Page 5379 – Christianity Today (2024)

If material is proven to be obscene, it no longer falls under the protection of the First Amendment. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of citizens to decide what is obscene according to community standards.

Capitalizing on that right requires community-wide effort, but it can work. Just ask the citizens of Washington County, Tennessee, where public pressure brought about the demise of a Playboy cable television channel.

American Cablesystems, of Johnson City, Tennessee, began broadcasting the channel August 1 and voluntarily cancelled it December 1. General manager Robert Crowley said his company dropped the channel under pressure from local groups, primarily Tennessee Roundtable, a state affiliate of a national organization of conservative activists.

“I’ve never seen such a media focus across the country,” he said. “The religious group [Tennessee Roundtable] went at this like a politician would.”

After American Cablesystems began offering the Playboy channel, Tennessee Roundtable surveyed more than 3,000 citizens and found that 85 percent were opposed to the programming. The survey—shown to Washington County commissioners—was substantiated when a crowd of 800 attended a commissioners’ meeting to protest the channel. The county commissioners passed a resolution that said the programming was detrimental to the community and asked American Cablesystems to withdraw it. The company refused.

Next, Tennessee Roundtable videotaped Playboy programs and showed them to key businessmen, pastors, and citizens throughout the county. The viewers didn’t like what they saw. Richard Taylor, Tennessee Roundtable state director, said community response was remarkable. By November the company had lost almost half of its 800 Playboy subscribers. In addition, cable subscribers who weren’t receiving the Playboy channel threatened to cancel as well, although Crowley said few of them did.

Tennessee Roundtable publicly accused American Cablesystems of selling obscenity and said the company should be prosecuted. Because cable television does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission, its content is practically unregulated. However, if a court rules that program content is obscene, the material cannot be broadcast. But without going to court, American Cablesystems voluntarily dropped the Playboy channel—an unprecedented and surprising move.

“The market would not bear that kind of product here,” Crowley said. “That’s free enterprise. We were becoming known as the company with the Playboy channel, and not as the company that offers 27 products. We have to listen to the community. If people don’t want a product, it comes off the shelf.”

Citizens have successfully challenged the Playboy channel elsewhere. Last spring a grand jury in Hamilton County, Ohio, charged a Cincinnati cable television company with possessing and pandering obscenity after it began broadcasting the Playboy channel. In an out-of-court settlement, the cable company agreed to stop broadcasting X-rated films on the channel.

The singer’s response to an Olympics ministry opportunity might settle the matter once for all.

The debate has raged for nearly two years. Is rock singer Bob Dylan—who reportedly became a Christian in 1979—still a Christian? Has he returned to Judaism, the religion of his childhood? Or is he simply a seeker of truth who doesn’t fully commit himself to any one religion?

Dylan might put an end to such speculation during this summer’s 1984 Olympic Games. He has been asked to participate in an Olympics evangelistic outreach. The singer has not given a firm answer. But according to Paul Emond, a former pastor who is a friend of Dylan, the singer is considering the invitation. As entertainment chairman for the Olympics Outreach Working Committee, Emond asked Dylan to be a part of the mass evangelistic effort.

“He had a thousand opportunities to say, ‘Look, Paul, that’s just not my bag anymore. Don’t you get the hint?’,” Emond says. “That’s not where he’s coming from at all.”

Emond says he helped lead Dylan to Christ in 1979, the year Dylan’s songs took a decidedly Christian turn. The album he released later that year, Slow Train Coming, contained a clear Christian message—as did his 1980 and 1981 releases.

The Christian proclamations were significant because of Dylan’s reputation as a musical prophet to the sixties generation. He burst into stardom during the mid-1960s with songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Many of his songs were critical of American society and U.S. government policy. The singer’s music helped shape the world view of American youth entering a period of public protests against the Vietnam War.

Because his fans were unaccustomed to hearing him praise God, Dylan’s statements of faith in 1979 immediately came under fire. After Slow Train Coming was released, Rolling Stone magazine said the album’s biblical references were nothing more than a continuation of Dylan’s familiar use of religious imagery. In 1982, New York magazine quoted an unnamed source who said Dylan had never forsaken Judaism for Christianity. Time and Newsweek last year published a photograph of Dylan—wearing a yarmulke, prayer shawl, and phylacteries—at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. (The rock singer was in Israel for his son’s bar mitzvah.)

Emond says Dylan is regularly misrepresented in the media. For example, he says it is wrong to conclude that Dylan’s participation in a bar mitzvah means he is embracing Judaism. According to Emond, Dylan’s bar mitzvah appearance merely underscores the singer’s understanding of the proper relationship between Old Testament faith and New Testament faith.

“I don’t think he ever left his Jewish roots,” Emond says. “I think he was one of those fortunate ones who realized that Judaism and Christianity can work very well together, because Christ is just Yeshua ha’Meshiah [Jesus the Messiah]. And so he doesn’t have any problems about putting on a yarmulke and going to a bar mitzvah, because he can respect that. And [he] recognizes that maybe those people themselves will recognize who Yeshua ha’Meshiah is one of these days.”

Others interpret Dylan’s ties with Judaism differently. His meetings last year with Hasidic Jews caused some to wonder if he was returning to Judaism.

“He’s been going in and out of a lot of things, trying to find himself,” says Rabbi Kasriel Kastel, of the Brooklyn Lubavitch center. “And we’ve just been making ourselves available.” The Lubavitch movement tries to renew the commitment of inactive Jews through education. Dylan studied with Lubavitch members while he was in New York to record his latest album, Infidels.

Kastel says he doesn’t believe Dylan ever forsook his Jewish faith to become a Christian. “As far as we’re concerned, he was a confused Jew. We feel he’s coming back.”

Emond acknowledges that Dylan has met with Hasidic Jews. But he says it wasn’t out of a desire to return to the Jewish faith. Emond says the meetings took place at the request of members of the Lubavitch movement.

“They can’t take the fact that he [Dylan] was able to come to the discovery of his Messiah as being Jesus,” Emond says. “Jews always look at their own people as traitors when they come to that kind of faith.… When one of their important figures is ‘led astray,’ they’re going to do everything they can to get him back again.”

But Kastel denies that his group is trying to take advantage of Dylan. “We don’t want anyone to feel that he’s being used in any way, which he’s very sensitive to. So we’re keeping this very, very low key.”

For his part, Dylan isn’t doing much to quell the debate. He does not grant many interviews, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY was unable to contact him. When he does grant interviews, his statements often are ambiguous.

The Los Angeles Times last year quoted him as saying he did not regret “telling people how to get their souls saved.” But he added, “Now it’s time for me to do something else.… Jesus himself only preached for three years.” The Washington Post quoted him as saying he believes in reincarnation.

In those articles as in others, Emond says, Dylan was misrepresented. “I know he doesn’t believe in it [reincarnation], so it must have been taken out of context or misinterpreted. They [writers] can take what he says, if they want, and make it sound pretty bad, depending on what questions they’re asking and how many words they leave out.”

Dylan has said he lets his songs speak for him. But his latest album doesn’t shed much light on his spiritual loyalties. The songs on the album make generous use of biblical imagery, but they make no clear declarations of faith. The absence of a Christian message leads some to wonder if the singer’s spiritual commitment has waned.

Such speculation leads Emond to criticize the church for passing judgment on Dylan. “If the Christians spent as much time praying for guys like Bob as they do talking or speculating on him, then we wouldn’t have these Christians like Bob that don’t come out as boldly as we might like them to.

“I’m not saying that he’s right in everything, because if I was in his position I would want to really capitalize on [his reputation as a vehicle for the gospel]. And maybe that’s in fact what he is doing, and he just has a different way of going about things.” If Dylan uses his musical talent to share the gospel during this summer’s Olympics, the speculation of the skeptics may be quieted.

North American Scene

A 14-year veteran of the Ku Klux Klan says the Klan plans to spark a major race war by assassinating a “prominent minority individual.” Tommy Rollins, a former grand wizard of the White Knights of America, told a “700 Club” audience last November that he fears for the life of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. Since becoming a Christian last April, Rollins says the Klan has made three attempts on his life.

Roman Catholic bishops have made opposition to nuclear arms part of a new, national campaign against abortion. Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin says he will spearhead an effort to fuse these issues in the public debate. His action officially removes abortion as a single issue for the bishops and places it at the heart of their advocacy of peace and social justice.

By a 59-to-38 vote, the U.S. Senate defeated a bill that would have made tuition tax credits available to parents of private-school pupils. In turning back the measure, the Senate overcame pressure from the White House and private-school organizations. The bill surfaced without warning as an amendment to an Olympics appropriations bill just before Congress adjourned for 1983.

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati has overturned the conviction of a 23-year-old Mennonite who refused to register for the draft. Convicted in October 1982, Mark Schmucker was fined $4,000 and sentenced to three years probation. In throwing out the conviction, the court ordered an evidentiary hearing to give Schmucker a chance to prove that he was selectively prosecuted. He contends that although hundreds of thousands of draft-age Americans have failed to register, only those who publicly opposed the law have been prosecuted.

Two out of three black pastors say they have not been influenced by liberation theologians such as James Cone, DeOtis Roberts, and Major Jones, according to a survey funded by the Lilly Endowment. Based on interviews with 1,894 black clergy, the study is the largest ever of black churches to be conducted by a nongovernmental group, says Lawrence Mamiya, the sociology of religion specialist who directed it. Only slightly more than half of the clergy surveyed feel their ministries are “essentially different” because they are in black denominations. Some 70 percent say it is important to use the terminology and concepts of black pride in their sermons.

The state of Utah cannot receive $500,000 in federal grants unless it stops requiring minors to notify parents when birth-control counseling is sought. The ruling was handed down by Federal District Court Judge David Winder. It arose from a suit filed by Planned Parenthood of Utah and the Park City Clinic on behalf of four teenagers who objected to the procedures.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not review a lower court ruling that forbids a moment of silence in New Mexico’s public schools. The state’s legislature passed a law in 1981 that called for a time of silence at the beginning of each school day. But last February, a federal district judge ruled that the law violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

A military judge has convicted the former commanding officer of a U.S. Navy frigate of engaging in hom*osexual acts with a member of his crew. Michael Vanderwier is believed to be the first commanding officer in the U.S. military ever to face such charges, although 12 officers and 1,115 enlisted personnel have been dismissed from the navy in the last year because of hom*osexuality. The 42-year-old Vanderwier denied the charges. The crew member involved in the hom*osexual acts, John Rainville, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony.

Seminary enrollment in 1983 increased nearly 5 percent over the previous year, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) announced. For the last several years, the growth rate of seminary enrollment has exceeded that of colleges, universities, and other professional schools. ATS reported that women and minority students are largely responsible for the increase.

One Last Note on The Day After

Did you catch that tune? Many who watched ABC’s movie The Day After did. An attempt at depicting the horrors of nuclear war, the television drama opened and closed to the strains of an old church favorite—“How Firm A Foundation.” When film director Nicholas Meyers discovered that Virgil Thomson’s musical score “The River” described Kansas—where the story in The Day After took place—he decided to use the music. But Meyers insists he didn’t know that the melody he used at the beginning and at the end of the film was the music of a hymn, with words significant to the story.

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,

My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;

The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design

Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

The film began with a sweeping view of Kansas farmland, as the music to “How Firm a Foundation” invited the viewer to sit back and watch. When the drama ended, the screen went black and a voice echoed: “Is anybody there? Anybody at all?” But as the voice died out, the music was heard again, this time resounding with strength. For those familiar with the words of the hymn, there was still hope, if not in man then in God.

A bleak picture of the Roman Catholic church in the Canadian province of Quebec has been given to the Pope by the Quebec Assembly of Bishops. In that province, where there are 5,618,365 Roman Catholics, only 25 percent now attend mass regularly, down from 60 percent in 1960.

A recent survey of 1,263 Roman Catholic high school students in Quebec found that only 18 percent attend church regularly, yet 92 percent believe in God and 84 percent believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

The bishops’ report reminisces about the glorious past when the church possessed awesome power, authority, and wealth. It refers to the social revolution of the 1960s as bringing an end to an era of tranquil assurance, of prestige, and of unanimity. During that decade, many Catholics “took their distance from the church” said Charles Valois, Bishop of Saint Jerome. But the church has been purified by the ordeal, it has refound its soul, and Bishop Valois feels optimistic about the future.

According to the report, the disaffection with the church does not necessarily reflect “an absence of a spiritual quest” by the people. In fact, Quebec is experiencing “an invasion of sects and cults which find here a fertile field for their propositions.”

French-speaking Quebec citizens are well prepared for sects, said Bishop Valois. “There is religious education in the schools so the children learn about God and Jesus, and when they grow up some feel it would be important to pray to God. So if somebody from another sect arrives at their door, they welcome that person,” he said. He also lamented that atheism is gaining ground.

The church needs to redefine its role and be open to change, the report urges. It must use the mass media, television in particular, to remind people of their baptism in the Catholic church, and ask that they investigate their own church first before turning to another. “We have to help them find their roots,” said Bishop Valois.

The report emphasizes that the Catholic church in Quebec is “an old house under renovation,” although at times it resembles “a house in ruins.”

The Christian Broadcasting Network goes out on a limb to reach America’s living-room mission field.

Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) takes a giant leap of faith into the mission field of the American living room this month with a luminescent prime-time television special, “Don’t Ask Me, Ask God.”

Complete with catchy theme song, celebrity cameos, and Scripture quotations marching up the screen à la Star Wars, the hour-long program is being broadcast across the country by cable television outlets and major network affiliates. The program will be aired during the first two weeks of January by stations that reach more than 90 percent of American television viewers (check local listings for time and date).

“Don’t Ask Me, Ask God” features five topics identified in a 1981 Gallup poll as chief concerns of the day: the future, suffering, evil, war, and life after death. Posing these as questions people would like to ask God, the show presents a kaleidescope of observations on each theme.

Hollywood stars—Vincent Price, Ben Vereen, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, Doug McClure, and Ned Beatty—introduce each subject. A dramatization filmed at CBN’s Virginia Beach studio follows, alternating between comic and sober portrayals.

On the subject of suffering, a basset-hound-faced Norman Fell portrays a twentieth-century Job whose car falls apart, house burns down, and wife runs away, while his friends conjecture it all happened because he cheated on his income tax.

Robertson, the show’s host, brings the audience back to reality after the skit, and introduces film clips of Mother Teresa reflecting on suffering and Joni Eareckson discussing how her life changed after her diving accident. Robertson admonishes the viewers that they should “ask God,” not anyone else, about why people suffer, and he quotes John 10:10 and Job 13:15 to give God’s perspective.

At the end of the program, Robertson turns the tables on his audience and asks what they believe. “We offer the audience an opportunity to pray to receive Jesus; that’s the bottom line,” says Warren Marcus, the show’s executive producer and CBN’s director of special projects. If it is well received by critics as well as by viewers, Marcus said CBN will produce two or three prime-time specials each year.

“It is very important that the secular press accept the vision of this thing. That would be a victory, because it would open up the marketplace,” Marcus said. Broadening its market has been a long-standing goal at CBN, reflected in the changing emphasis of the network’s flagship show, “The 700 Club.” In recent years, it has moved toward the mass appeal of a “PM Magazine” and away from strictly religious talk and music.

This commitment does not come cheap: “Don’t Ask Me” production costs totalled $700,000, and publicity and station time added another $1.1 million.

The program spends most of its energies on disarming and entertaining viewers who would most likely tune out “The 700 Club” or any other religious programming. Character actors portray ordinary people who recite comments actually recorded by Gallup. The comments do not tilt toward an evangelical belief in God, but reflect a genuine cross section of opinion.

As Robertson summarizes the answers offered by the Bible, he sticks to safe theological ground and does not stray from major common-denominator tenets of belief that all Christians share. In addressing “What does the future hold for me and my family?” Robertson uses three Bible verses. He summarizes Matthew 24:7–8 by saying trouble is a normal part of human existence.

From Luke 17:26–28, he assures viewers that life will go on until Christ’s second coming, and he rules out the possibility of human extinction through nuclear holocaust. Finally, he says the “new heaven and new earth” of Revelation 21:1–5 offers an “absolutely glorious” vision of what lies ahead, even though the particulars are beyond human discernment.

The celebrities in the show were recruited by Hollywood talent agent Jackie Brown. No test of faith was applied to the actors, and many of them are not professing Christians. Marcus said this was a matter of prayer at CBN, and “the Lord gave us the wisdom to use the stars only to ask questions, not give answers. You can use anyone to prove the point of who God is, just as the Bible does.”

Many of the celebrities were leery of CBN to begin with, Marcus said, “but they left as friends. And when we asked them to do publicity spots, they all were willing to help.”

One actor watched in amazement as the CBN film crew joined hands and prayed at the beginning of the day. Another, Marcus said, was troubled by career setbacks. CBN staffers prayed for him and advised him to turn the problem over to the Lord. He experienced a change in fortunes and told Marcus, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Keep praying for me.”

CBN hopes to generate similar enthusiasm among the show’s viewers so they will consider Christ’s claims when they contemplate the “big questions.”

There was a time when the hierarchy didn’t know what to do with spirit-filled Episcopalians.

Since the 1960s, The Episcopal Church has been sliding steadily in membership. The trend bottomed out last year, when the denomination gained 27,000 new people.

But that long-sought turnaround came much quicker, and much stronger, in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. There, a fertile mixture of evangelical preaching, charismatic renewal, and liturgical worship is producing steady growth.

Led primarily by three robust parishes, Episcopal reinvigoration has flourished there more than anywhere else in the country. Nationwide, about 400 of the 7,200 Episcopal parishes are experiencing spiritual renewal.

The churches attract people by encouraging lay ministry, spiritual discipline, and free expression in worship. In addition, they provide expository Bible preaching. Their congregations contain a rich diversity of faith backgrounds.

The Church of the Apostles, an exuberantly charismatic parish in Fairfax, packs a local high school auditorium with up to 2,000 worshipers at its two Sunday services. Its astonishing growth from the mid-1970s—when attendance averaged about 50—has been shaped primarily by the ministry of H. Lawrence (Renny) Scott. He left the Washington area in September to accept a call to Charleston, South Carolina.

Founding member Ken MacGowan says the church decided to “go the charismatic route” in 1976. At about the same time, its mother church, Truro Episcopal, also in Fairfax, invited Graham Pulkingham, a popular Episcopalian speaker from Houston, to teach a seminar on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This brought both spiritual and congregational shakeups to Truro. Traditional Episcopalians fled to other area congregations. And Truro called a new rector, John Howe.

“What I perceived as the need in 1976 was to give systematic, biblical undergirding to what was happening,” Howe says. “They had had a lot of superstars come through, but no consistency, no careful exposure to the whole counsel of God.

A third growing northern Virginia parish is The Falls Church, in the community of the same name. The church building is a historic landmark where George Washington once served on the building committee. When Rector John Yates arrived in 1979, he was asked by the church board to emphasize outreach, evangelism, and renewal.

“When we started moving in that direction, it was very difficult for a number of the traditional people in the church,” he says. “They resented Bibles in the pews and a new emphasis from the pulpit.” Nevertheless, Falls Church’s attendance doubled to 700 in three years.

Charismatic renewal is often the most visible characteristic of expanding Episcopal churches. But it is among the least important, according to these pastors.

“I hate the label and don’t think it is helpful,” says Howe. “There is no other kind of Christian than a charismatic Christian.… How you choose to express the gift of the Holy Spirit is between you and the Lord.”

As the charismatic movement floods a church’s life, it can leave in its wake a decided identity crisis. That is the problem the Church of the Apostles is facing. In Renny Scott’s absence, the congregation is struggling with the question of whether to define itself primarily as an Episcopalian or a charismatic parish.

In his preaching, Scott developed a theme of “three streams, one river”—Protestant (Bible-based), Catholic (liturgical and sacramental), and Pentecostal (Spirit-filled). He says all three streams are indispensable to the life of a thriving church.

The three churches are enjoying numerical growth as well as producing spiritual maturity in their members. Paradoxically, The Episcopal Church’s structure and hierarchy give these priests the freedom to involve lay people in ministry. An unexpectedly active laity emerges as a result.

This is most apparent in the myriad “shepherd groups” and home Bible studies that meet weekly. At The Falls Church, such groups have increased from 2 to 20 under Yates’s gentle prodding. Even more significant, to him, is the number of men assuming spiritual leadership through several men’s Bible studies. At Truro, 36 shepherd groups meet, involving about half the church’s 2,000 active congregants.

The level of financial giving by members of these congregations, as well as by the churches to their diocese, is remarkably high. Truro, Apostles, and Falls Church are among the four top contributors to their diocese, each adhering to the principle of tithing.

In 1976, Truro set a goal of giving half its income for social projects. The church increased the amount by increments of 5 percent each year. “At that point lots of things took off for Truro,” Howe recalls. “When you begin to make outreach a priority, it’s remarkable how the rest of the act comes together.” Once the momentum was established, it took five years instead of the anticipated seven to reach the 50 percent goal.

With such a commitment to outreach, community involvement takes a variety of forms. The Church of the Apostles sponsors a residential program for mentally retarded adults. It also sells record albums of its own Praise Band, donating all the proceeds to a ministry in Washington, D.C. Truro held a day-long training seminar for people interested in inner-city ministries. Howe travels around the country to encourage parish renewal. And lay leaders organize spiritual renewal weekends. The Episcopal Church hierarchy welcomes the growth despite some wariness over charismatic renewal.

Churches in northern Virginia don’t appear to be threatened by the mushrooming growth in their midst. Several of them are expanding rapidly as well. Rector David Jones, of the Church of the Good Shepherd, says of nearby Truro: “The nice thing is that both churches are clear about their vision, and God has called both into being. It’s not a question of competition. We’re not appealing to the same market, to use the world’s term.”

Such ready acceptance has not always come easy for Spirit-filled Episcopalians. “There was a time when the hierarchy in New York wouldn’t touch us with a 10-foot pole. That is long gone,” recalls Everett L. (Terry) Fullam, president of Episcopal Renewal Ministries. “The churches that are really moving ahead, almost without exception, are churches that are open to the renewing work of the Holy Spirit—are recovering the Bible and biblical preaching and teaching. They emphasize personal relationship rather than simply ritual, and they are very mission-minded.”

Traditionally thought of as the bridge between Protestantism and Catholicism, The Episcopal Church is in the process of adding a new dimension to its identity. As parishioners take their faith more seriously, and a second and third generation of evangelical priests begin to lead, changes are taking place that could alter the course of the entire denomination.

World Scene

Former President Gerald Ford is one of the founders of a new organization formed to promote religious rights in Eastern Europe. Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill.); Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, of Chicago; and former secretaries of state Alexander Haig, Dean Rusk, and William Rodgers are also numbered among the initial members of the Advisory Council on Religious Rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The council will organize action on such issues as anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union and the harassment of Catholic priests in Lithuania.

The Salvation Army, based in London, has designated 1984 as the “Year of Outreach and Evangelism.” Members worldwide are being urged to make use of open-air meetings, home visitation, radio, television, and Bible distribution. The Army’s commander, Jarl Wahlstrom, has called upon all Salvationists to “take the message of hope to as many of our fellow men as possible.”

An extended drought in the Andean highlands of Peru has helped unite evangelical pastors there for the first time. The drought wiped out 60 percent of last year’s crop, including most of the main staple, potatoes. In September, 38 pastors, representing six denominations and some 200 churches, formed the Evangelical Emergency Committee of Puno (southeastern Peru) and began to assess their role in the crisis.

More than 2,000 Brazilian evangelicals attended Brazil’s first National Congress on Evangelization in early November. The meeting was a direct outgrowth of the 1974 Lausanne, Switzerland, congress on world evangelization. There are more than 15 million evangelicals in Brazil, according to World Evangelization Information Service.

Two Chinese Christians are among the victims of the crackdown on crime in the People’s Republic of China. John Li, a former doctor, and his coworker, Lin Zerong, were executed in September as spies. Some Chinese Christians at first alleged that the charges against the pair were false. But after the executions, Taiwan officials admitted that the two had been working for the overthrow of the mainland Chinese government.

Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has alleged that Ethiopia’s Marxist government is oppressing churches. According to a 2,500-word LWF report, the military government is closing churches, arresting Christian leaders, and confiscating church property without compensation. The major victim is the 500,000-member Evangelical Mekane Yesus (Lutheran) Church, which has seen more than 280 of its 350 churches closed. The LWF says the Ethiopian government also is working to eliminate Baptist, Mennonite, and Pentecostal churches.

Women in India are voicing their displeasure at the growing number of p*rnographic films being shown in Calcutta and in other major Indian cities. The films attract more viewers than the award-winning movie Gandhi. And according to Far Eastern Economic Review, the stars of the films have become cult heroes. Although Indian movies portray murder, torture, rape, and sadism, on-screen kissing is taboo, presumably because it is un-Indian. Feminists in India—noting that it is usually males who object to the filming of physical intimacy such as kissing—say violence and sadism have become forms of sexual communication that symbolize male dominance.

Polish government authorities have ordered Roman Catholic Primate Jozef Cardinal Glemp to silence 69 “antisocialist” priests. Church officials say the order came with a threat that the priests were facing arrest. The warning heightened the tension between the Communist state and the Catholic church, many of whose priests are openly associated with Poland’s outlawed Solidarity labor union.

Former Guatemalan chief of state Efraín Ríos Montt is now missed by many who once were his critics. Various diplomats and church leaders say that violence, including military violence and urban crime, has increased substantially since his departure. Ríos Montt, an outspoken evangelical, was deposed last August in a military coup led by former defense minister Oscar Humberto Mejía Victores. Recently, Victores accused some Catholics of “cooperating with subversives.” Some say the charge led to the killing of Augusto Ramirez, a Catholic priest.

DEATHS

Julian C. McPheeters, 94, president emeritus of Asbury Theological Seminary, where he served from 1942 to 1962, nationally known member of the United Methodist Church; October 31, in Lexington, Kentucky, of complications following a stroke he suffered last April.

Paul J. Carlson, 78, former national commander of the Salvation Army (1972 to 1974), recipient of the Army’s rarely awarded 50-year service medal; October 30, at the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, New Jersey, of heart complications.

Edmund Musgrave (E.M.) Blaiklock, 80, theologian, Bible scholar, newspaper columnist, author of 78 books, editor of the Atlas of Bible Lands and the Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology, archaeological editor of the five-volume Encyclopedia of the Bible; late in October, in Auckland, New Zealand, of cancer.

A growing number of professional football players are finding the pinnacles of athletic success unfulfilling.

For a few hours on Sunday, January 22, millions of Americans will postpone their concern about the world’s problems. The eyes of the nation will be focused on Tampa Bay, Florida, site of Super Bowl XVIII. On the gridiron at Tampa Stadium, two teams of 49 men will compete for the right to be called world champions.

“I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort in my profession to become the best and to continue to be the best,” says Mike Webster, the sturdy anchor of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offensive line. “But each time I was the best, and we were the best as a team, I was left with a very empty feeling.” The owner of four Super Bowl championship rings, Webster knows what he’s talking about.

Fortunately for Webster, the void he felt has been filled. He is one of a growing number of professional athletes who is proclaiming Christ—not football—as King.

“When we first started holding chapels, we were lucky to get two or three guys to come,” says Webster’s teammate Mel Blount. Now at least half of the Steelers attend regularly.

What is happening in Pittsburgh is happening throughout the National Football League (NFL). Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, Jimbo Covert, the Bears’ top draft pick in 1983, was invited to a team Bible study. In Dallas, some 40 players and staff members regularly attend the Cowboys’ weekly Bible class. The teacher in Dallas is Howard Hendricks, a professor of Christian education at Dallas Theological Seminary.

“The NFL is in the midst of a spiritual awakening,” says Jim Brenn, who leads chapels and Bible studies for the Washington Redskins. “It has spread to athletes at the college and even the high school level. These guys are searching for something deeper than they’ve found in football.”

The burgeoning NFL chapel movement was pioneered by Ira Lee “Doc” Eshleman, a retired minister. In the late sixties, when America’s young people were rebelling against traditional authority, Eshleman believed professional athletes could reach them.

“I’ll never forget those first chapels,” he reflects. “There was one in Detroit. Hardly anyone came. But after it was over, a little bald-headed fellow came up to me and said, ‘Doc, all my life I go to church in de old country. I go to de alter. I sing in de choir. But I never know what it means to be a Christian until today. Today I pray. Today I invite Jesus into my life.’”

The bald-headed foreigner, Garo Yepremian, went on to become one of the best kickers in NFL history. Today he is a successful businessman and an active member of Saint John’s Armenian Apostolic Church in Miami. “That chapel changed my life,” he says. “It showed me Christianity had meaning. Before it was just a duty.”

In 1968 Eshleman got the okay from Rams’ coach George Allen to start a chapel in Los Angeles. At a meeting of general managers after the season, Allen was accused of using anything, even religion, to win games. He replied that no coach could teach love and respect among players as chapel was doing. And he wondered aloud whether a team could become a champion without it.

“That statement by Coach Allen did more to popularize the program around the league than any one thing that was ever done,” Eshleman says. By 1970, almost all NFL teams were holding chapel services. In the early days, the emphasis was on evangelism. But soon many began to understand the unique problems that accompany life in the fast lane, and various discipleship ministries emerged.

In 1974, Athletes in Action (AIA), an arm of Campus Crusade for Christ, began a ministry in five cities to meet the spiritual needs of professional athletes. AIA’s Hollis Haff moved to Pittsburgh. Says Blount: “Hollis has been at least as big a part of the Steeler organization as [coach] Chuck Noll.”

In a society that makes sports heroes into demigods, Christian athletes have expressed a desire to be treated as ordinary people. Covert grew up in a steel town near Pittsburgh. His father and grandfather “went into the mill and worked as hard as they could,” he says. “That’s what I do on the field. There’s no difference. I love football, but for me it’s a living.”

Webster says exposure of the drug problem among NFL players “has helped society see that superstars are people, vulnerable to sin, hardship, pain, and failure.”

Those who minister to athletes have come to understand that life in the spotlight can be lonely. “Sometimes it’s hard to decipher whether someone wants to be with you because you’re a person or because of the title you hold,” says quarterback Vince Evans, who last year led a team Bible study for the Chicago Bears.

Henry Soles, president of the Chicago-based ministry Intersports Associates, notes that the divorce and separation rate among professional athletes is much higher than the national average. “With everyone enthralled with her husband, a wife feels like a nonperson, an accessory,” he says.

And athletes are under constant pressure to perform. At Chicago’s Soldier Field, it takes just three bad passes to turn the fickle crowd. “It can be a very cold business because of the emphasis on winning,” says the Bears’ Evans.

“We’re all used to being criticized,” adds AIA’s Haff. “But not in the morning paper or on the 11 o’clock news in front of millions of people.” In addition, Christian athletes face the prospect of being labelled “hypocrites” if a television camera catches them swearing, throwing a clipboard, or starting a fight.

“People see us in emotional and pressure-filled situations,” says the Steelers’ Webster. “When you see Billy Graham on TV, he’s at his best. You see the highlights. You don’t see the other 59 minutes of the game. People have to realize that becoming a Christian does not mean instant perfection.”

However, for many athletes, living with fame is not as difficult as living without it. “After it’s all over,” says Yepremian, “when a guy is out looking for a job, nobody cares that he used to play football. The people who were saying how great he is are gone. And a lot of guys are not prepared for the inevitable.

But eventually, the energy of youth gives way to tired bones. Name recognition fades. Autograph seekers and news reporters disappear. The athlete must consider who he is, haunted by the memory of who he was. A major part of the sports minister’s role is preparing athletes, spiritually and practically, for life after football.

After the final whistle blows on January 22, 49 men will be awarded championship rings, which moth and rust will consume. That’s why Webster says “there’s only one Hall of Fame that anybody should ever want to be in—the kingdom of heaven.”

To that, hundreds of athletes around the NFL are learning to say, “Amen.”

The following excerpted chapter is taken from Charles Colson’s new book, Loving God. The story, as are the others in this volume, is true; but, as noted at the book’s beginning, in some instances “editorial liberties have been taken to combine certain events for the purposes of clarity or illustration.… In all instances the events underlying the stories are true. Background details have been researched as thoroughly as possible, although at times inferences were drawn from the limited facts available. Where that is the case, it is made evident in the text.”

No reporters have visited the prison camps of Soviet Russia, unless they have gone as prisoners. So to this day we have little information about the millions who have lived, suffered, and died there, especially during Stalin’s reign of terror. Most will remain nameless for all time, remembered only in the hearts of those who knew and loved them. But from time to time, scraps of information have filtered out about a few. One of those few was Boris Nicholayevich Kornfeld.

Kornfeld was a medical doctor. From this we can guess a little about his background, for in postrevolutionary Russia such education never went to families tied in any way to czarist Russia. Probably his parents were Socialists who had fastened their hopes on the Revolution. They were also Jews, but almost certainly not Jews still hoping for the Messiah, for the name Boris and the patronymic Nicholayevich indicate they had taken Russian names in some past generation. Probably Kornfeld’s forebears were Haskalah, so-called enlightened Jews, who accepted the philosophy of rationalism, cultivated a knowledge of the natural sciences, and devoted themselves to the arts. In language, dress, and social habits they tried to make themselves as much like their Russian neighbors as possible.

It was natural for such Jews to support Lenin’s revolution, for the czars’ vicious anti-Semitism had made life almost unendurable for the prior 200 years. Socialism promised something much better for them than “Christian” Russia. “Christian” Russia had slaughtered Jews; perhaps atheistic Russia would save them.

Obviously Kornfeld had followed in his parents’ footsteps, believing in communism as the path of historical necessity, for political prisoners at that time were not citizens opposed to communism or wanting the czar’s return. Such people were simply shot. Political prisoners were believers in the Revolution, Socialists, or Communists who had, nevertheless, not kept their allegiance to Stalin’s leadership pure.

We do not know what crime Dr. Kornfeld committed, only that it was a political crime. Perhaps he dared one day to suggest to a friend that their leader, Stalin, was fallible; or maybe he was simply accused of harboring such thoughts. It took no more than that to become a prisoner in the Russia of the early 1950s; many died for less. At any rate, Kornfeld was imprisoned in a concentration camp for political subversives at Ekibastuz.

Ironically, a few years behind barbed wire was a good cure for Communism. The senseless brutality, the waste of lives, the trivialities called criminal charges made men like Kornfeld doubt the glories of the system. Stripped of all past association, of all that had kept them busy and secure, behind the wire prisoners had time to think. In such a place, thoughtful men like Boris Kornfeld found themselves reevaluating beliefs they had held since childhood.

So it was that this Russian doctor abandoned all his socialistic ideals. In fact, he went further than that. He did something that would have horrified his forebears.

Boris Kornfeld became a Christian.

While few jews anywhere in the world would find it easy to accept Jesus Christ as the true Messiah, a Russian Jew would find it even more difficult. For two centuries these Jews had known implacable hatred from the people who, they were told, were the most Christian of all. Each move the Jews made to reconcile themselves or accommodate themselves to the Russians was met by new inventions of hatred and persecution, as when the head of the governing body of the Russian Orthodox church said he hoped that, as a result of the Russian pogroms, “one-third of the Jews will convert, one-third will die, and one-third will flee the country.”

Yet following the Revolution a strange alignment occurred. Joseph Stalin demanded undivided, unquestioning loyalty to his government; but both Jews and Christians knew their ultimate loyalty was to God. Consequently, people of both faiths suffered for their beliefs and frequently in the same camps.

Thus it was that Boris Kornfeld came in contact with a devout Christian, a well-educated and kind fellow prisoner who spoke of a Jewish Messiah who had come to keep the promises the Lord had made to Israel. This Christian—whose name we do not know—pointed out that Jesus had spoken almost solely to Jewish people and proclaimed that he came to the Jews first. That was consistent with God’s special concern for the Jew, the chosen ones; and, he explained, the Bible promised that a new kingdom of peace would come. This man often recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer, and Kornfeld heard in those simple words a strange ring of truth.

The camp had stripped Kornfeld of everything, including his belief in salvation through socialism. Now this man offered him hope—but in what a form!

To accept Jesus Christ—to become one of those who had always persecuted his people—seemed a betrayal of his family, of all who had been before him. Kornfeld knew the Jews had suffered innocently. Jews were innocent in the days of the Cossacks! Innocent in the days of the czars! And he himself was innocent of betraying Stalin; he had been imprisoned unjustly.

But Kornfeld pondered what the Christian prisoner had told him. In one commodity, time, the doctor was rich.

Unexpectedly, he began to see the powerful parallels between the Jews and this Jesus. It had always been a scandal that God should entrust himself in a unique way to one people, the Jews. Despite centuries of persecution, their very existence in the midst of those who sought to destroy them was a sign of a Power greater than that of their oppressors. It was the same with Jesus—that God would present himself in the form of a man had always confounded the wisdom of the world. To the proud and powerful, Jesus stood as a Sign, exposing their own limitations and sin. So they had to kill him, just as those in power had to kill the Jews, in order to maintain their delusions of omnipotence. Thus, Stalin, the new godhead of the brave new world of the Revolution, had to persecute both Jew and Christian. Each stood as living proof of his blasphemous pretensions to power.

Only in the gulag could Boris Kornfeld begin to see such a truth. And the more he reflected upon it, the more it began to change him within.

Though a prisoner, Kornfeld lived in better conditions than most behind the wire. Other prisoners were expendable, but doctors were scarce in the remote, isolated camps. The authorities could not afford to lose a physician, for guards as well as prisoners needed medical attention. And no prison officer wanted to end up in the hands of a doctor he had cruelly abused.

Kornfeld’s resistance to the Christian message might have begun to weaken while he was in surgery, perhaps while working on one of those guards he had learned to loathe. The man had been knifed and an artery cut. While suturing the blood vessel, the doctor thought of tying the thread in such a way that it would reopen shortly after surgery. The guard would die quickly and no one would be the wiser.

The process of taking this particular form of vengeance gave rein to the burning hatred Kornfeld had for the guard and all like him. How he despised his persecutors! He could gladly slaughter them all!

And at that point, Boris Kornfeld became appalled by the hatred and violence he saw in his own heart. Yes, he was a victim of hatred as his ancestors had been. But that hatred had spawned an insatiable hatred of his own. What a deadly predicament! He was trapped by the very evil he despised. What freedom could he ever know with his soul imprisoned by this murderous hate? It made the whole world a concentration camp.

As Kornfeld began to retie the sutures properly, he found himself, almost unconsciously, repeating the words he had heard from his fellow prisoner. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Strange words in the mouth of a Jew. Yet he could not help praying them. Having seen his own evil heart, he had to pray for cleansing. And he had to pray to a God who had suffered, as he had: Jesus.

For some time, Boris Kornfeld simply continued praying the Lord’s Prayer while he carried out his backbreaking, hopeless tasks as a camp doctor. Backbreaking because there were always far too many patients. Hopeless because the camp was designed to kill men. He stood ineffectively against the tide of death gaining on each prisoner: disease, cold, overwork, beatings, malnutrition.

Doctors in the camp’s medical section were also asked to sign decrees for imprisonment in the punishment block. Any prisoner whom the authorities did not like or wanted out of the way was sent to this block—solitary confinement in a tiny, dark, cold, torture chamber of a cell. A doctor’s signature on the forms certified that a prisoner was strong and healthy enough to withstand the punishment. This was, of course, a lie. Few emerged alive.

Like all the other doctors, Kornfeld had signed his share of forms. What was the difference? The authorities did not need the signatures anyway; they had many other ways of “legalizing” punishment. And a doctor who did not cooperate would not last long, even though doctors were scarce. But shortly after he began to pray for forgiveness. Dr. Kornfeld stopped authorizing the punishment; he refused to sign the forms. Though he had signed hundreds of them, now he couldn’t. Whatever had happened inside him would not permit him to do it.

This rebellion was bad enough, but Kornfeld did not stop there. He turned in an orderly.

Galilee

The time shall come

when the prayerful gaze,

once left upon the Galilee,

will return upon a wave

and touch you.

The time shall come

when the tearful spray

of every new storm

will begin to pass

and the whispering calm

will carry His voice,

His voice from the Galilee,

and it shall heal you.

The sea of living waters,

warm waves of love,

sweep shoreward to consume

the broken crust of life

and to revive what remains,

if our heart and mind

will seek and drink

of the faith of Galilee.

—Miranda

The orderlies were drawn from a group of prisoners who cooperated with the authorities. As a reward for their cooperation, they were given jobs within the camp that were less than a death sentence. They became the cooks, bakers, clerks, and hospital orderlies. The other prisoners hated them almost more than they hated the guards, for these prisoners were traitors; they could never be trusted. They stole food from the other prisoners and would gladly kill anyone who tried to report them or give them trouble. Besides, the guards turned a blind eye to their abuses of power. People died in the camps every day; the authorities needed these quislings to keep the system running smoothly.

While making his rounds one day, Kornfeld came to one of his many patients suffering from pellagra, an all-too-common disease in the camps. Malnutrition induced pellagra which, perversely, made digestion nearly impossible. Victims literally starved to death.

This man’s body showed the ravages of the disease. His face had become dark, one deep bruise. The skin was peeling off his hands; they had to be bandaged to stanch the incessant bleeding. Kornfeld had been giving the patient chalk, good white bread, and herring to stop the diarrhea and get nutrients into his blood, but the man was too far gone. When the doctor asked the dying patient his name, the man could not even remember it.

Just after leaving this patient, Kornfeld came upon a hulking orderly bent over the remains of a loaf of white bread meant for the pellagra patients. The man looked up shamelessly, his cheeks stuffed with food. Kornfeld had known about the stealing, had known it was one reason his patients did not recover, but his vivid memory of the dying man pierced him now. He could not shrug his shoulders and go on.

Of course, he could not blame the deaths simply on the theft of food. There were countless other reasons why his patients did not recover. The hospital stank of excrement and lacked proper facilities and supplies. He had to perform surgery under conditions so primitive that often operations were little more than mercy killings. It was preposterous to stand on principle in the situation, particularly when he knew what the orderly might do to him in return. But the doctor had to be obedient to what he now believed. Once again the change in his life was making a difference.

When Kornfeld reported the orderly to the commandant, the officer found his complaint very curious. There had been a recent rash of murders in the camp; each victim had been a “stoolie.” It was foolish—dangerously so at this time—to complain about anyone. But the commandant put the orderly in the punishment block for three days, taking the complaint with a perverse satisfaction. Kornfeld’s refusal to sign the punishment forms was becoming a nuisance; this would save the commandant some trouble. The doctor had arranged his own execution.

Boris Kornfeld was not an especially brave man. He knew his life would be in danger as soon as the orderly was released from the cell block. Sleeping in the barracks, controlled at night by the camp-chosen prisoners, would mean certain death. So the doctor began staying in the hospital, catching sleep when and where he could, living in a strange twilight world where any moment might be his last.

But, paradoxically, along with this anxiety came tremendous freedom. Having accepted the possibility of death, Boris Kornfeld was now free to live. He signed no more papers or documents sending men to their deaths. He no longer turned his eyes from cruelty or shrugged his shoulders when he saw injustice. He said what he wanted and did what he could. And soon he realized that the anger and hatred and violence in his own soul had vanished. He wondered whether there lived another man in Russia who knew such freedom!

Now Boris Kornfeld wanted to tell someone about his discovery, about this new life of obedience and freedom. The Christian who had talked to him about Jesus had been transferred to another camp, so the doctor waited for the right person and the right moment.

One gray afternoon he examined a patient who had just been operated on for cancer of the intestines. This young man with a melon-shaped head and a hurt, little-boy expression touched the soul of the doctor. The man’s eyes were sorrowful and suspicious and his face deeply etched by the years he had already spent in the camps, reflecting a depth of spiritual misery and emptiness Kornfeld had rarely seen.

So the doctor began to talk to the patient, describing what had happened to him. Once the tale began to spill out, Kornfeld could not stop.

The patient missed the first part of the story, for he was drifting in and out of the anesthesia’s influence, but the doctor’s ardor caught his concentration and held it, though he was shaking with fever. All through the afternoon and late into the night, the doctor talked, describing his conversion to Christ and his new-found freedom.

Very late, with the perimeter lights in the camp glazing the windowpanes, Kornfeld confessed to the patient: “On the whole, you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially, it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have not received this blow.”

Imagine! The persecuted Jew who once believed himself totally innocent now saying that every man deserved his suffering, whatever it was.

The patient knew he was listening to an incredible confession. Though the pain from his operation was severe, his stomach a heavy, expansive agony of molten lead, he hung on the doctor’s words until he fell asleep.

The young patient awoke early the next morning to the sound of running feet and a commotion in the area of the operating room. His first thought was of the doctor, but his new friend did not come. Then the whispers of a fellow patient told him of Kornfeld’s fate.

During the night, while the doctor slept, someone had crept up beside him and dealt him eight blows on the head with a plasterer’s mallet. And though his fellow doctors worked valiantly to save him, in the morning the orderlies carried him out, a still, broken form.

But Kornfeld’s testimony did not die.

The patient pondered the doctor’s last, impassioned words. As a result, he, too, became a Christian. He survived that prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there.

The patient’s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

On her shoulder, Mary Slessor carried her adopted baby. Clinging to her skirt was her five-year-old, and with her right hand she coaxed along her three-year-old. Two older children sloshed behind. Sloshed, because they were trudging through a mangrove swamp in West Africa. It was night, for their boat had reached its destination late. They could not see any snakes that might lie across the path or drape from trees above. But they could hear leopards. To keep the big cats at bay, Mary belted out hymns. The children chimed in. “Our singing would discourage any self-respecting leopard,” Mary wrote to a friend later. On this night, no other adult was within miles.

Because no missionary had the time, or, perhaps the courage, to go, Mary Slessor and her children were moving in to live with the fierce Oyokyong people in what is now Nigeria. The year was 1888.

Today women are faced with multiple role possibilities and struggle with their identities: “What are my priorities?” “How assertive should I be?” “What dare I do?” In this quest, Mary Slessor is a worthy addition to our gallery of role models.

Mary was born in 1848 in Scotland. Population had boomed in the early 1800s. Crops, however, had failed. On the non-agricultural front, the steam engine was squelching cottage industries. Desperate for jobs, families migrated to cities. Many lived, begged, and died on the streets. The Slessor family of nine lived in one room.

Mary’s father was a shoemaker, and her mother a weaver who earned ten shillings a week for 58 hours of labor. Because weaving required nimble fingers more than strength, and because a woman’s wage was nearly half a man’s—and a child’s wage only one-fourth—there was almost no work for men in weaving mills. Boys could work until they became men; then they were sacked. In this grim setting, and after three of the children died, Mary’s father became an alcoholic. On payday Saturday nights he would bluster in, ready for violence or sex, small children notwithstanding. To protect her mother, Mary many times drew his anger to herself.

One wonders what Mother Slessor thought of God’s goodness when—on top of marital loneliness, beatings, the inevitable squabbles of children cooped up in one room, children’s sicknesses that led so quickly to death, and nearly 60 hours of work outside the home every week—she waddled after her fifth, sixth, and seventh pregnancies to the stone-cold communal bucket outhouse located beside the manure heap.

In fact, we know what she thought: A speaker had captured her imagination, and she dreamed that one of her sons would be a missionary to West Africa. So she checked the Missionary Record out of the church library and read missionary stories to her brood. She encouraged them to “play missionary.”

Yet all her sons died.

Was that the end of a dream? No: Mary stepped forward. Her sisters were horrified. “Can’t you volunteer to go to some safer field, like Jamaica or India?” they begged. But Mother Slessor was thrilled.

Out of this background, Mary Slessor went to West Africa to become known among her own countrymen as the first woman vice consul of the British Empire, and to be known among Africans as Eka Kpukpro Owo, “the mother of all the peoples.” As James Buchan observes in his excellent biography, The Expendable Mary Slessor (Seabury, 1981), “The squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of a Scottish slum taught her how to share the squalor, the poverty, and the hunger of the West Africa of her day.”

What did mary find in that new continent? Two centuries earlier, before the slave trade with the West, the people of Calabar had lived in self-governing villages. Economically they had specialized: fishing villages traded with farmers, pottery villages traded with canoe makers, blacksmith communities traded with weavers.

Big-time slave trading exploded this simple lifestyle (Buchan, pp. 35–36):

“The West African tribes soon realized that to trade in human beings was the way to power and wealth and those which did not have an anchorage already migrated to the coast and occupied one. Soon too, by bartering slaves for guns, they had the fire power to keep other tribes back and to set themselves up as middlemen between the tribes of the interior and the Europeans. All along the Guinea Coast the tribes fought to keep their anchorages and the monopoly of the trade.…

“As the trade developed and they needed more warriors and more labour the coastal tribes began to keep back more and more of the captives for their own use. A small House, slave and free, could number up to a thousand. But a large one, like those of the Calabar towns, owned thousands of slaves and hundreds of trading and war canoes.…

“Between 1720 and 1830 about a million slaves were shipped out of Calabar, while thousands more died in the anchorage or were butchered there. The chiefs grew accustomed to looking on human beings simply as merchandise. But because they shared the same human life, the cheapening of the lives of the sold cheapened the lives of the sellers.… By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Calabar life … was a squalid travesty of what it had once been.…”

Life was cheap. Torture was imaginative. Slaves, women, and children especially were expendable. Here Mary stepped in. Besides preaching, teaching, and nursing, she rescued women and hundreds of babies thrown into the jungle. Rarely did she have fewer than a dozen such children living in her makeshift house. Each infant was suspended in a cradle hammock made from a wooden crate. Tying a string to each crate, Mary would lie in bed at night and pull strings as each baby needed soothing. To bathe her babies, Mary put four big milk cans on the stove to warm the water, plopped in four babies, pulled them out and dried them, plopped in four more—all the time discussing points of African law with those who sought an audience with her.

As we have noted, Mary’s knowledge of indigenous law eventually propelled her into being the first woman vice consul of the British Empire. This knowledge was gleaned as she lived “not only like an African, but like a poor African”—in native houses, sleeping beside big, sweating native bodies, eating native food, going barefoot, suffering local diseases—but awake, aware, curious, asking questions, categorizing information, applying it.

Mary’s participation in local councils could be feisty. One day, a British government officer remembers, when an African showed up who had been forbidden to come to court because he had been rude (Buchan, p. 146):

“Suddenly she jumped up with an angry growl, her shawl fell off, the baby (which had been on her lap) was hurriedly transferred to somebody qualified to hold it, and with a few trenchant words she made for the doors where a hulking overdressed native stood. In a moment she seized him by the scruff of the neck, boxed his ears, and hustled him out into the yard, telling him quite explicitly what would happen to him if he came back again without her consent.… Then as suddenly as it had arisen the tornado subsided, and (lace shawl, baby and all) she was gently swaying in her [rocking] chair again.”

In spite of unorthodox methods, Mary’s genuineness, courage, and true concern made her welcome at councils.

Mary slessor was not the only tough Anglo-Saxon Mary in the West African jungle in those years, however. Mary Kingsley, intrepid explorer, journalist, naturalist, amateur anthropologist, and society’s darling, also trekked through. When she recounted her perilous exploits in Travels in West Africa and other books, and in articles such as those that appeared in The Spectator, she became an acknowledged African authority.

Kingsley came in velvet hat, buttoned-up jacket, and knee-high boots. Slessor had long since discarded the Victorian missionary’s hat, gloves, boots, bustle, long curls—and sometimes even her dress. Kingsley secreted a revolver and dagger in her clothes. Slessor went unarmed. Kingsley was glamorous. Slessor, due to malaria, looked scrawny and washed-out. Nevertheless, when Kingsley came to visit Slessor, the two took an immediate liking to each other, and they continued to correspond for the rest of their lives.

Both Marys modeled strong, creative women. Fashionable Kingsley, however, was subordinated to the scientific philosophy of the day. Slessor was subordinated to the Word and Spirit of God. Because of this, poorly educated Mary Slessor was liberated to have broader views and a much wider impact for justice and wholeness than Mary Kingsley.

Social Darwinism was widely believed in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Races were ranked on an evolutionary scale. Mary Kingsley swallowed this, according to Jon Bonk in his article “All Things to All Persons: The Missionary as Racist-Imperialist 1860–1918” (Missiology, July 1980). Therefore Kingsley could write, “The difference between the African race and the white [is not] … a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.… The African is analogous to the [dodo] bird in being, like him, a very early type, whom Nature, in her short-sighted way, has adapted to the local environments, with no eye on [the] future.” As well, according to Bonk, Kingsley was “irked by [missionaries’] willful ignorance as to the true nature of the African mind, which manifested itself in the ‘difficulty [they experience] in regarding the African as anything but a Man and a Brother’ and in the misguidedly dogmatic conviction of ‘the spiritual equality of all colors of Christians’” (p. 300).

Mary Slessor, however, was not bound by contemporary scientific philosophy. She took her marching orders from the gospel. For her, every slack-mouthed slave was made in God’s image, and was someone for whom Christ died. It was never inconvenient, then, to go rushing off in the middle of the night, or of a full agenda, or of a malaria attack, to rescue one more insignificant, threatened person.

Of Mary Slessor, Mary Kingsley said, “This very wonderful lady[’s] … abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribes a unique position and won her among many, white and black, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done no man can fully estimate.… This instance of what one white can do would give many lessons in West Coast administration and development. Only the type of man Miss Slessor represents is rare … Miss Slessor stands alone” (Buchan, p. 148).

For women today, what are the priorities? How assertive dare we be? Let us be strong, creative, goal-oriented women. But not only that, let us also be liberated beyond the confines of the philosophies of our day, liberated as was Mary Slessor to the Word and the Spirit.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

Who was the man who made 1984 a household year?

George orwell requested in his will, made three days before his death, that no biography of him be written. A writer should know better. Even if Orwell had not become posthumously famous he would have been too tempting a subject, for his short life was filled with dramatic reversals. He was a police officer in British Burma, a bum in Paris and London, a wounded soldier in the Spanish civil war, hunted by his own side, and a writer racing with death to finish his masterpiece. Terribly reticent even with close friends and family members, he left a spotty record of himself—which in itself tempts biographers who like psychological theories.

Peter Lewis’s admirably brief biography, George Orwell: The Road to 1984, leaves such theories aside. He does not belabor the facts, or go into deep literary criticism. He simply gives, in a breezy, interesting way, the story of Orwell’s life. A vivid picture of Orwell as a gloomy, likeable, unflagging intelligence emerges. Numerous photos help recapture the period. I thought the final line aptly summarized the book’s impact. It was from the poet W. H. Auden, on Orwell’s writing: “Today, reading his reactions, my first thought is: Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!”

His book reviews could be brutal, even when discussing a friend’s work. His discussions of politics showed an unfailing nose for hypocrisy. He could not have been an easy friend, yet he left a crowd of admirers, who apparently genuinely cared for him and liked him. All biographies leave a residue of sadness; they are like novels in which the hero dies at the end. George Orwell’s life seems melancholy all through—the silhouette of an admirable man made lonely because he couldn’t stop telling the truth.

Born under the name of Eric Blair to a minor civil servant, Orwell went to school at Eton. In Britain this branded him, just through the accent he acquired, as a member of the upper-crust intelligentsia. He was intensely uncomfortable with this position. Instead of going on to Cambridge or Oxford, he joined the Imperial police, which stationed him in Burma for five years.

He returned home, quit, and became more or less a bum, choosing to live on next to nothing in order to learn about the poorest of the poor. This was the beginning of his rejection of his middle-class past, with its conservative moorings. It was part reporting, for he wanted to write a book about it. But an element of penance seems to have been involved. Orwell was haunted by class. The book required five years, sometimes spent in unconvincing disguise. He really wanted to write fiction, but couldn’t get any published. Down and Out in Paris and London was published after two rejections and several required revisions. In his frustration he left the rejected manuscript on a friend’s floor, telling her to throw it out. She got it published instead. Apparently because he was not proud of the book, he published it under the name George Orwell.

Now, he was a literary man, but it proved to be a difficult life. Two more books were published with little success. He went to Spain, got caught in the revolutionary spirit, and volunteered to fight Franco. Shot through the neck by a sniper, he recovered. Then the faction he had joined was branded as too revolutionary by the Soviet-sponsored Communists and was outlawed. He hid like a hunted beast, until he could get out of the country. When he returned to Britain he found no influential socialists interested in an account of the witch-hunt. Though a socialist to his dying day, Orwell caught a powerful, lasting dose of anti-Stalinism. It did not make him popular with other socialists. He was far in advance of the massive defections from communism that came after the Stalin-Hitler pact. He also learned to despise the self-censorship of the left-wing establishment. Orwell wrote a splendid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia, of which unsold copies still gathered dust in the warehouse when he died.

It was during World War II that he began to find himself as an essayist. His essays still have a shocking freshness, like cold water. He tried desperately to enlist in the army, but was turned down each time because of his lungs. Instead, he had to work for the BBC, broadcasting to India. He wrote for newspapers, reviewing books and commenting on the times. It was work he disliked, and he compared it to pouring his spirit down the drain “half a pint at a time.”

But then, at the end of the war, he got an idea for a fable about Stalinism. It would involve animals revolting against a farmer, and turning the farm into an animal commune. Sound like a promising idea? It did not to anyone but him, but it became Animal Farm. The timing could not have been worse: the Russians were our victorious allies, and it was not the best time to attack them. He did anyway. Three publishers rejected it; he was ready to publish it himself as a pamphlet when a fourth finally took it. Twenty American publishers went through the book before one accepted it.

After that his life would have been easy if he had not lost his wife, who had been a tremendous sustaining help, and his health. He was in and out of the hospital, and only barely managed to get his next good idea to the typesetter before going into a hospital for good. He worked from a remote, cold Scottish island with his adopted son, Richard. Not even a typist could be found to go there to help him, and he apparently typed much of 1984 in bed. For fear of passing on tuberculosis he could not even touch his son, whom he loved more openly than he had ever loved anyone.

He was only 46 when he died in the winter of 1950. The doctors were letting him go to Switzerland; he had a fishing pole in his hospital room, ready for the trip. He said, with his usual grim humor, “Either I’m better or they don’t want a corpse on their hands.” Evelyn Waugh, the Catholic novelist, visited him not long before his death and reported him “very near to God.” But Orwell, an atheist, never said so to himself, unless you consider his desire for a Church of England funeral a statement. He was not the type to make sentimental gestures.

A biography is the tribute Orwell didn’t want; he preferred to be remembered by his writings. 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, a collection of essays, makes a powerful tribute to Orwell just in the fact that such a crowd of intelligent people are still spurred to write on what he wrote. The essays vary in quality and interest, as one would expect, and on the whole they would make dense prose for someone not terribly interested in political theory. But in mulling over the meaning of 1984, this book puts you in smart company.

The focus is “totalitarianism,” the kind of government usually ascribed to Hitler and Stalin, and which Ayatollah Khomeini apparently wishes to achieve. Totalitarianism is brutal, but more than brutal: it aims to master church, family, even thoughts. 1984 portrays the ultimate, and no one has matched it. Stalin came closest, but his regime has faded into a merely cruel authoritarian state, where people can make jokes about their leader without fearing the prison camps. One of the debating points in this book is whether this “failed totalitarianism,” usually associated with socialist countries, is on the same moral level as traditional authoritarian states, dictatorships which, while cruel, leave family, church, and tradition alone. Right-wing theorists make much of this distinction, for it makes it possible to support, say, Chile, but not Poland. Left-wing theorists suggest that to the person being tortured the distinction is academic.

Another debating point is whether a form of 1984 can come into power without using force. This view holds that Orwell partly missed the boat—Big Brother need not use torture, he can merely use the advertising agencies, and we will all conform to his way of thinking quite willingly. Or alternatively, technology, our promised savior, has mutated into an omnipresent Big Brother. Some opponents of nuclear power or computerization would take this view. They seem to hint, though they do not state explicitly, that a spiritual crisis is at the heart of 1984. The problem is dehumanization, not political terror, and there is more than one way to achieve it.

Orwell would have liked updating 1984 in company with these thinkers. He foresaw the dominance of television years before its spread. Only, as Bernard Avishai puts it, in 1984 “Big Brother won’t let you turn the set off. In America—little brother.” What would Orwell have made of that? I wish I knew.

George Orwell: The Road to 1984, by Peter Lewis (Harcourt, Bruce, Jovanovich, 1981, 122 pp.; $12.95). 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, Irving Howe, editor (Harper and Row, 1983, 276 pp.; $3.50). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.

I was born a couple of months after George Orwell died, early in 1950. He was not then a very famous writer. In fact, he had been little known and virtually poverty stricken until 1945, when he published Animal Farm at the age of 42. Three British and 20 American publishers had refused it, partly because of its fiercely anti-Soviet stance. But it became a success, his first. A few years later he wrote 1984, and died shortly after its publication.

Both books have now sold over ten million copies. By the time I read 1984 in junior high school it had become a standard text in many schools. It has marked this new year with a frightening aura.

What stuck with me, and sticks with most people, is a mood. The mood is dreamlike: a dingy, urban nightmare where nothing changes, not the scenery (brown, decaying slums), not the conditions (always being watched, always anxious and slightly drunk on synthetic gin), and not the people (noisy and busy, yet listless, impersonal). As in a nightmare, you can’t get out. The eye of Big Brother is on you. You are never alone but always lonely. Your only privacy is inside your skull. Orwell showed a peculiar genius for creating a nightmare, one that persists after you wake up.

In the closing months of 1983 I reread 1984, uncertain how it would seem after all these years. It did not disappoint me. As 1984 becomes history, I suspect the book 1984 will in an odd way acquire more force. People will stop reading it to guess what the future will be and pay more attention to its timeless message.

To read 1984 as a prediction of the future is to read it wrong; it was not prediction, but prophecy of the Old Testament type—a warning against evil, particularly political evil. Thus it doesn’t go out of date any more than Jeremiah; evil is always in.

I didn’t expect to find a message for Christians in 1984, but it is there plain enough. Orwell describes a struggle between good and evil, and he shows the process whereby an evil order overwhelms the people who try to fight it. His evil powers seek more than victory—they seek to convert the rebels to their way of thinking, making perfect conformity. Orwell’s understanding of good and evil are not far from Christian; according to 1984, the antidotes to political poison lie in truthful words and loving acts, and he spells out what that means. Only his conclusion needs correction. He knew evil, he knew the good that evil wants to destroy. But he did not understand the strength that can endure and paradoxically conquer under the most savage victory of evil. To understand that, he would have needed to understand the Cross.

malcolm muggeridge, Orwell’s friend, wrote, “One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency.…

He [Orwell] was allergic to institutional and devotional Christianity, and considered himself—in a way, justly—as being temperamentally irreligious. Yet there was in him this passionate dedication to truth …; this unrelenting abhorrence of virtuous attitudes unrelated to personal conduct.…”

V. S. Pritchett wrote of Orwell, “Tall and bony, the face lined with pain, eyes that stared out of their caves, he looked far away over one’s head, as if seeking more discomfort and new indignations.” I find it easy to switch the descriptions to Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Amos, or indeed any of the prophets. They told uncomfortable truth about public, political sins; they spoke to the kings and priests and prophets and leaders of society, hating their truthlessness, their systematic gypping of the poor and helpless, their love of power at all costs. So did Orwell, and he paid for it.

He could write beautifully. Consider this description of a street in Paris: “A ravine of tall, leprous houses lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.” Or his aphorism on Dickens’s novels, “rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles.” Yet if anything he pulled away from this gift in favor of stating the truth in as plain-spoken, unadorned a prose style as possible. His famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” fought against trumped-up political nonsense language with these rules of thumb: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; never use a long word where a short one will do; if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; never use the passive where you can use the active; never use a foreign phrase, scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Using these rules, he thought, writers would have to think rather than just spout. They do not make bad rules for Christian writers, or preachers, either. Using clichés or ready-made phrases, we don’t have to think what we mean; neither does our audience.

Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded, then nearly arrested for being in the “wrong” Communist faction. When he escaped to Britain he found the liberal press uninterested in publishing any account of Spain apart from the “correct” anti-Franco view. For relentlessly telling the truth of what he had seen, Orwell was ostracized by his fellow socialists. Orwell never forgot or forgave that willful blindness of the Left any more than he forgot his own conservative middle class’s willed ignorance of poor people’s misery. Truth made him lonely; he kept no party line.

All through his life truth came first; in his last years, love and beauty became equally important to him. As World War II ended he persuaded his reluctant wife, Eileen, to adopt a baby boy. A few months later, while he was away serving as a war correspondent in defeated Germany, Eileen died unexpectedly. Always a lonely, intensely private figure, Orwell was shattered. To everyone’s surprise, he determined to keep their son. Orwell was sick, and those were not the days when men raised children. Yet more than keeping him, he lavished tenderness on him. Somewhat pathetically Orwell proposed marriage to a number of women he barely knew. One letter of proposal read: “There really isn’t anything left in my life except my work and seeing that Richard gets a good start. It is only that I feel so desperately alone sometimes. I have hundreds of friends but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me.”

No woman accepted him, and he determined to move to an extremely remote house on the Scottish island of Jura, two boat rides and an eight-mile walk from anywhere. He loved its raw beauty and the sea fishing. There, dying of tuberculosis, he wrote 1984.

Six months after it came out he was in his grave. Curiously, the lifelong atheist had requested a Church of England funeral, which his friend Malcolm Muggeridge helped arrange, observing that “it was obvious a good number of those present were unfamiliar with Anglican liturgy.”

In retrospect it seems to have been inevitable that Orwell’s last work should mark this year with a fearful aura. But no one could be sure of that in 1950, when he died. The book might, like so many novels, have been quickly forgotten. Its endurance is particularly curious since the plot of 1984 quickly slips from the mind. If you are like me you remember the mood, and can be prodded to remember one or two of the coined words or fictional events—but not much more. Let me jog your memory.

Winston Smith, an obscure member of the Outer Ring of the ruling party, has been thinking rebellious thoughts. Though he has no hope of escaping the eye of Big Brother, he takes three rebellious steps. First, he starts a diary, an act so private and thus rebellious it is sure to end in his execution. He begins to write down his secret thoughts, which quickly lead him to the blasphemous words, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

Winston’s second rebel act is to fall in love. He and Julia, another Party member, arrange a series of trysts. Love is not allowed between Party members, for it suggests the possibility of loyalty to someone other than Big Brother, and erotic energy expended toward some cause other than his.

Together they join in a third act of rebellion when O’Brien, a high-ranking colleague at the Ministry of Truth, recruits them for an underground rebellion. Winston and Julia swear absolute loyalty to this Brotherhood.

It turns out to be a trick. They are arrested and O’Brien becomes Winston’s torturer and inquisitor. A few days of steady application of pain, and Winston will eagerly say anything, sign any documents. But the Party seeks more. They want to make Winston a new man who loves Big Brother and accepts as gospel anything the Party says. If they say two plus two is five, then to him it really should be. The Party loves power, and they will not be satisfied until they have power inside Winston’s skull.

After weeks of torture, Winston would willingly give them this power. He would willingly believe any lie, if he could make his mind do it. Indeed, he almost can. But one problem blocks him: he still loves Julia. He cannot help loving her. In his sleep he cries out, “Julia, my love!”

The climax to his conversion comes when they strap to his face a cage filled with starving rats. Winston loathes rats, and these, huge and hungry, will attack his eyes, tear at his cheeks to get at his tongue. At the last moment, as the cage is strapped on, he realizes in black panic how to save himself:

“Do it to Julia!” he shouts. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

The rats are taken away. Having betrayed her, not just in words but in actual desire, his last resistance is gone. When he and Julia meet they no longer feel any twinge of love. As Julia says, “Sometimes they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else.…’ You want it to happen to the other person.… All you care about is yourself.”

In the final scene, not long after this revelation of selfishness, Winston looks adoringly, wonderingly, gratefully at the ugly, televised face of Big Brother. His humanity, which made him a rebel, has been destroyed.

In rereading 1984, an odd comparison occurred to me: C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Lewis invented a correspondence between devils in order to show the way Satan might work on a particular individual. Of course, by showing how evil works he meant to encourage the corresponding virtues.

Lewis’s devils (like good evangelicals) concentrate on personal sin, not public, political evil. We have good evidence that Satan takes interest in public affairs as well. The evidence may be more pointed to Christians in Russia or South Africa or Iran, but the fact that Americans today may go to jail for killing a duck but not a human fetus has reminded us that even here evil is not strictly nonpolitical.

1984 provides a map of public, political evil: how things would be if they got as bad as possible, and how they would get that way. Big Brother might as well be Satan in power.

But 1984 is not just about evil any more than Screwtape is. For each evil there is a corresponding virtue. The evil is public and political, but surprisingly (since Orwell was a lifelong, passionate socialist) can’t be conquered strictly at a political level. The virtue needed is fundamentally personal. When Winston Smith starts a diary, or falls in love, he is a true rebel. But when he joins the rebellious Brotherhood, he becomes just like the staunchest Party members. It is no accident that “Brotherhood” rings with “Big Brother.”

Winston’s inquisitor, O’Brian, asks him, “‘You consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?’

“‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’

“O’Brian did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound track of the conversation he had had with O’Brian on the night he enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking and prostitution, to disseminate veneral disease, to throw vitriol in a child’s face.”

Orwell is not saying that politics is a hopelessly immoral business. That would reverse his entire life’s stand. He is saying that politics is utterly hopeless unless those engaged in it can be fundamentally good. That means caring for beautiful things, for undistorted language, for human love more than power, more even than life, more even than freedom from torture. Big Brother doesn’t ultimately care about political philosophies; he wants to squeeze the personal life out of us. The struggle against him is not one political philosophy against another, nor the Party against the Brotherhood, but man against himself. The question is, can man be good enough to save himself? Can he preserve his spirit?

Big Brother cannot stand to leave a single thought independent of him. If people are to believe his lies—compliance is not enough, they must believe—he must destroy truth. How? Orwell proposes—and here I think he is most original, and most important—you must destroy language and history.

Am I better than an amoeba by anything more than extension? Isn’t accumulation, perfection, ambition, mere pretension? Basic is being an amoeba cut to the kernel with an unobstructed view—it’s essentially my stance in relation to You.

—Merle Lamprecht

In 1984, Newspeak, the ugly language of political jargon, is slowly replacing English. Syme works on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He tells Winston, “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.… By 2050 … there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.”

Winston rebels by starting a diary.

For George Orwell, words are necessary to thought. People who cannot or do not read and write, whose language becomes limited to jargon, will never think anything but what is fed them. We evangelicals, our language full of jargon, could think about this. It may help explain why we cannot counter the public evil of our times that instead creeps over us.

Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to revise history on a daily basis. He alters the back copies of the Times newspaper—new ones are printed, old ones destroyed—so that nowhere in the world will a shred of evidence exist that anything other than the Party’s version of events ever happened. People who don’t know history, Orwell suggests, are anchored to nothing. They blow like leaves in the winds of current opinion.

Here, too, evangelicals may take warning. We have the Bible, a great fund of history. But we sometimes act as though we are the first generation of “real Christians” since Paul and Peter. Unglued from our past, we lack a standard of comparison for our own and the world’s behavior. Thus we blow in the winds of the latest trend and are subject to the materialism around us without even realizing it.

Through Doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time—Big Brother can induce rootless people to believe his three big slogans: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Our current nuclear condition, in which missiles are dubbed Peacemakers, and the only hope of reducing our weaponry lies in building more, comes to mind. But so does an evangelical subculture in which being a “King’s kid” may mean material wealth, while the only King’s kid in the Bible had no place to lay his head.

1984 is a world operated by lies, by fear, by hatred for the enemy Big Powers. What can counter this evil? Some of Orwell’s answers are familiar to us, some not. The love of language, the memory of the past, the preservation of simple, uselessly beautiful objects, the beauty of nature, the love between parents and children, and the love between a man and a woman are his antidotes for political poison. People with no space in their lives for such loves, Orwell suggests, become mere political fodder. His own life, particularly the last years when he seized fatherhood with such passion, shows that he was not writing pure theory.

Socialists usually offer an optimistic view of mankind, and so Orwell’s 1984 ends surprisingly pessimistically. Evil conquers.

Some have suggested this pessimism came because Orwell was dying as he wrote. Actually he was merely expressing a dilemma he had seen for some time. He knew that man’s central problem was the death of Christian belief. In 1944 he wrote, “Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved.… The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

Before then, in 1940, he had written of Europe’s rejection of God—which he approved—this way: “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.… It appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.”

The only answer lay, vaguely, in teaching people to think of themselves as brothers in the name of humanity rather than God. “We have got to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.” He was impatient with Christians who tried to couch their beliefs modernistically, clouding over their historical creeds with liberal sophistication. Yet, “I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return.” He did not want it to return because it had propped up, he felt, the oppression of the poor. But in any case, he thought the belief impossible to retrieve, like a belief in magic or ghosts, for the average person raised on science.

The outcome of 1984 is unrealistically pessimistic, and I think the reason lies here: Orwell had no image of man made of any material but dust. The absolute conformity of 1984 is impossible; no imaginable government could really control all language, all history, all activity. But even if a government could, such conformity is also impossible because man is made of better stuff than Winston Smith. Humanity is not good enough to save itself, but it is too sturdy for Big Brother to grind to sawdust. Humanity survives, may even thrive, under incalculable torture. Solzhenitsyn has shown this in a way we can never forget. Even after people betray each other, as Winston did Julia, and Julia did Winston, they can and do forgive themselves and each other. Love between two people can survive even their own selfishness.

By the satanic rules of 1984, everyone must betray his friend. Imagine Screwtape speaking instead of O’Brian: “You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out.… It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.”

And thus, “There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated.” Under such pressure—the rats—Winston cries out, “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!”

And who wouldn’t?

One man did not. If anything was worse to Jesus than pain, anything unendurable, impossible even to contemplate, it was abandonment by his Father. In comparison, a starving rat in the face would have been an easy out. But he never said, “Not me!” Do it to someone else! Not me!” Pilate, Judas, Caiaphas were near at hand, deserving substitutes for death and divine rejection, but Jesus never betrayed a soul.

According to the rules of 1984, this is intolerable—a leak in the system, a proof of the Party’s vulnerability. Even if it happened only once, with a single man, it would punch a permanent hole in the Party’s airlock—a hole through which others might escape.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).