Page 4745 – Christianity Today (2024)

The thump of goat-skin drums pulses through the Jefferson Junior High School cafeteria as eight dancers dressed in multi-colored batik robes and headdresses and brandishing short swords jump, sway, and sashay to an African beat.

“Drums are part of the African tradition to send messages. They are like the bells in the church to call people to pray,” says Alex Mukulu, 39-year-old director of the Ugandan dance troupe Impact International. “They are drums of praise,” he tells students, “drums of worship.”

Impact International’s 11-city tour of the U.S. last year aimed at reaching both churched and unchurched people with their message of praise, cultural change, and redemption, using African musical forms laced with Western influences.

Mukulu plays much of the music on a guitar, but the musical center of attention is the drums. “Your [Western] drummers beat away but don’t say any-thing with it-only ‘boom chuck,’ ” Mukulu says, laughing. In Uganda, different rhythms have different purposes-as the village alarm clock or a call to work.

CUSTOMS AND DUTIES

The performance is a vibrant example of African praise. Much of the music and dance attempts to show and to affirm the values of African customs and traditions, says Mukulu-though people are becoming bitter with change and loss of those customs as more and more of Africa is involved with the Western world. For example, Uganda is moving away from arranged marriages, once “part and parcel of parents’ contribution to the future of their married children,” he says. Now, because of Western media, couples want to fall in love, then marry. But they can “fall in love” for the wrong reasons, Mukulu argues, and then they get divorced.

Mukulu wants to point out both the strengths and flaws of new customs, not simply dismiss them. “Our role is to emphasize and point to those values in every form of culture that are not sinful, so our people may not lose their traditions but rather perfect them.”

There is a song about Njabala, a young woman who is lazy. The eight dancers-who practiced 8 to 12 hours a day for six months for the tour-sing as they act out her education. Throughout Njabala’s ballad, the lyrics explain her work and role in the tribe. Mukulu explains he reluctantly added short swords to the performance to symbolize how women have been learning to defend themselves as Uganda has suffered much violence in the past three decades.

FINDING PEACE

Much of Mukulu’s music, and even his coming to faith, stems from a desire for peace in his war-torn country. “I wanted to write a play called The Prince of Peace because there was no peace in my land,” he explains. So he went to speak to a man he frequently saw reading by his window. “One who reads so much probably has some ideas about peace,” Mukulu thought.

The man was a British missionary who had read his Bible daily for 50 years. “He told me I couldn’t give what I didn’t have; I couldn’t give peace to my people unless I had peace.” Mukulu accepted Christ that day.

“But I never wrote the play. Perhaps I live the play.”

Mukulu must balance his two goals of both explaining and celebrating tradition and sharing a gospel that takes people away from common cultural ground. “Christ-who is the way, the truth, and the life-must remove us from where we are familiar to an unfamiliar ground. One reason many people reject the gospel is that they fear to swim in the new waters of challenge.”

KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS

“There are two ways to pull the Christian community together: one is through suffering, the other is through the arts,” says Jerry Eisley, director of the Washington Arts Group, a network of Christian artists in the D.C. area that sponsored Mukulu’s group for 17 performances around the nation’s capital.

Youngsters-white and black, poor and middle class-confirmed Eisley’s view as they danced along with Mukulu’s group, sang praise songs together, and played with the drums.

Mukulu is dismayed by some of the questions from U.S. students-asking what year it was in Uganda and whether the country had electricity. But he is even more concerned about their lack of spiritual preparation.

“Students in public schools are not ready to ask questions about the spiritual contents of our performances, because there is a general consensus that we both must not talk about faith,” he says. The group’s appearances in public schools are done in a “farmer spirit” with the aim of putting “seeds in the ground.”

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T60585508

The place known casually as “The Ranch” is ringed by piles of junk. Strangely attired mannequins, mysterious parts, and half-built contraptions litter the dusty landscape. To its owner, Betty Voss, what appears to be junk is but a beginning for healing creativity.

Since 1962, the artist has been one of San Bernardino (Calif.) County’s leading lights to gang members, kids under court probation, child-abuse victims, and disabled children who can’t figure out how to make life work. She has converted a collection of barns, bungalows, and trailers into an outdoor puppet amphitheater and studios for pottery throwing, glass blowing, puppet making, painting, and other artistic endeavors.

Voss, an energetic fifty-something, has always been a Christian in a field that avoids the mention of God and healing. Her face is creased by smile lines, and she chuckles that the Art Therapy Association of America “can’t deny that there’s something in art beyond their explanations of it. They still don’t get as far as God, but they could see we were taking very hardcore probation kids, and they were being changed.”

Voss employs art initially to establish trust and rapport, drawing out the childlike creative urge suppressed by extreme emotional trauma. “Because we are all made in the image of a Creator God,” she insists, “we each have creativity within us. Following our own creative ability really leads us back to God, the original Creator-the original Artist,” she says.

Artmaking is a nonthreatening, nonverbal conduit for buried emotions. Recent research is finally offering scientific support for physical strategies in art therapy. For example, there is now proof that manual activities, like handling clay or worry beads, release healing chemicals into our bodies.

Voss, who has witnessed the salutary benefits of art for three decades, remembers one of her first cases. “This little guy with a brain tumor, in remission, began hurting again, and even the doctors didn’t understand why. I asked him to ‘animate’ his pain [like a cartoon],” Voss remembers, “and he sketched a tunnellike thing. He was claustrophobic-frightened of the cat-scan machine.” The drawing revealed the problem, and then a solution could be found for the boy’s pain. With Voss’s help, he became the resident cat-scan expert, gladly counseling other patients.

When viewed more as a process than an end product, art gives an outlet for a range of emotions. For example, Voss says, “Throwing clay at plywood is a great way to express anger. But it’s merely a release. It doesn’t accomplish everything we want. The kids literally have to turn their anger into something creative, not destructive. We help them see forms in the thrown clay. They finish it off.” In the process of redeeming a formless mass of clay, a victim’s battered self-identity can also be redeemed by positive, affirmed activity.

Recently, Voss was astounded during a therapy session between Cornelius Austin, a Vietnam vet, and a kid who survived a drive-by shooting at a McDonald’s. The boy, who Austin describes as “totally dead inside,” had pressed his T-shirt to a victim’s bloody wound to try to stop the bleeding. His emotional breakthrough occurred when he drew the image of his hand grasping a gory piece of cloth. Austin’s own cathartic image about his Vietnam experience, where his spine was severed by a bullet, was virtually identical. In an instant, the two shared a profound, unspeakable pain. Austin recalls, “That image, and my understanding of it, validated the truth of the awful thing he witnessed.” Art helped the boy accept the trauma of his experience-a necessary first step in being able to figure out how to get on with life.

For both Voss and Austin, there is more behind healing. Austin says, “These kids don’t know that perfect love casts out fear”; it is art that has helped him communicate this message to hardened teens.

And that’s life at the Ranch.

By Karen L. Mulder.

NETWORK

Summer ’95 Faith and Arts Conferences

Dance “Festival ’95,” an interfaith celebration of the spiritual life through dance forms; sponsor: Sacred Dance Guild; August 9-16; Honolulu, HI; expected attendance: 400; main speakers: Carla De Sola, Leah Mann; 618/457-8603

Music-Ecclesiastical “Choristers Guild Summer Seminar,” workshops to train clinicians to nurture the spiritual growth of children and youth through music; sponsor: Choristers Guild; July 23; Grand Rapids, MI; expected attendance: 400; 214/271-1521; fax: 214/840-3113

Music-Classical “Inaugural Conference,” first gathering of Christians who compose serious concert music; sponsor: Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers; September 29-30; Houghton College, Houghton, NY; expected attendance: 50; main speaker: Patrick Kavanaugh; 716/567-4707 or 9424

Music-Contemporary “Christian Artists Seminar in the Rockies,” concerts and over 150 daily seminars on worship, drama, music ministry, and the arts; sponsor: Christian Artists Corporation; July 30-August 5; Estes Park, CO; expected attendance: 1,000; main speakers: Bill Gaither, Bryan Duncan, Susan Ashton, Babbie Mason, Wayne Watson; 800/755-7464; fax: 303/452-3411

“Cornerstone Festival ’95,” Christian rock concerts; round-the-clock multi-disciplinary seminars and fellowship meetings on music and arts; sponsor: Jesus People USA; June 29-July 2; Bushnell, IL; Steve Taylor, Phil Keaggy, Glenn Kaiser; 312/989-2087

Music-Sacred “GTU Sacred Music Conference,” worship services, recitals, concerts, and extensive displays of music, books, and materials for ecclesiastic use; sponsor: Pacific School of Religion/Graduate Theological Union; July 17-21; Berkeley, CA; expected attendance 300; main speakers: Joyce Jones (organ), Marika Kuzma (conducting), Mary Cobb-Hill (spirituals), Steven Roberts (gospel music); 800/999-0528

Performing Arts “Messengers for Hope,” workshops in clowning, mime, storytelling, puppetry, dance; sponsor: Phoenix Power and Light Co., Inc.; August 3-6; Rochester, NY; expected attendance: 250; 1-800/258-5323

Theater “1995 North American Networking Conference,” venue for the best in Christian theater performance and for the support and equipping of Christians working in theater arts; national auditions will be held for numerous resident Christian theater companies; sponsor: Christians in Theatre Arts (CITA); June 8-10; Point Loma, CA; expected attendance 500; main presenters: Lamb’s Players Theatre, Riding Lights Theatre of England; 803/271-2116; fax: 803 /271-2116

Visual Arts “Collaboration,” juried and nonjuried exhibits, critique sessions, seminars, workshops, plenary sessions that will delve into the significance of collaborative art efforts within varying social/religious contexts; sponsor: Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA); July 28-29; Berkeley, CA; expected attendance 400; main speakers: Tom Sine, Nicholas Wolterstorff; 612/378-0606; fax in PA: 717/691-6042

Visual Arts and Religious Communities “On the Visual Arts and Religious Communities,” to explore the progress of arts and religion for the last 30 years in the context of the international arts scene; bringing to light differences and affinities among cultural and religious traditions; sponsor: care, Center for the Arts, Religion and Education; July 31-August 4; Berkeley, CA; expected attendance: 500; main speakers: John Dillenberger, Moshe Safdie, Stephen de Staebler, Horst Schwebel, Wilson Yates; 800/999-0528

Writing “The Glen: A Writer’s Workshop,” writing workshop and multidisciplinary survey of current literary trends; sponsor: Image journal; August 19-25; Glen Eyrie, CO; expected attendance: 300; main speaker: poet Richard Wilbur; 316/942-4291 x278; fax: 316/942-4483

List compiled with the help of Christians in the Arts Networking, Inc., Arlington, MA.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T60595508

Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers, by Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens (Westminster/John Knox, 272 pp.; $17.99, paper). Reviewed by Lyman A. Kellstedt, professor of political science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Vanishing Boundaries is an important piece of contemporary social-science research that should be read by anyone interested in the future of Christianity in American society. If you have ever asked yourself why some churches and denominations prosper while others do not, this book provides some answers.

The subjects for the study were confirmands of a particular segment of mainline Protestantism, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (pcusa). Churches were selected randomly to represent all regions of the country and all sizes of church. Confirmand lists from the 1950s and 1960s were obtained from the selected churches, limiting the study to the baby-boom generation and its immediate predecessor, and individuals to be interviewed were randomly selected from these lists. Sherlock Holmes-style investigations tracked down the people selected, who were then interviewed by phone, 500 in all. Forty in-depth interviews were conducted in person. Cooperation on the part of the people selected for interviewing was high. The authors talk about their methods of research in an open and frank manner, and in the process increase confidence in their conclusions.

Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens find that the Presbyterian confirmands have scattered into eight groups-four distinct “churched” groups: “fundamentalist,” pcusa, other mainline Protestant, and churches from all other denominations; in addition, there are four distinct “unchurched” groups: attenders but not members, members but not attenders, uninvolved but “religious,” and the nonreligious.

Much of the book examines these eight groups in an effort to explain their involvement or lack of it. With the exception of the so-called fundamentalists, the reader is struck by the tangential connections to the faith on the part of the respondents. Only about half of the original confirmands are members of a church, and many of them lack strong commitments.

The number-one factor in explaining strong religious involvement is the existence of orthodox beliefs, especially the belief that Christ is the only way to salvation. These beliefs may be taken for granted in evangelical churches, but they are not shared by many of the Presbyterian confirmands interviewed.

Building on their research, Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens attempt to explain the precipitous decline of mainline Protestantism. After considering a variety of explanations, they conclude: “We believe the dominant explanation for mainline decline is a combination of the gradual weakening of mainline churches, changes in American culture, and the churches’ policy of openness to change.”

They argue that churches can do something, but not a lot, about changes in the culture. Churches can, however, work hard to instill a system of core beliefs in their congregants-beliefs that are not abstract and impersonal but provide answers to essential questions concerning the existence and nature of God, life after death, and prescriptions for leading the good life in relationships here on earth.

For the vast majority of Presbyterian confirmands interviewed for this study, the church failed to provide satisfactory answers to these questions. And the authors are not optimistic that local mainline church bodies will magically find a solution to their decline in numbers in the near future.

One major annoyance in this otherwise admirable research effort is the use of the term fundamentalist to describe churches more conservative than the pcusa. This choice of terminology may reflect a failure to distinguish between religious traditions (groups of denominations and local churches that share common beliefs and practices, such as evangelical Protestant and mainline Protestant) and religious movements (which are efforts to alter existing denominational structures and local churches; examples include fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, and ecumenism).

Vanishing Boundaries is about what works in contemporary American religion, or, conversely, what does not work. The authors’ findings strongly suggest that any local church body or denomination that takes its eye off the ultimate questions of the faith and places few demands on its congregants will find itself on the sidelines.

Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens do us a great service by attempting to explain the decline of mainline Protestantism in a form that should encourage discussion and debate. Evangelicals need to participate in these discussions. We, too, need to be clear about what brought people to our churches and so avoid being pushed to the sideline. Vanishing Boundaries can assist us in this process.

CHURCH-FRIENDLY THEOLOGY

The intrinsic winsomeness of Jesus’ way.

Systematic Theology, Volume II: Doctrine, by James Wm. McClendon, Jr. (Abingdon, 536 pp.; $24.95, paper). Reviewed by Rodney Clapp, academic and general books editor, InterVarsity Press, and author of Families at the Crossroads (IVP).

Of the writing of systematic theologies there seems to be no end. One theologian has in fact counted more than 40 commenced in the last decade. Even passionate readers of theology may be forgiven, then, if they wonder whether they need take up another volume of contemporary systematics. If you are among the number who have decided to give the genre a rest (or perhaps have rarely sampled it at all), I am here to persuade you to add one more book to the list before you abandon the field.

James Wm. McClendon, Jr., most recently scholar in residence at Fuller Theological Seminary, and before that for many years a distinguished teacher at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, has recently published the second volume of his systematic theology. Doctrine follows Ethics in McClendon’s project, and it in turn will be followed by a concluding volume on fundamental or philosophical questions. McClendon’s beginning with ethics and ending with what is usually called prolegomena is itself an indication of one thing that sets his systematics apart from a plethora of competitors. This Southern Baptist thinker is determined to do theology in service of the church and therefore careful to avoid tacking on the “applied” angle of his work as a comparatively scanty afterthought.

So the first reason for including Doctrine on your reading list is that it offers theology done for the work of the church-and for the work of the church now. “Without Christian life,” McClendon says, “the doctrine is dead; without Christian doctrine, the life is formless.” And doctrine, like church practice, must continually be renewed in the light of changing history. For our times, much of the value of McClendon’s work springs from his heritage as an Anabaptist. The Radical Reformers never had the luxury of leaning on state or surrounding culture to do the work of the church. Today, after centuries of outright and then quasi-Christendom, all Western churches are essentially free churches-free churches in the sense that they must depend solely on themselves for the attraction and maintenance of members.

So we all, whether Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or Mennonites, must now appeal to what McClendon calls the “intrinsic winsomeness of Jesus’ way displayed in Scripture and history, rather than some external inducement.” McClendon is also worth reading on this count because, unlike some heirs of Christian traditions that once held widespread cultural power and can now only lament its loss, he is not depressed and nostalgically paralyzed by the passing of Christendom. Whatever the real dangers of the day (and McClendon is not blind to them), it is energizing to read a theologian who recognizes that this era of profound cultural transition presents fresh opportunities. After all, it is not merely Christendom that has passed, but much of the Enlightenment legacy with it. As McClendon observes, large cultural-philosophical obstacles “that have impeded Christian thinking for two hundred years or so are now dissolving or dissolved: Christian theology is in a new way free to be itself.”

A second reason for putting Doctrine on your reading list is that while it does theology for the church today, it does so in vigorous continuity with the church yesterday. On the way to learning how a late-twentieth-century free church theologian might parse the doctrines of sin, salvation, God, and the kingdom of God, you will need to work your way through many pages reviewing and respecting Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and a good many other luminaries of the faith. I am sure McClendon would agree with philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of tradition as a communal argument carried on over time. Accordingly, McClendon is no modern progressive who thinks the past was wholly inferior and can be summarily dismissed. But neither does he consider it sufficient to parrot the arguments of an earlier day (just as Augustine did not parrot the arguments of Irenaeus, or Calvin the arguments of Augustine).

Different readers will favor different aspects of McClendon’s cultivation of the tradition, but I especially like his treatment of the Trinity. Worship of the Trinity has long been a Christian hallmark, one that sets the faith apart not only from atheistic philosophies but also from other monotheistic faiths. For that very reason, this doctrine is likely to suffer increasing pressure over the coming decades-not least from a growing Islamic witness. McClendon honors the Greek and Latin creedal formulations that saw each member of the Trinity as hypostasis and persona, but is rightly concerned that the usual modern understanding of these terms as “person” is misleading. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not “persons” in the modern sense of discrete individuals. As an alternative, McClendon suggestively turns to the notion of narrative, a category recently receiving much attention in nearly all the humanities and social sciences.

So for McClendon, the Trinitarian doctrine is an “encoding of the biblical narrative of God.” To call God Father is to remind us this is the One, according to the Story, who created all things and is the “Father in heaven” to whom Jesus prayed. To call Jesus Christ Son reminds us that the Trinity includes he who lived and died on behalf of a lost creation. And to call a member of the Trinity Holy Spirit is to acknowledge that God remains with and active in the church and the creation.

A third and final reason to read McClendon is that Doctrine, quite simply, is fun. Confident of his substantial learning, McClendon is not afraid of plain speech. He adores biographies, having devoted a goodly portion of his earlier writing to the genre and its possibilities, and so he never tires of fleshing out the person behind a name. And Doctrine is written with the winning elegance of the courtly Southern gentleman that is James McClendon. Indeed, the church would benefit from laypersons reading this book if for no other reason than to show them that serious theology need not be encased in lifeless and forbidding prose. I offer two brief examples. First, on Holy Communion:

In this remembering sign, the Christian company, stragglers as well as pioneers, are gathered, the fit and the footsore shoulder to shoulder, to receive as ration the sign of God’s faithfulness in the body of Jesus Christ.

And second, on the Lord’s (or Disciples’) Prayer:

In sum, the Disciples’ Prayer presumes a hearer God deeply involved with the organic and inorganic world, a holy God who blesses the created order with his own presence, a nurturing God who cares about the baking of bread, a healing God who mends the ruptures of social fabric for our good, a guiding God who leads Christians through the narrow passages of time that precede the end. To acknowledge the listening presence of such a God is to acknowledge God’s prior presence in creation to feed and heal and guide and bless.

To serve the church in its work, to respect the tradition while keeping it alive, and to show us theology can be enjoyable-Jim McClendon’s Doctrine does all this, as did his earlier Ethics. Augustine once prayed to be released from lust, but not quite yet. Perhaps we should pray for a moratorium on systematic theologies, but not until Jim McClendon finishes his volume three.

Finding God in Unexpected Places, by Philip Yancey (Moorings, 240 pp.; $17.99, hardcover).

Attentiveness to the presence of God is the unifying theme of the 44 wide-ranging chapters in this new book from CT’s editor at large. “I do not ask you to believe all that I believe,” Yancey writes, “or walk the same path I have walked. All I ask is that you keep an open mind as you look at the world through my eyes.” Most of the contents of the book first appeared in Christianity Today.

WORTH MENTIONING

* Christians who are committed to environmental stewardship will celebrate the appearance of Green Cross. Mission statement: “To serve as an interdisciplinary Christian quarterly which helps readers care for creation in a way that is faithful to Jesus Christ, biblical revelation and scientific analysis.” Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter 1995) offers a mix of features and departments, including “Christian Ecological News”; $25; 10 E. Lancaster Ave., Wynnewood, PA 19096; (800) 650-6600.

* Launched in Spring 1995, Regeneration Quarterly is “offered by Christians of the rising generation for thoughtful Christians of every age.” The magazine seeks to provide “a forum for robust yet graceful conversation among Christians who might otherwise be separated by conviction, circ*mstance, or geography.” Theme of the charter issue: “The Soul of Generation X”; $19.95; P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9368; (800) 783-4903.

* Christianity and the Arts, a quarterly that made its debut in 1994, is distinctive in the breadth of its coverage of the arts. Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1995), for example, includes pieces on the visual arts, dance, music, poetry, and fiction. Reproduction of artwork is high quality; see the stunning lead article, featuring the work of painter Linda Ruth Dickinson; $15; P.O. Box 118088, Chicago, IL 60611; (312) 642-8606.

* After a hiatus, the annual literary review Seven resumed publication in 1993 with Vol. 10, a Dorothy Sayers centenary issue. Don’t miss Vol. 11 (1994), which includes “Shadowlands Observed”: Ten people-widely different in background and outlook, yet all possessing relevant expertise-offer their responses to the film Shadowlands. Among the contributors to this fascinating Rashom*on-like feature are Peter Schakel, George Sayer, Lyle Dorsett, Douglas Gresham, Walter Hooper, Claude Rawson, and Debra Winger; $12.50; The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187-5593.

* For a state-of-the-art example of integration of psychology and theology, see Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter 1994) of the Journal of Psychology and Theology, a special issue focusing on “Psychotherapy with Religiously Committed Patients,” guest edited by Randall Lehmann Sorenson (one of next month’s reviewers in ct); $12 (single issue); Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, 13800 Biola Ave., La Mirada, CA 90639-0001; fax (310) 906-4500.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T60605508

The Discovery Channel recently aired “Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich,” a documentary on some films found in archives after German reunification. The Nazis had a public relations problem: they wanted to exterminate weaker members of society, but Lutheran Germany had a history of compassion toward the old, the infirm, and the mentally ill. In order to change public perception, the Nazis hired some of Germany’s best filmmakers.

I watched the Nazi films with chilled fascination. Certain qualities-the narrator’s “objective scientist” voice, the soothing, classical soundtrack, the follow-the-dot reasoning-reminded me of a fifth-grade science film. A hunter strides through the Black Forest. “Nature runs by fixed laws,” says the narrator. “The fox catches the weak rabbit, and the hunter shoots the weak deer.”

Any realities that challenged the film’s message-Don’t hunters go after strong deer with big racks?-were glossed over. This was Nazi propaganda, not pure science. Next the film showed patients at Hadamar, a facility for the mentally disturbed. Klieg lights aimed at unnatural angles made the patients look ominous, their faces angular and deeply shadowed, their eyes wild.

Shift to a bureaucrat displaying budget graphs. It takes 100,000 Deutschmarks to keep one of these defectives alive, he explains-money badly needed by the Fatherland. We should follow the example of nature and allow the weak to die.

Another film, The Accused, presented the same message in a drama. For the starring role, the director shrewdly cast the actor who read the Nativity story over German radio each Christmas. The film shows him and his beautiful wife playing in a string trio. Inexplicably, the wife starts hitting wrong notes on the piano. She stares at her hands, shakes her head, and runs from the room.

The wife learns she has contracted multiple sclerosis. She sinks into depression. Finally, the husband and wife together decide there is no need to prolong a miserable life. They carry out her assisted suicide.

The Accused ends in a court scene, with the actor giving an impassioned defense of the higher law he obeyed, the law of nature. Germany released this film in 1939, as lawmakers were debating euthanasia.

In an extraordinary coincidence, “Selling Murder” aired on TV the week after an episode of the news program 20/20, in which a camera crew followed a Dutch family through the stages of their choice for physician-assisted suicide, now widely practiced in the Netherlands.

The man-this time a real patient, not an actor-had ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. A degenerative nerve disease, ALS causes paralysis of the limbs and then the muscles that allow speaking and, finally, breathing. Until the very end, the Dutchman could still communicate. His wife understood most of the grunts and squeaks that came from his damaged vocal cords. Failing that, he could point to letters on a board and spell out words.

Discreetly positioned behind the patient’s bed, the 20/20 cameras filmed the last few seconds of his life. A doctor injected a toxic solution; the man’s breathing slowed, and then stopped. His wife held his hand. She kept looking at the doctor, as if seeking reassurance. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the doctor said. He meant it as a statement, a comment on the pain-free ending, but it came out more as a question, a haunting question.

If I had seen only the 20/20 episode and not watched the Discovery Channel the next week, the scene might have passed quickly from my mind. We can hardly control what goes on around the world. The Dutch also distribute free narcotics; the Chinese mandate abortion for “defective” fetuses. I hear these things, I shake my head, and I retreat to worry about issues closer to home.

The Nazi propaganda films, though, drove the issue home for me. In a world that denies God, and that has no coherent view of what constitutes a human life, should it surprise us that human beings are again claiming for themselves the right to control death?

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said the Dutch doctor on 20/20. That is also the strident message of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and many others today. Death is natural, a desirable state for the infirm, the defective, the weak. A few weeks after these documentaries, a regional newsletter of Mensa, the organization for people with high IQs, published an article proposing the elimination of undesirables, including the retarded and the homeless.

Selling Murder” ended with a surprising twist. Despite their slick films and other attempts to sway public opinion, the Nazis failed to exterminate the physically and mentally disabled. Jews, Gypsies, and hom*osexuals they murdered virtually without protest; the disabled, they had to let live.

Why? The change in Nazi policy traces back to one brave woman, a Christian nurse who worked at Hadamar. When the facility was converted into a gas chamber, she could not keep silent. She documented the facts and reported them to her bishop, who released them to the public. The resulting outcry from the church forced the Nazis to back down. Perhaps her courage can serve as a prophetic model for Christians today.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T60595508

This story can serve as a metaphor for immigration: While working in Nairobi, my Ghanaian friends Sam and Paulina Atiemo bought a modest row house in a middle-class Kenyan neighborhood. The house gave them a postage-stamp garden and plenty of room for their children and guests. The only drawback was that over their back wall was a railroad line, and beyond it the huge, depressing slum called Kibera, a warren of makeshift houses. Kibera is the kind of slum you see pictured on television specials about Third World poverty.

Kibera was growing. Soon entrepreneurs began to sell produce in the open area behind the Atiemos’ wall. Eventually they replaced their improvised stands with tin-roofed shacks, which used the Atiemos’ wall as their back wall and main support. The wall, like that of all the Atiemos’ middle-class neighbors, was topped with shards of broken glass, to keep thieves out. The wall was high, and the Atiemos could not see the entrepreneurs—from their second-story window they could only see their roofs—but they could hear their radios and their conversation. And they could talk to them through a hole at the base of the wall.

The Atiemos’ house was designed so that washing water flushed out an open drain and through that small hole in the wall. It had worked well when there was free space beyond. Now, however, the occupants of that space objected. “At least let us know before you throw out your washwater,” they asked, “so we can move our produce.” For some time the Atiemos did so. Then one day they discovered that someone had cemented up the hole. They chipped it open so their water could drain, but soon it had been cemented up again. After that, the washing water had to stand in their back yard.

When it came time for the Atiemos to move away from Nairobi, some Americans considered buying their house. When they peered out the back windows they faced a daunting vista, however. The rusty tin roofs of Kibera had grown like a forest to the very edge of the Atiemos’ wall. The roofs extended out of sight, a menacing and seemingly infinite world of poverty. The Americans did not take the house, and the Atiemos thought the roofs were the reason why. They understood: It is not a psychologically simple matter to live a middle-class existence on a postage stamp island, separated from unthinkable poverty by a tall, brick wall topped with shards of broken glass.

FEED OR SEND AWAY?

So here we are in postage-stamp America, surrounded by poverty right up to our walls. That is the way we often think of our privileged position in the world. Immigration is a part of that picture. Through it that poverty is able to dribble (or gush) inside. Take down the wall, and we might be overwhelmed.

Immigration punctuates the news with crises. Remember the Vietnamese boat people, the Mariel boat lift, the wetback crisis, Haitian refugees, Proposition 187, the Golden Venture, the sanctuary movement? We are regularly reminded that whites are about to become a minority in America, that our borders are out of control, that we cannot provide jobs and free education to everybody in the world. “Waves of desperate migrants seeking relief from hunger, poverty, or tribal warfare may prove to be a more formidable challenge … than Soviet missiles or tanks,” writes Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

A cover of last year’s Atlantic Monthly captured this anxiety perfectly. To the question, “The Rest Against the West?” it pictured a white, middle-aged barbecuer with his dog and “Home Sweet Home” apron looking apprehensively across his fence at dozens of peering brown faces. No one was harming him, and yet: How can you barbecue hot dogs with a hungry world looking on?

I lived through the Proposition 187 debate in last year’s California elections. Reflecting that anxious mood was the repeated cry, “We’ve got to do something!” Very few people seemed to believe that Proposition 187 (which sought to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving government-funded benefits, such as education) was a desirable solution. (Indeed, the likelihood of the courts stopping its implementation was cited by Gov. [Pete] Wilson as a reason to vote for it.) But people said we needed to “send a message to Washington.”

An equally soulful cry was heard from the other side: “Why do you want to hurt people?” For those on the other side of the wall are not evil people. Their desires for a better life are understandable to us all. More and more it seems, however, that to keep them on their side of the wall we have to hurt them, or at least threaten them.

On such matters, fraught with moral questions, Christians surely should have something valuable to say. But it is by no means clear just what. We are in a position much like Jesus’ disciples, who, confronting a hungry crowd, saw only one solution: “Send the people away!” (Mark 6:36). Jesus fed the multitudes from a few loaves and fishes, but (like the disciples) we lack his confidence in miracles. Should we send the people away on the practical grounds that there is not enough here for everybody who wants to come? Or should we encourage our government to embrace the crowds and their needs?

It is true that Scripture tells us to love the alien as ourselves (Lev. 19:33), not to mistreat or oppress him (Exod. 22:21), and to include him in the welfare scheme for orphans and widows (Deut. 24:19-22). But those words were written when the world’s population was a small fraction of our own; when borders were open or nonexistent (think whether you can remember any document checks on Abraham and his children as they traveled ancient Palestine); when welfare consisted of letting the poor glean what was left over from the harvest.

We cannot straightforwardly translate the Old Testament commands into our own situation. We first need to understand our nation, our time, and our peculiar dilemmas.

A COLONY OF ALIENS

Anxiety over immigration is as old as America. “There is a limit to our powers of assimilation,” a New York Times editorial declared in May 1880, “and when it is exceeded the country suffers from something very like indigestion.” Several of the Founding Fathers worried publicly that immigrants were imposing a foreign politics and foreign culture on our land. Tolerant Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote, “Why should the Palatine Boors [German immigrants] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together, establish their language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens?”

First the Germans and the Irish, then the Italians and the Jews were treated as the bane of American society. Yet strangely, anti-immigration feeling never translated into limits on immigration. Any number could come, and did. In 1856, the No-Nothing political party, created largely to protect America from immigrants, became one of the most powerful political forces in the nation. It soon faded away, however. Not until 1882 were the first restrictions set, barring Chinese laborers; and not until the 1920s did immigration quotas begin, fixing annual limits for each nation’s immigrants, and ensuring that northern Europeans would continue to predominate. (Southern Europeans, considered genetically feeble, were restricted, and Asians were all but barred. For immigrants from the Western hemisphere, however, no numerical limits were set until 1965. As it happened, few came.)

In part as a result of the restrictive legislation, in part because of World War II, immigration to the United States was sharply reduced between the 1920s and the 1950s. In 1965, however, Congress scrapped the national origins quota system and enacted legislation that opened the door to a new wave of immigration.

Ironically, this landmark legislation was not designed to increase immigration. Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairing the Immigration Subcommittee when it adopted the 1965 Immigration Act, promised that “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. … Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. … [The bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from … the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”

Nevertheless, immigration immediately boomed. Furthermore, the ethnic mix changed dramatically, from Europeans to Asians and Latinos. Today over a million people come to live in the United States each year. This is the highest level of immigration, numerically speaking, the world has ever known. (As a percentage of the U.S. population, however, immigration to the United States is perhaps a third of what it was at the beginning of the century.) Most of them come from poor Third World countries.

Increased immigration is a direct result of government policy—even though Americans have never favored more immigration, and a law has never been passed that was intended to increase it. That is because while Americans generally want less immigration, they do not want it badly. Meanwhile, many special-interest groups have worked hard for generous provisions. Business and agricultural concerns sought immigrant labor; ethnic groups wanted relatives and former countrymen to join them; political lobbies desired hospitality for refugees from oppressive regimes—especially Communist ones.

Underneath these legal explanations, however, are more fundamental changes. Americans once felt comfortable excluding all but Anglos. No more. Prejudice that was once normal is widely seen as wrong. That is why in 1965 our immigration laws dropped barriers to Asian immigration. It seemed like the right thing to do. Asia, however, more than any other continent, has a poverty-stricken population that can dwarf ours.

There is also the matter of family values. The 1965 law allowed citizens and permanent residents to bring close relatives into the country—their spouses, children, parents, brothers, and sisters. The law’s sponsors claimed this would preserve the U.S.’s ethnic makeup, since the largest ethnic groups—European—would presumably have the most relatives to bring over. It turned out that Asians and Latinos had a much larger sense of family. They brought in relatives by the score, and each, in turn, brought more.

There is, finally, the fact that people in far-off places know much more about America than their parents did. American films and television are seen everywhere. In New Delhi slums, I was told last year, 50 percent of the homes have a television, and MTV’s shows are popular. Exactly what an undernourished child from the slums of Delhi sees in MTV I do not know, but no doubt it puts some kind of American tentacle in his soul.

Greatly expanded world trade, increased tourism and travel, lower air fares—all work to this end as well. The pressure is felt by all the wealthy countries in the world. Europe never had an immigration problem until the current era. Now, the Danes, for example, debate whether it is possible for their country to be multicultural, as opposed to being, well, Danish. So do the French, the English, the Germans. “Contemporary immigration is a direct consequence of the dominant influence attained by the culture of the advanced West in every corner of the globe,” write Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut in Immigrant America. Ironically, that dominant culture feels threatened by the forces its dominance has unleashed.

Still, immigration is not really “out of control.” Perhaps three out of every four American immigrants come legally. Congress could reduce immigration by half, overnight. Should we? Or should we continue to let a world of poor people, from cultures utterly unlike our own, flood to our cities?

WHAT DO THEY COST?

Naturally, the first thing we think of is money. Immigration is often considered as an economic issue, as though we could wipe the faces off the people and consider them as purely monetary facts. There have been many careful analyses of immigrants’ impact on employment, wages, taxes, and welfare. The results are not as illuminating as one might wish. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to consider immigration should know the economics involved. Here are questions that are commonly asked:

* Do immigrants take jobs from citizens? “If they could work eight days a week, they would,” says Presbyterian pastor Rafael Martinez of the poor Mexican immigrants he ministers to in San Diego. That fits the usual portrait of the “immigrant personality”—someone highly motivated to work and get ahead. It is common for immigrants to hold two or even three jobs at once.

Would at least one of those jobs have been held by an unemployed American citizen? The answer seems to be no. Immigrants appear to make very little impact on the job market. One reason is that they are almost always at a dramatic disadvantage in seeking jobs, either because their knowledge of English is limited, or because they lack the understanding of American culture needed on the job.

Immigrants get jobs that others will not take or for which no one else is qualified. Furthermore, they create jobs, both by starting their own businesses (immigrants tend to be self-employed more than native-born Americans) and by providing a market for goods and services. Economists note that areas with high immigration show no signs of higher unemployment. To the contrary, cities like Miami, Los Angeles, and even New York demonstrate highly dynamic economies.

* Do immigrants depress wages by supplying labor at wages citizens would never accept? Again, the answer seems to be no. At least, in areas where immigrants have flooded in—and three-quarters settle in just six states, California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—wages are not lower than elsewhere. Economists can find no relationship between wage levels and immigration rates, whether they look at skilled or unskilled labor.

* Do immigrants create hardships for those at the bottom of American society, particularly for poor African Americans? Yes, there does seem to be some impact on the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Last year the President’s Council of Economic Advisers reported that immigration “appears to have contributed to the increasing inequality of income [between rich and poor], but the effect has been small.” One study found that when immigrant participation in a local labor market doubles, the wages of young blacks may fall by 4 percent or less. (Those of other minorities are unaffected.)

* Do immigrants cost the rest of us, by consuming more government-supported social services, such as free schools and Medicare, more than they pay for in their taxes? Most economists believe the answer is no. They estimate that immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits. (Some, most prominently George Borjas of the University of California at San Diego, argue that immigrants are a net drain—though he estimates a net cost of $1 to $3 billion, small by comparison with the government budgets.)

Two qualifications must be made, however. First, immigrants pay disproportionately more in federal than in state and local taxes, but they consume services at the local and state level. The federal government gets a surplus, and some states and localities end up with a loss. California’s protests against federal policy seem well founded. Second, some kinds of immigrants—namely, illegal immigrants and refugees—contribute less and may cost more than other immigrants. For all these calculations, rough estimates are necessary; it seems impossible to be precise.

* Do immigrants take advantage of our safety net and become dependent on welfare? If you leave refugees out of it, immigrants are considerably less likely to go on welfare than native-born Americans. “Among non-refugee immigrants of working age who entered during the 1980s, 2.0 percent report welfare income versus 3.7 percent of working-age natives,” an Urban Institute report by Michael Fix and Jeffrey Passel found.

The two exceptions are refugees and elderly immigrants. Unlike other immigrants, refugees are eligible for welfare immediately on entering the United States, and they use welfare more than other Americans. That is perhaps to be expected, given the traumatic circ*mstances most of them come from.

As to the elderly, most of them have not worked long enough to qualify for social security. Over 25 percent of elderly post-1980 immigrants receive welfare, and this figure may be higher for groups that have learned how to “work the system.” According to Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis, 55 percent of elderly ethnic Chinese immigrants in California are on welfare.

Economic studies can be used (and are) for both anti-immigration and pro-immigration arguments, but they are not overwhelming in either direction. They do point out that many problems lie not with immigration per se but with refugees and illegal aliens.

Refugees are not typical immigrants—they did not choose to leave home, and they often have been traumatized in the process of coming to America. They offer special burdens, but we have special obligations to them, too. Often they are victims of American wars—the Cold War, in general, and Southeast Asian wars the most prominent recent example. Further, they are people whose lives were in danger, people who desperately need compassion. Refugee resettlement is the last program that should be judged by a cost-benefit analysis.

Illegal immigrants are a different story. Like most immigrants, they come for economic reasons, but they are mostly poor and uneducated, and their irregular status keeps them from joining the mainstream. Thus they make the smallest contributions economically.

The trouble is, it is hard to stop illegal immigration. Even if the border with Mexico could be controlled with less violence than was used on the Berlin Wall, large-scale illegal immigration would continue. Estimates are that half the undocumented immigrants come to America by legal means and simply overstay their visas. In a country as large and free as ours, it is hard to catch up with them. An effective employee identification system might work, but there are serious concerns about government intrusion.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T618a5508

If economics do not offer great reasons to halt immigration, what about culture? Consider Los Angeles. No city has felt the impact of immigration more. Almost four out of every ten new immigrants went to California during the 1980s, and the largest share of these ended up in Southern California. They have transformed the region. In 1970, 4.7 percent of the American population was foreign-born. Today at least 8 percent is. In L.A., the proportion is about one-third.

As every traveler knows who has landed at the airport and set out for Disneyland in a rental car, L.A. on a map is a mosaic of pink, yellow, tan, and blue blobs strung together by a web of freeways. Today, those colored shapes represent not merely civic boundaries, but ethnic enclaves. L.A. is no longer the creamy city of the Beach Boys and endless identical suburbs. The texture is grittier, lumpy even.

While working on this article I set out in my rental car one morning from the posh, Anglo city of La Canada, crossing into Latino and African-American northwest Pasadena. Driving east across Lake Avenue, I entered an Armenian zone, then turned south to reenter another Anglo area. I passed through Monterey Park, a majority Asian (mostly Chinese) city, then into solidly Latino neighborhoods in Montebello. Each community I drove through has its own grocery stores (these are not mere corner grocery stores, but ethnic supermarkets), its own newspapers, its own politics.

You have a choice of how to read this polyglot experience. You can cruise the roadways watching the signs change from Chinese to English to Spanish to Hindi and think you are on a toy-sized global holiday, a Disneyland-esque “Small World.” Or, you can think of Beirut. Is this, as some charge, a new tribalism? Are immigrants “threatening to dissolve the bonds of common nationhood … bringing forward the danger of a Balkanized America,” as John O’Sullivan wrote in National Review last year?

Certainly there are many tribes. L.A. Roman Catholics say mass in 60 languages. That is to say, 60 different ethnic church communities are large enough for church authorities to schedule a service and (often) to import a priest who speaks their language. Actually, the archdiocese counts 99 ethnic groups; many make do with the same language.

It is not just the Roman church, of course; open the yellow pages under “Churches” and it seems that half the Protestant services advertised are in some other language: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Armenian, Korean. Other religions are represented, too: Jim Stephens of the Sonrise Center for Buddhist Studies gives a bus tour of Buddhist L.A. that features 15 stops.

Talk to these immigrants and you soon realize they do not have stars in their eyes when they hear “America the Beautiful.” Modern immigrants do not come to America to shed their culture and proudly become American. Just the opposite: they almost invariably are desperately trying to hold on to their language and culture.

Take the Korean-American community. It is in many ways a “model minority” (though many Asians despise the label), aggressively upwardly mobile both economically and educationally. Chong Kim of the Korean Center for World Mission told me that every Korean in Los Angeles knows exactly where to find the best schools; they will live only in those communities.

Yet Korean immigrants remain intensely attached to their homeland. In their minds, “Americanizing” is synonymous with decadence, disrespect across generations, bad behavior.

The majority of Korean Americans belong to Korean churches, which are the rallying point for the Korean community. “The Korean church’s primary goal is to preserve Korean culture,” Young Lee Hertig of Fuller Theological Seminary told me, “which angers the second generation.” Other Korean-Americans see preserving cultural identity as a secondary result, since the church is a natural gathering place for fellow ethnic Koreans. But all agree that the church has become closely tied to the preservation of Korean culture. Older Korean pastors often return to Korea, “or if not, they dream of it.”

Korean immigrants are fiercely determined to keep their children Korean, yet they fail, invariably. Korean-Americans are following the same three-generation path that European minorities followed a hundred years ago. The first generation is preoccupied with their home culture, speaking its language in their churches, proudly asserting their ethnic heritage at home, protecting their children from American decadence, and often dreaming of return to their native land. The second generation, the immigrants’ children, are in between—bilingual and bicultural. The third generation often knows very little of their grandparents’ language and culture; they are fully Americanized (though they often become extremely interested in their roots). Between the generations there is heartache—grave disappointment from the elders, frustration and rebellion from the youth. Korean-American Christians speak of the “silent exodus” of young people from their churches. They want to stop it, but often their attempts to provide English services fall short.

Indians are another example. I was told that most Indian immigrants send back to India to find wives for their sons. Even an Indian-American girl would be insufficiently orthodox to preserve a truly Indian home. “There are a lot of good things in Indian culture we must keep,” Premkumar Dharmaraj told me. “There are a lot of bad things in American culture we must protect our children from.”

Most evidence suggests new immigrants are assimilating American culture as quickly as, if not more quickly than, earlier generations. And why not? tv, movies, and music are a powerful force for assimilation. Economic realities push immigrants to acquire English more quickly. “The three-generation shift to English may shrink to two generations by 2000,” write Philip Martin and Elizabeth Midgly. A recent survey found that “most Mexican-born U.S. residents spoke Spanish at home, but almost two-thirds of all U.S.-born persons of Mexican ancestry used English at home.” Although the adoption of bilingual education in some schools has aroused fears that America might become, like Canada, a bilingual nation, immigrants themselves frankly value the acquisition of English. “A survey of U.S. residents of Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican origins recorded over 90 percent agreeing that ‘all U.S. citizens and residents should learn English.’ “

Yes, there are large sections of L.A. where Spanish, Korean, Armenian, or Chinese is the dominant language, but that is to be expected when tens of thousands of new immigrants come into a city each year. The children of these immigrants will speak English, quite certainly. They will intermarry with other Americans. Nearly half of California’s native-born Asians and Hispanics marry into other ethnic groups, according to Ron K. Unz—a rate far higher than that of Jews, Italians, and Poles as recently as the 1950s. Overall, intermarriages are occurring in America at three times the rate of 20 years ago.

In the meantime, ethnic enclaves profoundly affect the city’s culture. Critics of immigration ask, can American society digest such a huge amount of differentness?

There is also the question of what culture immigrants absorb once they get here. The welfare state, some claim, has completely altered the process of assimilation. For example, immigrants qualify for affirmative-action preferences. A Nigerian with no experience of American racial prejudice may, oddly enough, receive special consideration under programs instituted to compensate for American racial prejudice. In the America of today, will immigrants still learn lessons of democratic participation? Or will they assimilate the value of victimization and of ethnic balkanization?

These are good questions, but they say more about our anxiety over America than about our problems with immigration. As Unz writes, “A country in which 22 percent of white children and 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock need not look to immigrants as the source of social breakdown.”

Americans are anxious and angry about many social trends. Few if any of these are caused by immigrants. Immigrants are not particularly prone to commit crimes in the streets, and they certainly do not select the programs for Fox Broadcasting. They add to the burden of the public schools (in California public schools, one of six students was born outside the U.S., and one in three speaks a language other than English at home), but schools would be troubled with or without them. When you get down to details, it is hard to build a case that immigrants are a major cause of social upheaval in the U.S. On the contrary, their hard work and family values represent what many people think we have lost.

It is worth remembering, too, that earlier immigrants seemed just as foreign and threatening. Italians and Irish seem like model Americans today, but when their immigration was at its peak, they seemed extraordinarily alien to Americans—poorer than even blacks in the age of Jim Crow, illiterate and allergic to schooling, lacking any democratic traditions, and Catholic. To many Protestants, they were soldiers of the pope, an antichrist insidiously plotting the overthrow of Protestant America.

And while today the vast contributions of Jewish culture to America seem obvious, at the turn of the century nothing seemed more alien than the men in black with their earlocks and huge hats, arguing loudly over the Torah.

THE MISSION FIELD NEXT DOOR

The Church on Brady is a medium-sized Southern Baptist church in a scuffling, blue-collar, mostly Hispanic suburban neighborhood of east Los Angeles. The small wooden houses around it were built in L.A.’s post-WWII housing boom, when Southern California was the promised land for many young veterans. They came from Oklahoma and Ohio and Texas, and they planted a California version of their culture wherever they came. Today the neighborhood is a promised land for a different kind of traveler, those newly arrived from Mexico or Central America.

For the last 25 years, Tom Wolf has been pastor of the Church on Brady. He is a large, genial man who came to the church when it was thinking of closing its doors. He has steered the church from a traditional white Southern Baptist identity to a multi-ethnic character—primarily Hispanic, with significant Anglo and Asian minorities. Wolf calls it a “global local church,” and one proof is that 23 missionaries currently overseas have come from the church. On a January morning, I sat in the church library—a surprisingly robust collection of books—with him, Erwin McManus, the Salvadoran who has come as senior pastor, and Elaine Fudenna, an Asian woman who heads a job-placement program in the church. They talked about the church and about immigration.

McManus, himself an immigrant, has no doubt that immigration must be regulated. As a pastor, however, he looks at the issue differently. “I’m glad people are coming here, because then they have a higher chance of knowing who Jesus Christ is. I’m glad that people are flooding here from all over the world, because it means we have the greatest possibility to have the gospel return to the ends of the earth. I’m glad immigrants are tremendously open to the gospel. I’m glad they have needs. I’m glad we can help them. To me, we live in a kairos moment, where God has brought the world to us, and our response is to open our hearts and bring the gospel to them. I’m not going to push for the border to be closed. I’m going to push for us to give food to the hungry and clothes to the naked and shelter to the homeless and have the gospel preached to the poor.

“We started a church [in Texas], and almost everybody coming in was an illegal. Somebody said to me, ‘You can’t grow a church on illegals.’ I said my goal isn’t necessarily to grow the church, my goal is to expand the kingdom of God. Everybody who came to Christ, we started teaching them how to start a church, because, we figured, in six months you’re going to get deported, and so, well, good, the government will send out our missionaries.

“Taking a political position is fine, but don’t let it become the point on your arrow. The primary purpose for you still is that the gospel of Jesus Christ be proclaimed.”

Q.: Suppose you had a postage-stamp piece of land on which you lived a middle-class existence, while all around you were alien multitudes who continually wanted to come and share life on your piece of land. What would you call such a place?

A.: A successful mission station.

Consider Grace Community Church, a large, well-known, evangelical church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. According to Jim Stephens, a converted Buddhist and a member of the church, it is surrounded by the largest Thai community in the United States. Most of these people practice Buddhism. The Wat Thai Buddhist temple is just down the street. The Thai have not come seeking Christ; they are probably not even aware that they have inadvertently surrounded a church. Can this be anything but a remarkable opportunity for mission?

Similar opportunities are everywhere in Southern California. Sizable Iranian and Japanese populations are found in Beverly Hills. In Carson are many Samoans. Indians cluster in Artesia. Vietnamese abound in Westminster. In general, compared to Africa or the Americas, Asia has been resistant to Christianity. How interesting, then, that Asian immigration to the United States has grown so rapidly in the last 30 years.

OUR SECOND CHANCE

Ken Fong, a pastor of the Evergreen Baptist Church in Rosemead, California, describes a conversation with one of his seminary professors. The professor had said in his lecture that the ethnic church is an abomination. We should all go to one church, he said. Fong approached him at the break.

“So,” Fong said, “if we should all go to one church, why don’t you come to mine?”

“But yours is an ethnic church,” the professor replied.

“Then what church are we talking about?” Fong said.

His point was, of course, that all churches are ethnic. From the inside it does not necessarily seem so, particularly if you are from the majority culture. But to some others, your church is culturally alien. You are culturally alien.

Ethnic diversity appears, by the light of the Book of Revelation, to be eternal. At the final consummation of history, it is announced that God will live with men, and “they will be his peoples” (Rev. 21:3). The Greek is plural. Later it is said that the nations will walk by the light of the Lamb (21:24). People from all nations, however, will be united in worship before the throne of God, a great multitude “from every nation, tribe, people and language” (7:9). This will be the great and final immigration.

If the church is meant to anticipate that final worship service, American Protestants have not done terribly well so far. Aliens have been received antagonistically: the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and the Jews, to say nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Indians.

Now we have been given another chance. After a long hiatus, the peoples of the world are coming to us again. Perhaps there is less prejudice now, but as current political discussions indicate, immigration still provokes fear. For Christians, it should provoke love. We are certainly loyal to America, which implies feeling pride in our culture. Our higher loyalty is to the kingdom of God, however, which moves disinterestedly across national borders. Imagine, if you can, the apostle Paul writing on the subject of immigration. “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” (Col. 3:11, nrsv). We should search the faces across the wall for those of our brothers and sisters.

AMERICA’S SOCCER FIELD

Last fall I coached an under-10 boys soccer team. Our local soccer league has a program to enroll underprivileged kids, and about half of my team came from immigrant families, Eritreans and Cambodians, in particular. I had my best season ever as a coach, and not because, as some might suspect, the immigrant kids were ahead of the Anglo kids in soccer skills. Actually, they weren’t. But they did have qualities that are not always common among Americans: endless enthusiasm and responsiveness to authority. Given that, and given my adequate skills as a coach, we managed to have one of the better teams in the league. (We finished third. The first- and second-place teams were the other two immigrant teams.) We also had a wonderful time.

I take that as a metaphor for immigration. Immigrants bring the richness of their culture; they bring hard work and personal discipline. Citizens can contribute a welcome, an orientation to American society, an invitation to participate on equal terms. (The immigrant kids would never have played soccer if we had not chipped in for equipment and fees, as well as made sure they had transportation to games and practices.) Immigration is a meeting ground.

There is some truth to the postage-stamp-surrounded-by-poverty image of immigration. The world outside our borders is unthinkably large, and we are by comparison unthinkably rich. But I think there is more truth to immigration seen as a soccer game, with new kids invited to play. Of course there is some limit to how many kids we can take on. Of course we don’t want to strain the system to the breaking point. As long as people are so eager to play our game, however, my bias would be toward finding ways to let them, as many as we can.

Driving around L.A., visiting people in all areas, talking to pastors and church leaders of ethnic churches, I never once got a sense of a city about to collapse in chaos. What I felt was a place jingling with change, a pulsating, challenging environment. Yes, there is stress, but there is also excitement.

I like what Jacob Neusner wrote: “When we lose faith in the power of this country and its unique social system to take the foreigner and make the stranger one of us—in our image, after our likeness—and make ourselves over too, we shall deny the power that has made us unique among other nations.”

Let’s face it, most of the chaos America’s children face has nothing to do with immigrants; it has to do with the old stock. It has to do with the breakdown of families and the degradation of the media and the loss of moral authority. Faced with such challenges—and they affect even a soccer coach—I still think my immigrant players will contribute more than they require. So I am happy to say to them, “Welcome.”

That is how I see it as a soccer coach, and a citizen of America. But as a Christian, the case seems even clearer. Immigrants are coming, in whatever numbers the govern-ment deems appropriate. Some may think they threaten culture, schools, economic status. But I don’t think so. They do not, in any case, threaten my life in Jesus. In fact, we need to recognize them for what they are: people in God’s image, representing practically “every tongue and tribe.” Tom Wolf calls immigration “the invasion of the eschaton.” It represents missionary movement in reverse, the world come to my doorstep. In a way, immigrants are the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, that through him “all nations will be blessed.” And who can not say “welcome” to that?

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T60185508

Two Christian groups are spearheading a boycott of the Walt Disney Company because of the unbecoming portrayal of Catholic clergy in the new film Priest, released by Disney’s subsidiary Miramax Films.

The New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the American Life League (ALL), headquartered in Stafford, Virginia, are urging supporters to boycott all Disney products, Disneyland, Disney World, and cable TV’s Disney Channel.

The organizations also are asking constituents to write letters to Disney demanding that the movie be withdrawn, that company chief executive Michael Eisner be fired, and that Christians be issued a public apology. Fifty other ministries have joined the boycott, including the American Family Association, Christian Defense Coalition, and Eagle Forum.

ALL president Judie Brown calls the film “smut,” “sacrilegious,” and “blasphemous.” She says, “The minds of the American people should not be poisoned against the very church that has consistently stood up for moral values.”

Five fictional clerics are portrayed in the R-rated film, including one involved in a hom*osexual relationship and another having a sexual affair with his female housekeeper. Catholic League president William Donohue says the other priests are depicted as “a drunkard” and “a madman,” while a bishop “is simply wicked.”

“Not one priest is depicted as well-adjusted and faithful to the church,” Donohue says. “Had such a priest appeared in the movie, it would have made inexplicable the film’s theme of blaming the institution of the church for the maladies of its priests.”

The groups persuaded Miramax to delay the film’s opening from Good Friday until five days later, April 19. But the studio says it will make no more concessions. Disney says it has no control over Miramax, even though it has demanded that the studio make editing cuts on the forthcoming Kids (about an HIV-positive teenage boy obsessed with having sexual intercourse with virgins) in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. Miramax is not known for offering family-friendly fare. Recent releases have included Sirens, Pulp Fiction, and The Crying Game.

Ted Baehr, chair of the Atlanta-based Christian Film & Television Commission, warns that boycotts that are too broad often fail. Baehr says a better approach would be to encourage Disney and Miramax to produce more family films.

Baehr gave Priest the highest-quality rating in the Movieguide he publishes. He says critics of the film should be more accurate in pinpointing their attacks, because it is not “p*rnographic, prohom*osexual, or proadultery.” He calls Priest a “profound film theologically” and says it clearly shows the problem of sin, the power of God’s grace, and the importance of prayer.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

ctmay95mhg5T652a5508

Each year, Christianity Today honors outstanding books of special interest to the Christian community. CT’s 1995 Book Awards continue that tradition in a new format. Instead of being divided into categories according to subject or genre, all eligible titles competed for a single "Top 25" list. More than 200 books were nominated by publishers for the 1995 Book Awards; additional titles were nominated by CT editors. Ballots were sent to 250 evangelical scholars, pastors, writers, and other church leaders. The full list of winners appears on the following page. (Because of ties, the list includes a total of 26 titles.)

The diversity among the winning publishers—16 are represented—attests the vitality of religious publishing, the fastest-growing area in the industry. While Christian publishers dominate the list, roughly a third of the winning titles were published by university presses or general trade houses. InterVarsity led all publishers with eight titles; Eerdmans placed four titles, including three of the top six.

Any such list, of course, is merely a useful reference point. These titles are representative of a much larger, ongoing enterprise, and it would be easy to draw up alternative lists of noteworthy books. Still, it is interesting to see how many of these particular books from this particular year seem to be talking to one another, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but clearly taking part in the same conversation.

The Book of the Year, Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans), reminds us that "Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind" and challenges us to reclaim that heritage. Look in a forthcoming issue of Christianity Today for a symposium on the Christian mind, featuring Noll, Darrell Bock, Alister McGrath, and Richard Mouw.

If evangelicals have been guilty of anti-intellectualism, the secular establishment has been increasingly hostile to Christianity. In The Soul of the American University (Oxford), George Marsden asks America's leading universities to practice what they preach; genuine pluralism, Marsden observes, would entail the expression of religious viewpoints alongside the prevailing naturalistic dogmas.

The 11 thinkers who contributed autobiographical pieces to Philosophers Who Believe (InterVarsity) show how intellectual integrity and academic excellence are compatible with forthright Christian faith. At the same time, in Consulting the Faithful (Eerdmans), Richard Mouw offers a much-needed corrective to fashionable jeremiads by Christian intellectuals who fail to perceive anything of value in popular Christianity.

Thanks to the honored authors, editors, and publishers for their good work. We are already looking forward to the 1996 Book Awards.

By John Wilson.

1995 Book of the Year

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll

An excerpt: "The search for a Christian perspective on life—on our families, our economies, our leisure activities, our sports, our attitudes to the body and to health care, our reactions to novels and paintings, as well as our churches and our specifically Christian activities—is not just an academic exercise. The effort to think like a Christian is rather an effort to take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world he created, the lordship of Christ over the world he died to redeem, and the power of the Holy Spirit over the world he sustains each and every moment. From this perspective, the search for a mind that truly thinks like a Christian takes on ultimate significance, because the search for a Christian mind is not, in the end, a search for mind but a search for God."

Winners

1. THE SCANDAL OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND, by Mark A. Noll, Eerdmans

2. THE SOUL OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: FROM PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT TO ESTABLISHED NONBELIEF, by George M. Marsden, Oxford University Press

3. PHILOSOPHERS WHO BELIEVE: THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS OF 11 LEADING THINKERS, edited by Kelly James Clark, lnterVarsity

4. CONSULTING THE FAITHFUL: WHAT CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUALS CAN LEARN FROM POPULAR RELIGION, by Richard J. Mouw, Eerdmans

5. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD OF HOPE, by John Paul II, Knopf

5. GOD IN THE WASTELAND: THE REALITY OF TRUTH IN A WORLD OF FADING DREAMS, by David F. Wells, Eerdmans

7. THE IVP BIBLE BACKGROUND COMMENTARY: NEW TESTAMENT, by Craig S. Keener, InterVarsity

8. THE OPENNESS OF GOD: A BIBLICAL CHALLENGE TO THE TRADITIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF GOD, by Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, InterVarsity

9. BEFORE THE SHOOTING BEGINS: SEARCHING FOR DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA'S CULTURE WAR, by James Davison Hunter, Free Press

9. WHY SHOULD ANYONE BELIEVE ANYTHING AT ALL? by James W. Sire, lnterVarsity

11. GOD AND MAMMON IN AMERICA, by Robert Wuthnow, Free Press

12. ROMANS: GOD'S GOOD NEWS FOR THE WORLD, by John Stott, lnterVarsity

13. HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, InterVarsity

14. FUNDAMENTALISM AND GENDER, 1875 TO THE PRESENT, by Margaret Lambert Bendroth, Yale University Press

14. POSTMODERN TIMES: A CHRISTIAN GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT AND CULTURE, by Gene Edward Veith, Crossway

16. HOLY SCRIPTURE: REVELATION, INSPIRATION, AND INTERPRETATION, by Donald G. Bloesch, InterVarsity

17. ACCOUNTING FOR FUNDAMENTALISMS: THE DYNAMIC CHARACTER OF MOVEMENTS, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, University of Chicago Press

17. BEYOND CULTURE WARS, by Michael S. Horton, Moody

17. CUP OF WATER, BREAD OF LIFE: INSPIRING STORIES ABOUT OVERCOMING LOPSIDED CHRISTIANITY, by Ronald J. Sider, Zondervan

20. EXPERIENCING GOD, by Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King, Broadman & Holman

20. FIRE FROM HEAVEN: THE RISE OF PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANITY AND THE RESHAPING OF RELIGION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, by Harvey Cox, Addison-Wesley

20. NEW BIBLE COMMENTARY, edited by G. J. Wenham, J. A. Motyer, D. A. Carson, and R. T. France, InterVarsity

20. THE SOUL OF POLITICS, Jim Wallis, Orbis/New Press

20. SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, VOL. II, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eerdmans

20. WHEN GOD WHISPERS YOUR NAME, by Max Lucado, Word

20. WOMEN CAUGHT IN THE CONFLICT: THE CULTURE WAR BETWEEN TRADITIONALISM AND FEMINISM, by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, Baker

Why do I really love my wife? Why do I feel a sense of warmth and contentment when we sit beside each other holding hands on a chilly autumn evening? Why do I feel a surge of joy and pride when I see one of my children shows maturity in her social judgments, or creativity in his artistic talents, or mastery of her school assignments? And what about my sense of purpose and satisfaction in writing this article, my hope that I might contribute to growth in the Christian community and the pursuit of truth? What even of my devotion to Christ, the Christian faith, and the moral life taught by the church? Are these and other feelings really what they seem?

The answers to these questions and more, Robert Wright tells us, are to be found in evolutionary psychology, a field of study that claims to provide a fundamental understanding of human motivation and purpose. The theory Wright expounds is at once elegant and strikingly counterintuitive. As he explained in a Time magazine cover story (Aug. 15, 1994), “The human mind, like any other organ, is designed for the purpose of transmitting genes to the next generation; the feelings and thoughts it creates are best understood in these terms.” Getting my genes into the next generation: that, according to evolutionary psychology, is the ultimate purpose of my life. And yours.

This Darwinian understanding of human nature is not universally accepted even among secular academics. It is, however, a perspective that is increasingly influential in the human sciences. As Wright observes, evolutionary psychology is a comprehensive world-view: “Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one’s perceptions of social reality.”

Christians will have to contend with evolutionary psychology, much as we have had to contend with psychoanalysis and other psychological understandings of the person. Wright's book The Moral Animal is a good introduction to this world-view. A journalist specializing in science, Wright is a gifted popularizer whose work is accessible to the general reader, yet not at the cost of “dumbing down” essential concepts.

The Selfish Gene

While its roots go all the way back to Darwin's second major theoretical work, The Descent of Man, today's evolutionary psychology began to take form in the 1960s and '70s, when a pioneering group of scientists loosely associated with what was known then as "sociobiology'' began to explore how natural selection might have influenced the development not only of physical structures but also of social behavior, ranging from the coordinated work of ants to the powerful emotions and religious musings of humans. This widened the scope of examination beyond physical structures to include social and psychological behavior.

A second major change was the move from thinking of survival as the goal of natural selection to a focus upon propagation. We are accustomed to thinking of Darwinian evolution in terms of "survival of the fittest." Indeed, modern Darwinians argue, only those structures, traits, and patterns that abet survival will persist. But survival is not an evolutionary end in itself. Survive, but fail to propagate, and you are erased from history. Survive to propagate, and your genetic material may live forever! Propagation must, therefore, take conceptual precedence.

Wright is well aware that this perspective will be alien and unwelcome to many readers, but he does not attempt to soften the message of evolutionary psychology to make it more palatable. On the contrary, he repeatedly asserts that "essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these terms. The basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other, are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness."

Obviously, most people most of the time are not consciously choosing strategies to ensure propagation of their genes. If told they were doing so, they would express incredulity and scorn. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology posits sly unconscious motives beneath our everyday thoughts and actions. And like the analyst (most of whose cherished concepts are swept out with the Darwinian broom), the evolutionary psychologist claims to discern the underlying patterns in the fabric of human society.

The Mating Game

Consider what Wright calls our "breeding strategies." One major focus of evolutionary psychology is how men and women are at odds in their strategies for optimizing their chances for propagation. Evolutionary psychology says men can succeed through a few moments of copulation—get her pregnant and you win. Men are thus naturally promiscuous and sexually indiscriminate: It is to their genetic advantage to impregnate as many females as possible during their lifetime, as this optimizes their chances of passing their genetic heritage on to subsequent generations. This impulse is not felt as a conscious desire to procreate but rather flows from natural selection's sculpting of the powerful pleasures of sex and an impulse to engage in it.

Women, on the other hand, must copulate, carry a child for nine months, nourish it, and see it to independence. Compared to the young of other species, human children require an exceptionally high degree of parental investment. In our modern culture as in the past, it is hard for a single mother to survive on her own in raising her kids, and ample empirical evidence now exists that children raised by single mothers are at a significant disadvantage in their adulthood in terms of vocational, relational, and emotional stability. To be at a disadvantage in these areas is to be at a disadvantage in Darwinian terms as well, in that the disadvantaged child is going to have a harder time propagating the parents' (now its own) genes.

Because children favored by higher levels of parental investment by their fathers are advantaged in the race to propagate, a mechanism to make this more likely has evolved through natural selection. Our human capacity to fall in love, Wright tells us, serves to keep men around long enough to make an investment in their children; because it pays dividends in evolutionary terms, this behavior has become one of the defining characteristics of our species. Monogamy and romantic love favor women and children. If a man gets a woman pregnant and runs, she and her child lose. Make sex contingent upon commitment, and seal that commitment with a bond of romantic love, and woman and child win.

So what about men's notoriously promiscuous impulses? Evolutionary psychology suggests that, on balance, a man is most advantaged in evolutionary terms when he remains in a monogamous relationship with a woman, contributing to raising children that he knows are his genetic progeny, while having multiple affairs on the side, thus increasing his chances of siring even more children; this is what Darwinists call a "mixed strategy." This strategy, evolutionary psychologists believe, accounts for the historical prevalence of polygamy in human cultures. Polygamy allows powerful males to monopolize more "precious female eggs" in a legitimate and genetically optimized living arrangement.

You can see immediately why many feminists hate Wright's book: it is perceived as justifying infidelity, excusing sexist double standards (''Let me sow my wild oats with the women of the night, but I want to marry a virgin"), painting women as pathetically dependent upon male support, and depicting husbands as the suffering and self-sacrificing marital partners simply because they must rein in their impulses to promiscuity. Sure, it is offensive; but is it true?

What makes evolutionary psychology "scientific" is that these ideas are used to make predictions about the way people are, and data are being gathered to verify or disconfirm these predictions. There is ample empirical evidence, for example, supporting the age-old caricature of men as sexually indiscriminate. College undergraduates were asked how intelligent someone would have to be for them to consider dating that person, and the common answer for men and women was average intelligence. When asked how intelligent someone would have to be before they would consent to have sex with that person, women raised the ante to ask for higher intelligence, while men lowered the ante to markedly below average. In a different study, college students were approached by an attractive stranger on campus and asked either to meet on neutral turf for a date, to go to the person's apartment for the evening, or explicitly to have sex. Through this progression of questions, female respondents became less cooperative to male questioners, with 50 percent agreeing to a date but 0 percent agreeing to have sex. Male respondents increased their cooperativeness to female questioners, with 50 percent agreeing to a date and over 75 percent agreeing to have sex.

Evolutionary psychology purports to explain all of human interaction, not just our "breeding strategies." The greater frequency of physical and sexual abuse of children in cohabiting or blended households, for example, is explainable as the result of genetic disinterest of step-parent adults who inherit nongenetically related burdens.

Even grief is argued to be shaped by evolutionary concerns; Wright cites survey research showing that parents believe they would grieve more for the death of an older child or adolescent (which is nearer to breeding age) than for the death of an infant (which is further from serving us by breeding) or of an older parent (who is no longer a breeder).

Similarly, the steady rise in male violence in the impoverished lower classes is deemed the inevitable result of the frustration of the urge to mate, as men despair of acquiring enough social success to have the means to form a family and propagate.

Truth: An Endangered Species

So how should we evaluate evolutionary psychology? Let us first examine it on its own terms. Wright's book is a journalistic treatment of this topic rather than a scientific argument. He clearly aims to be provocative and seems deliberately to engage in speculation as a means of moving his audience.

Unlike a careful scientist, Wright surveys only research that supports his hypothesis—many of his arguments are undercut by the availability of equally plausible competing hypotheses or data contrary to his theory—and any methodological limitations or difficulties with the supporting literature are ignored or minimized.

Remarkably missing from his discussion is an awareness of the relatively small absolute size of many of the findings he does report. For instance, he confidently claims as support for Darwinian psychology the "finding" that women desire intercourse more when they are ovulating; but this effect has been researched for years, and the results of the various studies show that either this effect does not exist or is a profoundly weak correlation. (Wright does state in a footnote that this issue is "unsettled," a much less confident statement than in the text of the book.)

Though it was released after The Moral Animal went to press, there would seem to be scant support for evolutionary psychology in the recent Sex in America survey; the supposedly powerful drive toward infidelity receives tepid empirical support from the best research.

Which leads us to the question of human thought and the search for truth. Like psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology sees primitive animality at the core of our being. As such, it should come as no surprise that evolutionary psychology contributes to the postmodern depreciation of rationality and our capacity to know truth, much as psychoanalysis has. If evolutionary psychology is true, Wright says,

then we will tend to believe things that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation …. What is in our genes' best interest is what seems "right"—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order. . . . Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth—moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse—are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. . . . Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously.

In the Darwinian view, moral and religious traditions do not survive because they are true, but because they contribute to genetic fitness generally; those traditions must have helped some individuals and groups to survive and propagate. Wright argues that "there is definitely no reason to assume that existing moral codes reflect some higher truth apprehended via divine inspiration or detached philosophical inquiry." Similarly, in his concluding chapter on religion, Wright suggests that "the Darwinian line on spiritual discourse is much like the Darwinian line on moral discourse. People tend to say and believe things that are in their evolutionary ingrained interests."

If our moral and religious traditions are merely functional models, to be discarded when they no longer serve their purpose, do the evolutionary psychologists have something better to offer? What about drawing morality from this system itself? Wright gives a profoundly mixed message regarding the "cash value" of this view of persons for developing a working system of morality and transcendence.

On the one hand, Wright argues that evolutionary thinking cannot generate morality. He explicitly seeks to avoid the naturalistic fallacy of inferring what ought to be from what is observed to be. In an essay in The New Republic, Wright argues, ''What's natural may or may not be good, but it's certainly not good by virtue of the fact that it's natural." He goes on to argue that what evolutionary psychology can do is to inform our understanding of the costs of and resistances to change. In The Moral Animal, he argues, "There is no reason to adopt natural selection's 'values' as our own," and that Darwinism "cannot . . . furnish us with basic moral values." He also argues that what is true for people as a group cannot become a guide for individual action. For example, while it is to the genetic advantage of males in general to be promiscuous, no individual male should feel himself thereby licensed to pursue promiscuity.

On the other hand, Wright is willing to say explicitly of evolutionary psychology that this "true understanding of human nature will inevitably affect moral thought deeply and, as I will try to show, legitimately."

He cannot have it both ways: moral neutrality and moral guidance. In fact, Wright leans heavily toward guidance. The internal structure of his book suggests strongly that he means to apply this reasoning to the analysis and guidance of individual life, despite his protests to the contrary. Indeed, what keeps The Moral Animal engaging (beyond the outrageousness of Wright's pronouncements) is his narrative reconstruction and analysis of the life of Charles Darwin from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The most odious example of Wright's evolutionary analysis is his account of the profound grief of Charles and Emma Darwin on the death of their daughter Annie. Bluntly, Wright argues that she was the child with the most reproductive potential—thus the grief. Wright turns explicitly prescriptive when he opines that "parents should . . . dole out investments in their various children with all the discernment of a Wall Street portfolio manager, the goal always being to maximize overall reproductive return on each increment of investment." A parent, by this rule, would be a fool to devote much time to a retarded child, or any child whose reproductive potential is diminished. Passages such as this suggest that Wright's declarations that Darwinian theory cannot be applied to individuals are mere window-dressing. If Wright makes such specific applications, why in the world shouldn't single male readers use his arguments to justify their rampant sexual promiscuity? Since Wright disavows direct moral guidance from the Darwinian paradigm, he feels compelled to offer a grounding for moral decision-making. All that he can offer to buffer the harsh Darwinian ethic is the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of Darwin who proposed that morally "right" actions are those that promote the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number of people. This moral calculus is, in the words of Wright, "just about all that we have left." After all, "everyone's happiness can, in principle, go up if everyone treats everyone else nicely."

Apart from the anemic character of this broad appeal for niceness, the problem with Wright's alternative is obvious. One of the classic weaknesses of utilitarianism is its inability to articulate any persuasive reason why, when my interests run counter to the general good, I should sacrifice my advancement for the welfare of others. The mindset of evolutionary psychology merely compounds this problem. The Bosnian Serbs could argue that by "cleansing" their Muslim neighbors off the map, they are simply increasing their resources for child-rearing in difficult times. When the going gets tough, why shouldn't we circle the wagons and protect our own genetic self-interest? · It is for this reason that Wright's silence on the topic of racism is so disquieting. There is precious little within this system that can serve as a basis for opposing eugenics or racial warfare.

Acknowledging Our Biological Nature

How should Christians respond to this movement? Scientific creationists will, of course, have no trouble handling Wright's arguments: evolutionary psychology is founded upon a false dogma and therefore wrong. For theistic evolutionists, the claims of evolutionary psychology are more problematic. Yet, as Phillip Johnson wrote in a recent Christianity Today article (Oct. 24, 1994, pp. 22–26), for Christians of all persuasions, ''The primary issue is whether God created us at all."

If God created us, regardless of the means, then perhaps our motives are not so base as evolutionary psychology would suggest. Perhaps there is a basis for parents to love an adopted child, for a husband to remain faithful to his wife, or even for someone to forgo marriage and serve God as a celibate single. Only a view of persons as created beings can make sense of these human drives.

Still, there is a great danger that, in rightly rejecting the world-view of evolutionary psychology, Christians will reflexively reject genuine knowledge about our biological nature. Modern science, with its ever-growing documentation of the biological foundations of human life, challenges us to a deeper understanding of what it means for God to have intentionally made us as biological creatures. The unique witness we have to offer to the world is the testimony that we are not merely biological. But we err if, in declaring our unique qualities, we implicitly or explicitly deny our embodied nature.

If Christians can acknowledge sexuality and the desire for procreation as important basic motivations, for example, then we will not object to analyzing human behavior in terms of how certain patterns may be explainable by their influences upon mating and procreation. What we will object to is the elevation of this motivation to the status of the Master Drive to which all other motivations are secondary.

We are sexual, but we are not merely sexual. We are biological, but we are not merely biological. We were created for more than that—we were created first for a loving and intimate relationship with our Creator, and also for loving connectedness with spouse, children, family, friends, and neighbors, with our brothers and sisters in Christ and with the people of a hurting world who do not know Christ, and for meaningful work in a real world as responsible stewards over the created order. Procreation is not the end-all and be-all of life.

Some Christian apologists have urged us to defend the faith by pushing non-Christians to the logical limits of their world-views. If I accepted evolutionary psychology's vision of life, I would feel compelled to move in one of three directions: (l) to become a "family values" racial supremacist, dedicated to the advancement of my clan; (2) to become an amoral psychopath pursuing my personal advantage in terms of sexual conquest and social advancement; or (3) to kill myself and get it over with since there is no point anyway.

Surprisingly, Wright envisions the good society as characterized by sexual restraint before marriage, faithful monogamy in marriage, shared loving investment of parents in their children, and interpersonal cooperation, peace, and accord. Ultimately, his philosophy cannot produce this outcome. It is a sterile world-view, and we can only hope that it will soon be extinct since it cannot fulfill its intended function. Only a transcendentally grounded understanding of human character and purpose can deliver on the vision Wright paints for us.

Stanton L. Jones is chair of the Department of Psychology at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; with his wife, Brenna, he is the author of God's Design for Sex, a family sex-education series (NavPress).

In early 1993 I received a call from an embarrassed radio announcer at a Christian radio station in Washington. He confessed that he had recently interviewed a local woman who he now thought may have been a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Her name was Betty Eadie, and she was the author of an allegedly Christian book, Embraced by the Light (Gold Leaf, 1992). In it she gives an elaborate account of her near-death experience (NDE). The dedication reads: “To the Light, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom I owe all that I have. He is the ‘staff’ that I lean on; without him I would fall.”

I consented to do a follow-up telephone interview on the subject of near-death experiences and so purchased and read Eadie’s book.

As I read the short but fantastic account of Eadie’s experience on “the other side,” I quickly discerned that the “Jesus Christ” to whom Eadie dedicated her book was not the same one the New Testament attests. Eadie’s Jesus, an amorphously benevolent being of Light, surrounded her in such a way that she could not tell where her “light” stopped and his began. Eadie concluded, based on her NDE, that Jesus was a being completely separate from the Father, that he would do nothing to offend her (so she should stop regretting past deeds), that humans are not sinful creatures by nature, that human “spirit beings” assisted the “Heavenly Father” at the Creation, and that, despite appearances, the world is bereft of tragedy. She concluded, “I knew that I was worthy to be with him, to embrace him.”

On a recent 20/20 television program, Eadie elaborated on her theology. She told Hugh Downs that her NDE informer her that those who had died in the Holocaust had chosen their fates before birth. This revelation was supposed to ease the anguish of the problem of evil. Yet one would have to question the intelligence of these preincarnate Jewish spirits in willfully choosing this ghastly demise. By attempting to eliminate tragedy, she impugns the victims and exonerates the perpetrators, none of who will suffer in hell.

No Baby Here

As I discussed and challenged these claims during the radio interview, several callers objected. How could I criticize this “nice lady”? One caller insisted that Eadie had experienced something of God but had simply confused some of the details. He told me "not to throw out the baby with the bath water."

But there is no baby here. As I told the caller, "What Mrs. Eadie has right is that there is a God, and there is an afterlife." And one doesn't need to die to reach these conclusions.

My radio interview took place before Eadie's book began its meteoric rise to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (where it stayed for over a year-and-a half) and before she became an instant celebrity, appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show and 20/20. Why would purported Christians want to believe Eadie's unbiblical account of the afterlife? And why are Christian bookstores frequently pestered to stock her book?

The Birth of a Trend

Although a large majority of Americans believe in God or some Higher Power, their religious beliefs are often self-styled, ill-conceived, and sloppily syncretistic. Because of secularization and religious pluralism, religious beliefs tend to be restricted to the private, subjective realm where they are isolated from public scrutiny. As a result, a plethora of religious expressions clamor for acceptance, many of which are falsely assumed to be "Christian." Few Americans need to be convinced that there is an afterlife (although, not surprisingly, more believe in heaven than in hell), but now a whole raft of near-death experiencers (NDEers) are eager to supply the metaphysical details. These accounts often conflict with each other and usually contradict biblical revelation.

Twenty years ago, most Americans believed in the afterlife, but most assumed that it applied to the dead only. Raymond Moody's little best-selling book Life After Life (Mockingbird, 1975) changed all that. Moody reported the experiences of 50 survivors of "clinical death" who claimed to have experienced another world. The individual experiences varied, but Moody identified several recurring features: leaving the body, observing the events surrounding one's "death," a rapid trip through a tunnel to a "Being" of Light, a review of one's life, the appearance of deceased relatives and/or angels, and the return to the body.

Moody also reported that while none experienced anything akin to the biblical picture of heaven or hell, almost all returned to physical life with new vigor and little or no fear of death.

Psychologist Kenneth Ring supplemented Moody's work with the rigorous Life at Death (Morrow, 1980), which was followed by cardiologist Michael Sabom's Recollections of Death (Harper & Row, 1982). Although differing from Moody's findings at certain points, Ring and Sabom corroborated the overall pattern of the NDE and helped put it squarely on the scientific map. Both acknowledged the explanations for the NDE that reduced it to merely a psychological, pharmacological, or physiological phenomenon devoid of anything spiritual. However, their investigations concluded that at least some NDEs involved actual out-of-body experiences beyond the realm of clinical death.

More recently, Melvin Morse, a pediatrician in Seattle, has captured national attention with his research into children's experiences with NDEs. Morse's Closer to the Light (G. K. Hall, 1990) concludes that NDEs must be taken seriously and not dismissed as delusional because of the children's consistent testimony, their innocence, and the fact that their experiences could not be explained on the basis of medication.

Because of work by people like Moody, Ring, Sabom, and Morse, the NDE is now a readily available category of paranormal experience. The International Association for Near-Death Studies, founded in 1981, helps NDEers understand their experience while educating others, and it also publishes a quarterly newsletter and an interdisciplinary academic journal.

First-person NDE accounts like Embraced by the Light and, more recently, Saved by the Light (Random, 1994), by Dannion Brinkley, are selling briskly, the latter perhaps eclipsing Eadie in sensational appeal with his account of receiving mysterious counsel from l3 luminous beings.

NDEs are increasingly being taken as visionary and even prophetic, notwithstanding their unbiblical and illogical themes. Eadie's book, despite (or maybe because of) its artless matter-of-fact manner of describing cosmic visions, refuses to die. The paperback and the audio versions of Embraced by the Light have already been released.

Why this popularity?

Religion of the Resuscitated

Eadie makes no mention of the fact that she is a Mormon, either in the book or on her tours. Brinkley lays claim to no institutional church connections and makes no pretense at being a saintly fellow. Yet both claim to have met ultimate reality face-to-face without the assistance of any religious institution, human mediation, or historical connection. They were There; now they Know; and we should listen, especially since the news they bring is so consoling.In addition to the desire of creatures stranded "east of Eden" to discover what—if anything—lies beyond death's door, the interest in NDE accounts can be explained by another American religious tendency: immediate individual spirituality.

These claims of blissful unmediated divine experience on "the other side" are producing what Christian NDE researcher Maurice Rawlings calls "the religion of the resuscitated." In his book To Hell and Back (Nelson, 1993), he describes this ersatz religion as embracing the belief in an enjoyable life after death with no fear of divine judgment. It dispenses with traditional dogmas of sin and the need for salvation, asserting instead that one must simply grow in knowledge and love, both vaguely defined. One NDEer in Moody's studies who had previously been a loyal Lutheran claimed that "the Lord isn't interested in doctrine." Hence, a kind of simplistic syncretism and universalism is affirmed.

As John Weldon and John Ankerberg point out in The Facts on Life After Death (Harvest House, 1992), this claim asserts that, on the one hand, we are exhorted to grow in knowledge while, on the other hand, we are barred from specific doctrinal affirmations about God, such as there being a narrow road that leads to life and a broad road leading to destruction (Matt. 7: 13).

The "religion of the resuscitated" also usually affirms the unlimited potential of humans. Eadie speaks of Jesus as her "Savior," but it is difficult to see how he functions as such given the role she claims for herself. She helped in the creation of the world as a preincarnate spirit; she briefly experienced omniscience (conveniently lost upon her returning); her thoughts have "tremendous power" to create reality; her soul and that of others progress eternally (a Mormon doctrine); and, as mentioned, she is worthy of Jesus' embrace. There is little room for "amazing grace" here.

Other NDEers make similar claims about unlimited capacities triggered through the experience. In Life at Death, Kenneth Ring avers that the NDE connects one with a "higher self," the pantheistic God within.

The "religion of the resuscitated" perpetuates the utopian hope that the prevalence of NDEs may be sparking a new evolutionary development in human consciousness. In this and other respects, the NDE phenomenon conforms to recurring New Age aspirations and predilections. Once freed from the fear of death and awakened to their latent power, humans may transcend their self-imposed crises and enter the New Age.

What to Think?

How might discerning Christians sort out this material theologically and apologetically?

Some skeptics have dismissed the NDE as simply the hallucinations of a dying brain, manufacturing a bogus sense of transcendence in the face of destruction. Susan Blackmore's Dying to Live (Prometheus, 1993) rigorously attempts to explain (and explain away) the NDE on the basis of physiological factors alone. Despite her ardor, Blackmore's theories fail to capture every aspect of NDEs. A legitimate supernatural element does seem to exist with some NDEs, especially concerning reports of people accurately describing physical events that occurred after they have left their bodies at the point of clinical death.

Yet even if some NDEs produce spiritual experiences, that does not resolve the problem of conflicting testimonies. Some people come back believing in reincarnation, some don't; some near-death experiencers do not claim to experience God but only a light; some speak of bliss; some speak of a hellish NDE during which they experienced a sense of darkness and torment and the presence of evil beings intent upon drawing them into doom.

A Christian world-view can account for the negative NDEs as more than inexplicable aberrations or subjective projections. God may give a sinner a shocking taste of hell in order to awaken a healthy fear of God. Howard Storm, a recent guest on the John Ankerberg Show, reported that although he had been an atheist professor, a hellish NDE brought him to Christ for salvation.

But what do we make of the blissful NDEs, such as that of Betty Eadie, that contradict a biblical view of the after-life?

Although the evidence suggests that people sometimes experience some sort of spiritual reality apart from the body during their clinical deaths, this does not guarantee that all who claim NDEs have actually had one, that what people experience reflects ultimate reality, or that their testimonies are true. Despite her claims, there is no hard evidence that Betty Eadie actually died. She waited nearly 20 years before publishing her material, refuses to release her medical records, and claims that the physician in charge of her medical crisis has since died. The account of her death in her book lacks the ring of truth.

In addition, although some NDEs may be real experiences beyond the body, we should ask, "How reliable are these experiences?" Given what Jesus taught about demonic deception, it makes sense that the Evil One would delight in convincing souls that they need not fear the judgment of a holy God.

An NDE reported by Ring in Heading Toward Omega (Morrow, 1985) involved a being who consoled a fretting women that "there are no sins." Many other NDEs agree. Yet if Jesus' words are true, we are, in fact, enslaved to sin and will die in our sins if we do not believe in the Son of Man who came to seek and to save the lost. As Blaise Pascal astutely warned in Pensées, "Between heaven and hell is only this life, which is the most fragile thing in the world."

Rawlings and others have given accounts of NDEs that seem to involve an encounter with the God of the Bible because their experiences concur with what we know about God's holiness and love. Bernard J. Klamecki, a medical doctor, reports in The Crisis of hom*osexuality (Victor Books, 1990) that a young man told him that he clinically died after a massive dose of antibiotics to treat a venereal disease. The man left his body and encountered "the Omnipotent One," who lovingly told him that he had not used his gifts to glorify Christ. After the man's resuscitation, he abandoned his hom*osexual way of life, became a Christian, and joined a supportive Christian community. The combination of Christ's love and moral instruction in this NDE makes sense theologically.

However, NDEs by themselves cannot establish a reliable theology. Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland rightly argue in Immortality (Nelson, 1992) that the NDE phenomenon helps establish that the soul can exist apart from the body for a short time, but that this is a "minimalist" claim because it says nothing of the final state of the soul. Those returning from near-death may have clinically died (indicated by a lack of heartbeat and/or brain waves), but they have not experienced biological or irreversible death. Nor have any been resurrected. Therefore, to take the word of the NDEer about the ultimate destiny of the soul is unwarranted, given the penultimate state of the NDE itself.

A genuine NDE cannot be compared to the final eschatological state wherein "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. 2:10–ll). The disembodied soul is still subject to the deception wrought by the "ruler of the kingdom of the air" (Eph. 2:2) and his minions, who are not above appearing as angels of light (2 Cor. 11:14). One may encounter a deceptive light that lacks truth.

Considering the conflicting testimonies of near-death experiences, their frequent disagreement with biblical revelation, the possibility of demonic deception, and their penultimate nature, we should dismiss the "religion of the resuscitated" and instead embrace the eternal certainties offered by the One who experienced death, burial, resurrection, and ascension to the place of unmatched authority. He alone has the last word on matters of life and death.

Douglas Groothuis is assistant professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary and the author of Deceived by the Light (Harvest House).