospitable city of Medina.  This event–the hijrah–marks Islam’s true beginning point.  Here, importantly, Muhammad shifted his emphasis from religion to politics, from persuasion to coercion.  His followers became bands of brigands, and as they raided camel caravans they brought money to the “prophet” and his movement.  Small-scale scirmish victories brought admiration and acclaim from the warrior-minded Arabs, and a battle at Badr in 624 proved particularly momentous, for the principles of jihad came to the fore.  No mercy was extended to unbelievers or captives.  “The Kuran contains the accompanying revelation from on high:  ‘It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land.’  Fresh revelations described the unbelievers as ‘the worst animals.’  The Prophet was now the ‘enemy of infidels.’  Killing, or in the case of Jews and Christians, enslaving and robbing them, was not only divinely sanctioned but mandated” (p. 38).  Within a decade, at the head of a victorious army, swollen by warriors fattened by plunder and power, Muhammed conquered Mecca, dying there in A.D. 632.

Evaluating the prophet’s career, Trifkovic says:  “Muhammad’s practice and constant encouragement of bloodshed are unique in the history of religions.  Murder pillage, rape, and more murder are in the Kuran and in the Traditions ‘seem to have impressed his followers with a profound belief in the value of bloodshed as opening the gates of Paradise’ and prompted countless Muslim governors, caliphs, and viziers to refer to Muhammad’s example to justify their mass killings, looting, and destruction.  ‘Kill, kill the unbelievers wherever you find ‘them’ is an injunction both unambiguous and powerful” (p. 51). 

Here Alexis de Tocqueville’s appraisal seems remarkable:  “‘ I studied the Kuran a great deal. . . .  I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.  As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world, and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself'” (p. 208). 

Muhammad’s example and teachings led quickly, following his death, to “jihad without end.”  Trifkovic insists:  “The view of modern Islamic activists, that ‘Islam must rule the world and until Islam does rule the world we will continue to sacrifice our lives,’ is neither extreme nor even remarkable from the standpoint of traditional Islam” (p. 87).  The century following Muhammad’s death (A.D. 632-732) witnessed the success of Muslim armies, conquering much of the known world, creating “an Arab empire ruled by a small elite of Muslim warriors who lived entirely on the spoils of war, the poll and land taxes paid by the subjugated peoples” (p. 89).  Lush agricultural lands, under Muslim rule, slowly turned to deserts.  Thriving economies, subordinated to Muslim dictates, slowly sank into impoverishment.  “The periods of civilization under Islam, however brief, were predicated on the readiness of the conquerors to borrow from earlier cultures, to compile, translate, learn, and absorb.  Islam per se never encouraged science, meaning “disinterested inquiry,” because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge” (p. 196). 

The primary victims of Muslim oppression were Christians, even in Spain, the alleged “jewel of supposed Islamic tolerance” (p. 108).   The oft-denigrated, and ultimately unsuccessful, Crusades were but “a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands, the systematic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims” (p. 97).  As a modern parallel, Trifkovic notes that the Crusades were designed as “a recon quest of something taken by force from its rightful owners, ‘no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy'” (p. 102).  Though less well-known in the West, the Muslim conquest of India led to what Will Durant called “probably the bloodiest story in history” (p. 111).  It was far worse than the Holocaust, worse than the killings of American Indians by the Spanish and Portuguese.  Muslims slaughtered Indians indiscriminately–killing 50,000 Hindus in a temple in Somnath, for example.  The Ottomans did the same in the Balkans, as did the Turks in Armenia.  In sum:  “Islam is and always has been a religion of intolerance, a jihad without an end” (p. 132).  Indeed, it resembles, in many ways, Bolshevism and National Socialism in the 20th century. 

Turning to the “fruits” of Islam, Trifkovic discusses such things as the absolute lack of religious liberty, the subjugation of women, the widespread practice of enslaving non-Muslims.  He also shows how deeply embedded is the hatred for Jews in the Muslim world.  For example, during WWII the Mufti of Jerusalem and former President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, urged Muslims to support Hitler.  In a radio broadcast from Berlin, he said:  “‘Arabs!  Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights.  Kill the Jews wherever you find them'” (p. 186).  He supported the extermination of European Jewry.

Trifkovic concludes his treatise with an examination of “Western Appeasement,” showing how in Bosnia and Kosovo, Indonesia and Africa, leaders in the West have been so subservient to the economic power of Mid-Eastern oil and so conflicted concerning their own cultural traditions that they failed to resist militant Muslims.  “The West,” he insists, “cannot wage ‘war on terror’ while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil, appeasing Islamist aggression around the world, turning a blind eye to the Islamic destruction of peoples who are animists, Hindus and Christians, and allowing mass immigration of Muslims into its own lands” (p. 260).  Added to his concern is “Jihad’s Fifth Column” alive and well in the U.S. and other Western nations. 

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For those who find fiction a more palatable vehicle for historical and cultural information, Craig Winn and Ken Power’s Tea with Terrorists:  Who They Are; Why They Kill; What Will Stop Them  (CricketSong Books, c. 2003) provides an engrossing study of Islam’s threat to the world.  There’s adventure, romance, suspense–plus Christian apologetics, countless quotations from Islam’s primary texts, and an unrelenting warning that we Americans are just beginning a life-and-death struggle against an implacable foe.  The story centers upon a heroic Navy Seal, Thor Adams, who leads a disastrous expedition into Afghanistan, following which he launches an intellectual search to understand what motivated the Muslims he’d encountered.  The publicity he garnered granted him a podium, and he told the nation the truth he discovered about Islam.  That led to political acclaim and success.  (Since I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who wants to read it, I’ll say no more about the adventure and romance, but it is engrossing enough to sustain interest for 600 pages!)

The more historical and philosophical sections of the book, however, deserve attention, for they stress many of the same points earlier discussed in Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet.  World War III began, the Winn and Power make clear, on September 11, 2001.  The Muslims who steered the planes into American landmarks represented millions of Muhammad’s modern disciples who are deeply committed to jihad–the holy war that will end only when Islam rules the globe.  Terrorist acts, at the moment, are the strategies of choice, as they have been from the beginning, for “Muhammad was a terrorist” (p. 116).  Indeed a careful reading of Islam’s sacred texts reveals a disturbing celebration of death, a continual call to kill all “infidels,” a justification of any crime or enormity if it furthers the sacred cause.   “Islamic scriptures promote war, lying, thievery, rape, bigamy, genocide” (p. 434).  Just as Muhammad’s success followed his decision to shift from preaching a “religious” message to leading an armed band of brigands and killers that ultimately conquered Mecca, today’s Muslims resort to treachery and intimidation in their quest for pleasure and power.

Today’s Muslim terrorists are not, Winn and Power insist, abnormal.  Islam is not, and never has been, a “religion of peace.”  Peaceful Muslims, in the past, have often been coerced converts, not true believers, generally living in lands far from Arabia.  Lots of less-than-fervent faithful clearly crave normal routines, free from violence.  But devout Muslims, seeking to live out Muhammad’s precepts, have always embraced a violent agenda.  They reveal the fact that “Allah is as different from God as Muhammad is from Jesus” (p. 354).  Indeed, they simply carry on the most ancient Islamic agenda, and the cancers cells of el-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas are wildly metastasizing offshoots of “the cancer [that] is Islam itself” (p. 467). 

The authors argue that Islam is a “perverted religion” most nearly akin to dictatorial ideologies such as Communism and Nazism.    They even devote 10 pages to showing some amazing resemblances between the “Messenger” Muhammad and the “Leader” Adolph Hitler.  “Violence was the key to victory for both men” (p. 436).  Both gained and maintained political power through intimidation and manipulative rhetoric.  Both “became anti-Jew and anti-Christian” (p. 443).    Both led movements that led to the deaths of multiplied millions of innocent people.