Page 4502 – Christianity Today (2024)

Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Ehrlich (Viking, 370 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner, Kellett Scholar at Clare College, Cambridge University.

On occasion, I have joked to my boyfriend Andrew that our grandchildren will do things—culinary things—that they will not understand. They will have long forgotten—if in fact they ever knew—why they make braided whole wheat loaves every Friday, and why they eat meringues around Easter. For although I have, in becoming Christian, put aside most of the symbols and accouterments of my Jewish childhood, the ones that will not go are related to the kitchen. I have folded up and tucked away my prayer shawl, donated my Mikraot Gedolot to a local synagogue, taken to driving on Saturdays, removed the mezuzah from my doorpost. But I still bake challah every Friday afternoon, and I still concoct the crisp, unleavened cookies every Passover. It does not make any sense. Often I am not even home on Friday night to eat this challah, and it gets turned into French toast for Sunday brunch after church. But baking that bread is almost as automatic as brushing my teeth.

I have given Andrew Miriam’s Kitchen to read. In fact, whatever the book’s weaknesses, I felt as if it were a godsend. Literally. I have been praying that Andrew will somehow come to understand something he does not: not just why I continue to bake challah, but why my father, a good cultural Jew, is so distraught that I have become an Anglican and that therefore his descendants will not be Jewish. Why he is so troubled that his daughter is dating the son of a priest. Why I quietly fumble with the clasp at my neck and slip my cross into the pocket of my jeans when I pull into my father’s driveway.

“But he doesn’t believe any of it,” wails Andrew. “So why does he care?” I cannot really explain why he cares any better than I can explain why I insist on eating mediocre cookies that send my cholesterol skyrocketing every spring. Miriam’s Kitchen will explain it.

Elizabeth Ehrlich will probably be surprised that among her most vociferous cheerleaders is a mumar, the rabbinic term for Jews turned apostates. For her book is not a story about a movement away from Judaism, but about just the opposite. Miriam’s Kitchen chronicles Ehrlich’s struggles to keep a kosher kitchen. Along the way, she enrolls her children in Jewish day school, begins attending synagogue, and goes to the mikvah, the ritual bath that observant Jewish women go to every month, a week after their period ends. So keeping a kosher kitchen is the metaphor that conveys Ehrlich’s growing—if at times ambivalent—commitment to observant Judaism, but it is also an end in itself.

To observe kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—is to be reminded every day that the mundane mingles with the sacred. Keeping kosher, you really do sometimes feel as though you’ve sanctified this most basic aspect of daily life in a way that no brief grace before meals can manage to accomplish. But keeping kosher is also a colossal pain in the neck.

The dietary laws find their origins in the Old Testament, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Fish must have fins and scales, otherwise they are tref—not kosher. No scallops, shrimp, lobster, mussels, or crabs. Land animals must have cloven hooves and chew their cud. No pigs or rabbits. Also no birds of prey, no snails, no creepy-crawly insects.

“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” says Deuteronomy 14:21, and through the centuries of rabbinic exegesis that verse came to dictate a complete separation of all dairy products from all meat products. No cheeseburgers or chicken parmesan—but also no eating a steak on a plate that once held a grilled cheese sandwich.

The four best pages in Miriam’s Kitchen come early on, where Ehrlich tells us “How to Keep a Kosher Kitchen”:

You need a lot of things. Meat dishes, dairy dishes, coffee cups two ways. You need ladles for cream soup and ladles for beef stew, knives for steak and knives for butter. A cutting board for cheese, and a different one for turkey. You need a lot of cupboards if you’re going to have a kosher kitchen. … The pots have their essences. These cannot be denied. Cook vegetable soup in a meat pot, and that soup itself becomes practically fleyshik, a thing of flesh. You must eat it with a fleyshik spoon. You may not dust it with grated cheese. That soup is branded by its provenance, until the end, the moldy end two weeks from now in a plastic container marked MEAT. If you want a soup to be neutral, neither dairy nor meat, you’d better have a separate pot that you call pareve, and a ladle and a stirrer and containers to match. It’s not utensils only. You need distinctive tools to clean with. You can’t use the sponge that wiped out sour cream at luncheon to scrub beef drippings from the broiler pan that night. You need a separate meat sponge for the broiler pan. While you’re at it, get another broiler pan.

Does Ehrlich really want to do all this? “It’s a lot of work,” she notes. “Who wants a kosher kitchen? I do. I mean I might. I’m thinking maybe I’ll try.”

Food, and rituals surrounding its preparation and consumption, are central to most religions. I was not surprised when, a few weeks before I was baptized, my priest told me that in the early church nonbaptized folks could attend church but had to leave before the Eucharist. And although in 1997 I was permitted to stay in the church while my baptized neighbors received Holy Communion, it is still the act of eating that separates the insiders from the outsiders: eating the bread that makes all believers one body.

For food is not merely about nourishment, nor about delighting in a favorite salmon mousse or chocolate torte. The Jewish dietary laws regulate not only what goes into your body, but, de facto, who else you put it in with. The most strict observers of kashrut would not eat at any nonkosher restaurant, nor would they do more than sip a glass of water or maybe munch an apple in the home of someone whose observance of the dietary laws did not meet their standards.

Elizabeth Ehrlich knows that it is this, and not the annoyance of having three sets of dishes, that is the hardest part of keeping kosher. “I want to be of the world,” she says. She does not want to make a nuisance of herself at her friends’ dinner parties, asking only for a salad. She is somewhat gratified and somewhat disconcerted when, at a Christmas fete, her five-year-old son pipes up, “Is the chicken kosher?”

On the day that she is helping her parents pack to move, the neighbor, Mrs. Henderson, prepares for Elizabeth’s family a pot roast, some stringed beans and mashed potatoes, and peach cobbler. “I thought you folks would be starving,” Mrs. Henderson says. “Probably nothing to eat at home. … Moving day is like that.” The roast, of course, is tref. The peach cobbler probably contains butter and was baked in a dish that once held shepherd’s pie. The string beans might have been cooked with a bit of bacon for flavor. “I don’t want the burden of a Jewish palate,” writes Ehrlich, “if this drives a wedge between … me” and Mrs. Henderson.

I have always thought that of all Jesus’ shockingly radical acts, the most radical was breaking bread with those people he should not have been eating with. Ehrlich agrees:

Kashrut, I believe, gave Jesus his great opening. He ate with the common people in their homes, when other learned teachers wouldn’t. Poor folk might not have had enough wooden bowls, ceramic vessels, and cooking implements to adhere perfectly to dietary laws. They might not have enough knowledge or resources to make their kitchens kosher enough for the standards of a truly learned man. Jesus swallowed his own squeamishness, perhaps, sat down and broke bread. You can get to heaven without all of this, he taught. I can see the appeal.

Memoirs have begun to run together a bit these days, and Ehrlich’s bears the marks of the newly popular genre. Those writing memoirs about religious journeys are handed a very useful way to structure their books: the calendar. It was according to rhythms of the church calendar that Kathleen Norris structured The Cloister Walk, as did Frederica Mathewes-Green in Facing East. So too Elizabeth Ehrlich in writing Miriam’s Kitchen, which starts and ends in September, the month in which Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, usually falls.

Miriam’s Kitchen could also be placed in the subgenre of literary food writing. Ehrlich is no M. F. K. Fisher, but we do get treated to a few recipes in each chapter—her grandmother’s chocolate sour cream cake, her mother-in-law’s lukshn mit leybern (chicken liver with noodles), fried cauliflower, and apple cake. (Ehrlich wisely leaves off those hallmarks of contemporary recipes, the notations of calories and fat content, knowing that Miriam’s pineapple chocolate-chip cake and potato latkes probably wouldn’t make the cut.)

This isn’t a book to read straight through at one sitting. It is episodic, each chapter comprising a series of shorter reflections (again, like Norris’s Cloister Walk). Every kitchen I have ever been in in Ehrlich’s Westchester County is equipped with a modest telephone desk in the kitchen, and one can envision Ehrlich sitting down at her kitchen desk in between kashering her silverware and stirring a great pot of soup to jot down her reflections on whether or not it really matters that her knives and spoons have been scrubbed clean and then boiled, whether it was worth the bright red burn she had just acquired on her thumb from handling those too-hot forks, whether the rabbis who dreamed up all of these rules and regulations ever themselves set foot in a kitchen.

But Miriam’s Kitchen is not merely a gathering of loosely connected reflections. It is the record of a quest. Elizabeth Ehrlich is different from most of the kosher-keeping Jews I know. She is doing it neither because she grew up doing it and therefore feels guilty every time she’s tempted to eat a piece of pepperoni pizza, nor because she believes that God revealed the commandments, and their rabbinically elaborated minutiae, to Moses on Mount Sinai.

In fact, Ehrlich is not even sure she believes in God, period. She waffles. She hopes her friends, who “serve secular humanism at mealtime,” will not ask. She would be a little embarrassed to admit that she, sophisticated daughter of a solidly Marxist, atheist Jewish father, might, maybe, believe in God.

And Ehrlich certainly does not experience herself as being in a commanded, covenental relationship with this God who may or may not exist. She conveniently translates mitzvah—commandment—as “good deed,” which makes the whole thing more palatable: God’s commands become those that make sense to us, like tithing, and we neglect those that don’t make as much sense, such as refraining from flicking light switches on the Sabbath.

Ehrlich even found a way to transform the dietary laws from commandments that are prima facie inexplicable into good deeds that make sense in the nineties:

If you are going to slaughter an animal for food, respect it. Never forget that it lived and breathed, a mammal like yourself. Here is a way of reminding, respecting—eat the animal separate from the milk. Thus the tradition comes to terms with human appetite, but demands consciousness. And I had come of age in vegetarian times.

She will try observing these laws, she says. A trial run of keeping her meat dishes separate from her dairies. “So far with no sense of obligation, no sense of commandment. I will recite prayers, but to What or Whom?”

So if Elizabeth Ehrlich is not motivated by guilt, and she is not motivated by a sense of being commanded, then what pushes her forward in this quest to go to synagogue and light Friday night candles and root out clams from her kitchen?

It was, initially, symbolic. The thought of feeding her “new, pristine” babies hamburger and milk just didn’t sit well. Then, as Ehrlich learned that keeping kosher involved a lot more than merely serving her kids juice when they ate burgers, she learned that her motives went beyond the aesthetic. “It wasn’t about dishes, or law, or a way of life. It was only a way of feeling. Without any particular sense of obligation, I felt Jewish, I felt a valuable if occasional differentness, and I wanted to pass that on. I wanted my children to eat stuffed cabbage, then yearn for strudel, not ice cream or flan.”

That is what Miriam’s Kitchen will explain to my boyfriend. Along the way, it might also explain to him why my father is sad. And it will challenge even those of us, secure in our faith, who think we may not have very much to learn from a Jewish woman in Westchester and her “wishy-washy version of deism.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

As a Christian and a Hollywood screenwriter who has lived in Los Angeles since the 1970s, Coleman Luck understands both sides of the cultural clashes between evangelicals and Hollywood—and he tries to bridge these unfriendly worlds as he communicates spiritual concepts in his television productions. Luck was co-executive producer for the action/adventure series The Equalizer on CBS from 1985 to 1989, cocreator and executive producer of Gabriel’s Fire in 1991-92, and executive producer for the more recent television adventure series The Burning Zone (United Paramount Network). His latest screenplay, The Touch, is based on Charles Williams’s concept of Christians bearing one another’s burdens. Luck, 52, talked with CHRISTIANITY TODAY‘s Mary Cagney while attending an ethics conference at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Why is there such a standoff between Hollywood and evangelicals?Both groups underestimate the importance the other places in its system of faith. Hollywood’s faith is in the First Amendment right to free speech. I think evangelicals cannot believe Hollywood is motivated by anything other than money. While money is a factor, most people in Hollywood believe passionately in the films and television they make.

Does Hollywood particularly dislike Christianity?I would rather say Christianity is to some degree feared in Hollywood. The only forms of Christianity Hollywood understands are Catholicism and right-wing conservative politics dressed in religious terminology. Also, there is a large Jewish community in Hollywood, and Christians don’t have a spotless record when it comes to anti-Semitism. These Jewish filmmakers have understandable reasons to be afraid of institutionalized Christianity. This fear influences the attitudes of Hollywood.

Screenwriter Coleman Luck:“The only forms of ChristianityHollywood understands areCatholicism and right-wingconservative politics dressedin religious terminology.”

Did evangelicals overreact to the film The Last Temptation of Christ a number of years ago?It’s too easy simply to criticize Hollywood for producing films that aren’t culturally or spiritually sensitive. For example, consider how Bill Bright’s organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, uses the Jesus film in cultures that have never seen films before. I’ve watched video footage of little children viewing the Jesus film. We may say, “Look at the emotion in these children and look how the film is moving them.” But just remove the religious context of Jesus being nailed to the cross and you’re left with a film about a man being tortured—something we are appalled at if Hollywood shows our children. I am not saying we should never use the Jesus film. The point is it’s easy to be insensitive when crossing cultures, whether from Christian America to Pakistan or from Hollywood to the evangelical community.

The much-publicized attempt by Bill Bright to buy the negatives for Last Temptation was interpreted by folks in Hollywood as a slap in the face to their integrity. To them it implied: “You people are just whor*s, and the only thing you care about is money—so here’s the money.”

What do you think of Christians boycotting Disney?I think boycotts like this have very little long-term effect. Disney is having a very successful year, even with the current boycott. Furthermore, I know from experience that heavy-handed techniques build resistance in Hollywood. They feel they will lose their integrity if they bow to that kind of pressure.

On a more personal level, they also wonder what the Bible has to do with such arm-twisting. Our theologians may justify it, but the nuances are lost on the executives of the entertainment industry. I remember during The Last Temptation of Christ I was working with Universal Television, and thousands of people began picketing outside our studios. For us inside, it was frightening. I remember driving with a friend through a crowd of people who were shoving placards with “John 3:16” written on them in front of our car. These were Christians, but believe me, they didn’t look very loving. My friend, who was not a Christian and was a producer for Equalizer, turned to me and said, “I would hate these people if I didn’t know you.”

What are Hollywood’s faults?Hollywood is guilty of ugly and cheap stereotypes of people of faith. If they tried those stereotypes with sexual orientation or gender or race, they would be justifiably castigated. It goes all the way back to Elmer Gantry (1960), which was a watershed film of that sort. There’s a current example of this in the movie Contact. It’s a very good film overall, but who is it that’s destroying all the scientific work that has been built up in order to contact this civilization in Vega? A Christian fanatic. These are cheap, easy villains for Hollywood to deal with. It is unconscionable for them to stereotype us in this way.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Rick Short / Lightstock

Q:I've heard Mormons criticized for getting "baptized for the dead," but in 1 Corinthians 15:29, Paul writes: "Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?" (NIV). Did Jews or early Christians practice this? Why do we believe it's wrong to practice it today?

—Janice ShowalterFlint, Michigan

A:In Mormon doctrine, no one can enter the "celestial" heaven without being baptized. But those who have died can gain admittance if others are baptized for them. Today, Mormon doctrine requires that the dead person for whom someone else is baptized must be named (hence their interest in genealogical research), and proxy baptism is considered one of the most important elements of Mormon "temple work." So it is surprising to discover that the Book of Mormon never mentions the doctrine—even more so knowing that the Bible and the Book of Mormon are between them believed to contain "the fullness of the gospel" and that the Book of Mormon ostensibly contains "the fullness of the everlasting gospel." Still, this does not prevent the Mormon's Doctrines of Salvation from boldly asserting, "The Prophet Joseph Smith declared, 'The greatest … commandment given us, and made obligatory, is the temple work in our own behalf and in behalf of our dead.' " Presumably, this is the biblical basis for 1 Corinthians 15:29.

Mormon teaching aside, how should we understand this verse? Christian leaders have long been leery of imposing on the consciences of believers as being crucial what is mentioned in only one verse. It's not that something becomes "truer" or more binding if it is repeated many times. Rather, when something is mentioned only once, it cannot be given the same weight of importance as the central themes of Scripture. (One of the marks of heterodoxy is that, while central truths are skirted, relatively peripheral matters become life-and-death issues.) More important, when something is mentioned only once, there is more likelihood of misinterpreting it, whereas matters repeatedly discussed are clarified by their repetition in various contexts.

We can see this problem in the more than 40 interpretations of 1 Corinthians 15:29 that B. M. Foschini catalogued 50 years ago in Catholic Biblical Quarterly. They included that Christians in Corinth were being "baptized into the ranks of the dead" by martyrdom (thinking of "baptism" in the light of Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50), that this was ordinary Christian baptism that took place "over" the grave of the dead, or that new Christians were baptized to "replace" Christians who had died. Though interesting, these proposals lack credibility. The most plausible interpretation is that some in Corinth were getting baptized vicariously for the dead. Several factors, however, put this into perspective. Although Paul does not explicitly condemn the practice, neither does he endorse it. Several writers have offered the following analogy. Imagine a Protestant writing, "Why do they then pray for the dead, if the dead do not rise at all?" No one would take this as an endorsem*nt of the practice of praying for the dead; it is a criticism of the inconsistency of praying for the dead while holding that the dead do not rise. To make this rhetorical question an endorsem*nt of the practice of praying for the dead, one would expect, "Why do we then pray for the dead?" Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 15:29 Paul preserves the more distant they. After all, his primary concern in 1 Corinthians 15 is the defense of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. His rhetorical question in verse 29 may simply be pointing out the inconsistency of those who deny the final resurrection, granted their rather strange baptismal practices.

And they were strange. There is no good evidence for vicarious baptism anywhere in the New Testament or among the earliest apostolic fathers. By the same token, there is no hint that this vicarious baptism (if that is what it was) was intended by the Corinthian believer to cover as many deceased people as could be named. If the practice existed at all, it may have been tied to a few people or special cases—for example, when a relative died after trusting the gospel but before being baptized. We really do not know. If it were something like that, one could understand why Paul does not make a federal case of it.

In any case, Paul's clear emphasis is that people are justified by grace through faith, which demands a personal response. Christian baptism is part of that personal response, even as it is a convenantal pledge. In contrast, baptism on behalf of someone who has not exercised such faith sounds like magic—of something far from Pauline thought.

By D. A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. Send questions to be answered by evangelical scholars to Directions, at cteditor@christianitytoday.com or Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, IL 60188.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower swung through Jackson, Michigan, on a campaign tour, a nine-year-old boy waited in the crowd at the railroad station, hoping to meet the general. When Ike finally walked by, the boy thrust his hand through the line and touched the coat of the man who would soon be President. It was Dan Coats’s first brush with politics.

Today Coats is a seasoned U.S. senator from Indiana, a post he has held since 1988 when he fulfilled the term left vacant by the election of Dan Quayle to the vice presidency. A graduate of Wheaton College (where he met his wife, Marcia), Coats was first elected to the House in 1980. This followed a stint in the military and a law practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During this time, he heard a talk by Chuck Colson that changed the direction of his life. “It was as if the other people in the room melted away,” Coats says of the effect of the talk. He went home and, with Marcia at his side, dedicated himself to serving God fully in his career.

During the two decades of public service that followed, Coats, a Republican, has supported such conservative goals as a balanced budget, low taxes, a robust military, and strong families. He also authored a set of bills called “The Project for American Renewal.” These initiatives emphasize what Coats calls a compassionate “shifting of power, money, and influence out of Washington” back to private organizations and religious charities.

Coats surprised the political world last year when he announced he would not seek re-election when his term expires in January of 1999. Instead, he would seek to further his goals through nonprofit and faith-based organizations. Robert Schwarzwalder, a member of the senator’s staff from 1991 to 1994, talked with Coats at his Capitol Hill office about his inside view on issues ranging from Clinton and China to evangelicals, abortion, and the Supreme Court.

How has your faith influenced your conduct in office?Pretty dramatically. When you go into a situation where so much of what you do is critiqued by your political opponents and the press, it’s important that you understand the role your faith is going to play. You have to have a solid foundation of faith, because this is a tough business. You’re subject to so many pressures. The public and press are fickle. You can be liked or disliked from one day to the next. It’s easy for people to misinterpret your votes. It makes you realize faith is the only real constant in your life.

You have been a pro-life leader in Congress. What lessons have you learned in the fight for unborn life?All of my training and study—at Wheaton, in church, in my personal study of Scripture—has led me to an unshakable conviction that all of life is God’s creation, and so the sanctity of life should be one of the unalienable truths of our system. Still, Christians have often confused principle with strategy. I have tried to express my convictions while developing an effective strategy to translate my convictions into reality.

Sometimes we have to use incremental approaches. Sometimes we have to recast the debate. In the early eighties, the entire debate was on the Human Life Amendment. It just simply was not possible to gain the necessary two-thirds majority in the House or Senate to pass the amendment. We then focused our strategy on taxpayer-funded abortion, which had some success. Now we are working on banning partial-birth abortion.

Some people would have said this was a compromise, that we should accept nothing but a constitutional amendment banning abortion. If we ban partial-birth abortion, will that eliminate abortions? No, it would only limit a tiny fraction of them, but this issue has helped us refocus the debate and has put the pro-choice people on the defensive.

Some Christians have concluded that I’ve not been true to the faith. That’s been difficult, one of the greatest challenges I’ve had to face.

How do you respond to attacks from other Christians as well as from political opponents?On occasion, I’ve had some sharp exchanges in the Senate with some of my colleagues. There is a temptation to label someone a personal, not just a political, enemy. My goal is to maintain my position, to state my convictions without personalizing my criticisms, to have a relation-ship with my opponent based on respect. Christ’s teaching and his conduct set the example.

Sometimes it makes people uncomfortable when you raise the moral side of the issue. But I think we’re not here just to always avoid the difficult issues.

How have you used moral arguments to advance legislation?Scripture—God’s Word—is the source of all truth. But approaching public policy from an explicitly Christian perspective is counterproductive. It is wiser to approach it from the standpoint of the moral foundation that undergirds our society—the moral framework found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The principles in these documents show how to relate moral truth to the issues at hand.

Not every issue has a moral foundation. But foreign policy, issues of war and peace, life and health—all have profound moral implications. On many issues there is less clarity. Consider Most Favored Nation [MFN] trade status for China. Persecution of Christians in China is real, and it is wrong. But I’ve received letters from Christians within China saying that if MFN is rescinded, they’ll experience repression. If we stay engaged with China, we can promote democratization.

Recently, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson has threatened, in his words, to take as many of his listeners away from the Republican party as he can unless there is greater progress on social issues. Other conservative Christian leaders, like Richard D. Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, echo these sentiments. How do you respond?I understand a little of their frustration. They and the people they represent have invested a great amount of energy, finances, and other resources to address through the political process serious social and cultural issues they think are having an extraordinarily negative effect on the country. They are frustrated that the Congress hasn’t been as responsive and successful as they would like.

But often that frustration has translated into criticizing and condemning the very people who share the same goals and who often are as frustrated as they are but, because of the nature of the political process, haven’t been able to succeed in a way that those people want to succeed. This doesn’t mean that they’re not on the same team. It means that they’re facing hurdles and obstacles I’m not sure people outside the system have an appreciation for. Bombastic rhetoric from people in elective office may please people outside, but it doesn’t accomplish the goal and often makes achievement of our goals more difficult.

“Some Christians haveconcluded that I’ve notbeen true to the faith..That’s been difficult, one ofthe greatest challengesI’ve had to face.”

—Dan Coats

The response of some Christian activists is, “We gave you a majority in 1994.” No, they didn’t. Even though we have a Republican Senate, there is not a majority of Republican senators who agree with every issue that the Christian Right advocates, and even if there were, in the Senate it takes 60 to pass laws, and we have only 55 Republican senators. The country re-elected Bill Clinton President, so it takes 67 votes to override the President’s veto.

Social conservatives are frustrated we’ve been able to score only some first downs, but we haven’t been able to score all the touchdowns we’d like. But that doesn’t mean that we have walked off the field. We’re out there sweating and bleeding. To capsulize the issue, it’s a matter of rhetoric versus results. Just going to the floor doesn’t translate into legislative success.

Though there are serious questions about the President’s personal life, many voters seem to feel that if he fulfills his official duties well, his private conduct is secondary and should, perhaps, even be ignored.Character counts, integrity matters, and personal responsibility is important. Leaders need to model these, but we’re not getting any of those qualities out of this President. I think it sets a terrible example for the American people, particularly for future generations. It is a reflection of decades of relativism that defines truth as whatever the individual thinks it is. We’re not paying an economic price right now, and that seems to be, unfortunately, dominating public opinion about the President’s performance. But we’re paying a terrible moral and spiritual price that is more destructive than any economic recession could impose on our nation. I’m very concerned about the implications for our society and the implications particularly for the next generation.

You’re already president of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, a civic organization that is not explicitly Christian or religious. What message are you sending by filling this position?Big Brothers/Big Sisters is an organization that helps children without fathers. It promotes mentoring and operates on volunteerism, one on one, bringing an adult into a child’s life. We continue to see positive results from that approach.

But that’s only one of the things I’m going to do. I intend to create a foundation for American renewal basically for the purpose of promoting nongovernmental, nonprofit, and primarily faith-based volunteer organizations that will address some of our most fundamental social issues. I’m doing so because I believe the root of the solution is spiritual. These institutions, as opposed to government, are constituted to bring the spiritual renewal I believe will transform society by transforming individuals from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

You’ve been in public service for more than two decades. What counsel do you have for evangelicals as they approach politics?I encourage evangelicals to be involved in the political process, to be involved in community affairs, whether that be the PTA or neighborhood associations or city council. I think we can bring a perspective that’s very important.

I’m concerned about individuals and organizations that, while they wouldn’t profess this, behave as if our salvation lies in the election of a certain President, a certain Congress, or passage of a certain law. Their energies, efforts, and even their beliefs are directed more substantially to that rather than fulfilling Christ’s commands to love God and love others as ourselves.

We should never lose sight of a higher calling that transcends politics and all human endeavors. That higher calling is a commitment to serve God and to share the good news of the gospel. That ought always to be our number-one priority.

Robert Schwarzwalder is communication director for a business association in Springfield, Virginia.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not. In his new book, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism (Baker, 160 pp.; $14.99, paper), Millard J. Erickson divides contemporary evangelical theologians into two kinds of people: those who resist postmodernism and those who are more positive toward it.

In a recent article in these pages (CT, Feb. 9, 1998, p. 40), Roger Olson writes that he is willing to risk “gross oversimplification” in order to undertake a similar task. He argues that there are two kinds of contemporary evangelical theologians: traditionalists and reformists. The former are those who “value traditional interpretations and formulations as binding and normative and [look] with suspicion upon doctrinal revisions and new proposals.” The latter are those who value “the continuing process of constructive theology seeking new light breaking forth from God’s Word.”

Olson says he means nothing pejorative by these labels; his concern, he insists, is to make peace between these two types. Erickson also writes with an evident desire to analyze his colleagues fairly and give credit where it may be due all round. His new book does present a spectrum of opinion on postmodernism. Still, the spectrum is divided into two discrete halves, and it is hard to see such dividing as anything other than divisive.

Erickson’s new book follows his slim volume The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Evangelical Theology (Baker). Here again he is in harmony with a Roger Olson article, this one appearing in the Christian Century (May 3, 1995) on so-called postconservatives. The term is virtually synonymous with Olson’s “reformist” label and carries an unhappy resonance, as “postconservative” sounds a lot like “postliberal.”

Erickson compounds the terminological difficulties in the earlier book by lumping in Clark Pinnock, Stanley Grenz, Bernard Ramm, and Gregory Boyd, among others, into what he calls simply the evangelical Left. In the more recent book, Erickson discusses evangelicals who have responded negatively to postmodernism in contrast to those who have made a positive response. In both books, David Wells and Thomas Oden are cited as representative of those who have resisted the sirens of the Left and the blandishments of postmodernity.

The trouble with such typologies is that they presuppose a uniform conservative theology against which postconservatives can define themselves; a traditional theology that reformists want to alter; and an evangelical center or Right in comparison with which all of the theologians in question are definitely to the Left. It is this general assumption, as well as the questionable grouping of quite disparate theologians onto one side or the other of a divide, that mars such maps of contemporary evangelical thought.

Two crucial misunderstandings afflict such schemes. The first is a caricature of the Enlightenment and the modernity it is said to embody; the second is an ahistorical narrowing of the evangelical tradition.

According to this caricature, the Enlightenment placed reason above every other route to knowledge; believed that knowledge gained through reason was objective and certain; and held that the rational, free individual was ideally capable of coming to such truth.

Reformists/postmodernists, so the story goes, reject these convictions in favor of the following: a championing of experience as well as reason (and perhaps revelation as well); an appreciation of knowledge as personal, subjective, and provisional; and a recognition that we each do our investigating and thinking in communities, coming up with what one might call “tribal” narratives and ideologies to understand the world. Once we recognize our situation as postmoderns, we no longer should claim the status of absolute and comprehensive truth for our ideas.

The problem with this scenario is that it is overly simple and so misconstrues our intellectual history. When we speak of the Enlightenment, we need to specify which one. According to American historian Henry May’s oft-cited typology, there were actually several Enlightenment varieties. Indeed, few Enlightenment figures subscribed strictly to the definition offered above. For one thing, even rationalist thinkers such as Descartes and Kant made room for experience in their thought, and the empiricist stream associated with Bacon and Locke prized it greatly. Furthermore, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards were demonstrably Enlightenment figures who valued reason and experience as gifts of God that nonetheless were to be subjected to the light of God’s revelation in the Spirit-illuminated Scriptures.

Enlightenment confidence, moreover, did not lie in the conviction that reason provided certainty here and now, but rather in the conviction that the project of investigating the world in this way would yield progressively better results. And this project was a public one engaged in by the community of fellow thinkers, not a private one for the enlightened individual (Descartes in his closet and Kant on his afternoon walks notwithstanding). The whole point of founding a Royal Society, the whole point of publishing one’s ideas, was to submit hypotheses to one’s peers for their testing. The scientific method was, after all, a major inspiration for the Enlightenment and includes in its basic premises that knowledge is achieved by the independent confirmation of others.

Postmodernists, then, are more accurately characterized as those who do not share this confidence in the Enlightenment project, who see human perception and theorizing as so limited and distorted by our individual and corporate qualities that we can only tell our own stories, perhaps listen to those of others for what additional insight they can offer, and muddle through as best we can.

So where does evangelicalism figure in this more nuanced historical narrative? Evangelicalism indeed developed in the Enlightenment context, but that was a context in which Wesley and Edwards could preach, not just one in which Voltaire and Jefferson could declaim. Moreover, evangelicalism as we encounter it today is the multifarious product of more than two centuries of cultural change and adaptation (as David Bebbington has brilliantly shown in his history of British evangelicalism), not a “flash-frozen” specimen of the Enlightenment that merely requires thawing out in each successive generation.

There are many types of evangelical: some still marked deeply by Enlightenment qualities; some more in a confessional Reformational, or historic Puritan, or Romantic style; some expressing the historical consciousness of nineteenth-century movements; and still others articulating the gospel in a bewildering range of twentieth-century modes, whether process, liberation, feminist, or charismatic—not to mention increasing varieties of theology arising beyond the developed West.

It does not help us to understand each other, much less work theologically together, if traditional evangelical theology is seen in terms of a simplistic sketch of the Enlightenment. Evangelical theology has indeed been scholastic and rigid at times, but it has also been supple, experiential, vital, and humbly open to God’s revelation. Indeed, it seems that what many of Olson’s reformists—and many of Erickson’s postmodernists—are reacting against is not modernity but dogmatism, a nasty trait that appears in every age.

It is hardto see suchdividingas anythingother thandivisive.

Nor is the diversity of evangelical theology adequately represented by schemas such as those proposed by Olson and Erickson. It is simply arbitrary, for instance, to place Donald Bloesch—a fan of Barth’s and yet an opponent of gender egalitarianism—on one “side” or the other of the Olson/Erickson line. And Stan Grenz, who is indeed open to some aspects of postmodernism, cannot be grouped easily with Clark Pinnock and others who are exploring the so-called openness of God. The theological landscape is too variegated for a “two-party system,” as Olson puts it—which encourages this Canadian to wonder how much American binary politics lies behind this sort of typologizing!

There are not just two kinds of culture: modern and postmodern. There are not just two kinds of evangelical theologian. Perhaps in God’s imaginative and adaptive Providence, in fact, he has led different theologians to different conclusions (on nonessential matters) in order to reach different kinds of people evangelistically, instruct them theologically, guide them ethically, and motivate them spiritually. Some of us benefit more from Lewis Sperry Chafer than Francis Schaeffer, some more from C. S. Lewis than B. B. Warfield, and some more from postmodern theology than modern theology. At the core of evangelical commitment and identity is neither “a theology to die for” (as some traditionalists might put it) nor personal experience of Jesus (as some postconservatives are saying), as if these two were separable things, but the good news of knowing God in Christ, a gospel primarily transmitted via the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit. Evangelicals past and present have agreed on this fundamental.

Instead of trying to sort out who is on whose side, then, let’s continue to affirm that evangelicalism is much bigger and richer than any of our schemes—because our God is bigger and richer. By no means should we abandon theology and the disputation that is necessarily a part of it. Many of these issues matter, and argument can be mutually beneficial to all who engage in it rigorously and respectfully—as both Erickson and Olson do. Let us beware, however, of fixing great gulfs between us, which we suppose no one can cross. For there are many who do cross them.

To pick up an image from historian Martin Marty, such divides in evangelicalism are, in fact, wonderfully crisscrossed with alliances on other matters: opposition to abortion, support of evangelism, opposition to religious persecution, support of justice for the poor. These are blessed ties that bind us to each other and to our common Lord. What God has joined together, therefore, let no theological scheme, however well meant, put asunder.

John G. Stackhouse, Jr., is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author most recently of Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (Oxford University Press).

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Angelica Hubbard’s six-year odyssey—from a Los Angeles emergency room, where she arrived eight weeks after birth with broken bones and brain damage, to the security and nurture of her adoptive family—reveals in stark detail how the foster-care system can harm as much as it helps.

“Over the past 20 years a whole state of limbo has come into existence where no judgment is made, where the child is neither fish nor fowl,” says Patrick fa*gan, senior fellow in family and cultural issues at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “He’s neither, as it were, the proper child of his parents who are raising him well, nor has he become the adoptive child of somebody else who is going to raise him well. Instead he’s the ward of the courts, and he’s bounced frequently from one foster home to another to another.”

In 1991, Los Angeles County placed Angelica through a private agency in the home of Doug and Kathy Hubbard, an American Baptist youth minister and his wife. The couple gingerly embraced Angelica for the first time in a hospital room, where tests revealed bone fractures and neurological damage. For the next five years, Angelica was at the mercy of a state system, which put the rights of her birth parents ahead of her needs.

Eventually, Angelica’s Hispanic birth parents satisfied state requirements and she returned to her original home at age two. But six months later, Angelica was back in a hospital, malnourished and with bruises and bite marks. From jail, her birth mother telephoned her case worker and pleaded for Angelica to be sent to the Hubbards. The agency rejected her appeal and placed the child with another Hispanic family. “To Angelica we were Mommy and Daddy, but their answer was, She’s already been placed; we can’t tell you any more,” Kathy Hubbard says.

Yet the Hubbards were determined and contacted the new foster family, offering free baby-sitting. Within four months, Angelica returned to them. And last year, they adopted Angelica, ending her bruising journey through the foster-care system.

KIDS’ NEEDS FIRST: New federal legislation has changed the way states are supposed to handle foster care and adoption so that what is best for children is to be uppermost in the minds of case workers.

The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), enacted in January, aims to double the number of adoptions by 2002. The new law speeds up the procedure to place foster children into adoptive families, giving states, placement agencies, and ministries strong incentives to put the needs of children first.

Although Angelica’s story has an upbeat ending, the same cannot be said for many of the other 500,000 foster children in America. Historically, the foster-care system has focused on keeping families together, even if children pay the price physically and emotionally.

Foster-care adoptions are up sharply where aggressive community outreach programs have been initiated. Churches are increasingly viewed as a prized asset in that effort. Christians have cared for orphans since the first century. But the contemporary breakdown of the nation’s foster-care system, burdened by bureaucracy, politics, and underfunding, has given church leaders fresh opportunities to care for foster children and to stimulate adoption in innovative ways.

“Foster parenting is more appealing when it’s the responsibility of a community rather than just the two parents,” says Ted Kulik, assistant director of the Institute for Children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While there is no conclusive research on what motivates people to care for a foster child, according to University of California at Berkeley researcher Richard Barth, it is very clear “that foster and adoptive parents have very high degrees of religiosity.”

Kulik points to Child Share of Glendale, California, as an example of a small but growing number of Christian organizations working within the system. They have an enviable track record for introducing stability into troubled young lives. Two out of three Child Share children stay with the same family until they are either reunited or adopted. The average foster child lives in four different homes.

Child Share links public and private agencies with foster and adoptive families. Some 250 congregations representing 20 denominations participate. Church members may serve with varying degrees of commitment, from baby-sitting and respite care to foster and adoptive parenting.

Nationwide, about 200,000 foster children are either presently or potentially available for adoption, though each year only about 20,000 are placed in permanent homes. Increasingly, private and public workers alike acknowledge that without community involvement the new federal law will not achieve its goal of dramatically increasing resolution of foster-care cases.

BLACK CHURCH INVOLVEMENT: Minority children make up 64 percent of the foster-care population and remain in care longer than any other group. African Americans have always adopted children of their own race at a higher rate than white families, according to Rita Simon of American University in Washington, D.C.

African-American churches and the state of Texas are successfully partnering in the recruitment of families for foster care and adoption. Project Hustle, a program to place hard-to-adopt children, develops teams from community groups who use their networks to find families and provide them with support.

“The use of the churches was critical because of the history of the relationship between the black church and the black community,” says Helen Grape, regional placement program director for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services in Fort Worth. The response from churches is greater than from other organizations.

“Businesses usually must offer an incentive, such as time off or insurance, to recruit people,” Grape says. “The ministers say, There is a need, so come and do it, and people will more than likely follow through.”

Each community group is assigned 20 to 25 children for whom they have the responsibility to help guide through the process to, ideally, a permanent, safe home.

It is a multidimensional process that Grape helps orchestrate. “You have to forget this sequential kind of planning,” Grape says. “It has to be concurrent; you have to work with the family at the same time that you identify options, support systems, judges, and court people who have to be ready to do what is necessary to free kids or get kids where they need to be.”

Cooperation is essential to make the new legislation effective, Grape says. “Now, more than at any other time, public and private agencies must work together to identify families, to train together, recruit together.”

A similar recruiting effort that started in Chicago has been in place since 1980. One Church, One Child is a special program designed to connect African-American families, churches, and needy kids. One Church, One Child identifies adoptive families and single parents for children in need of permanent homes and has now placed 90,000 children nationwide. The vision of One Church, One Child was to recruit at least one African-American family or single parent per church to adopt at least one child.

RACIAL TENSIONS: Transracial adoption remains a highly sensitive issue, exposing ongoing ethnic tensions within American culture. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers condemned transracial adoption as “cultural genocide.” But laws enacted in 1994 and 1997 prohibit using race as a determining factor in adoption. Nevertheless, bias against transracial adoption remains.

“There is a very aggressive movement within the social services system that a black child in need of adoptive parents will not be permitted to be adopted by white couples,” fa*gan says. “That is their putting a race-cultural issue ahead of the actual needs of a particular child.”

Critics claim that children lose their identity and become “spiritual and cultural orphans.” But a 20-year study of Midwest families by Simon challenges that notion. Most parents work hard—perhaps even too hard—she says, at teaching their children about their cultural heritage.

“The joke among these children was that not every dinner conversation has to be a discussion of black history or whether Jesse Jackson is going to run for public office,” says Simon. Children were more interested in discussing basketball or dating.

As the parents of three mixed-race children, James and Karen Stobaugh of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, have more of a personal stake than most in the debate. James Stobaugh says, “At times we’ve struggled with our society’s subtle and not-so-subtle racism.” The Stobaughs relocated after racists burned crosses at a nighttime rally on the edge of their property. A firm supporter of transracial adoption, Stobaugh says, “The U.S. is home to nearly 200 people groups. To think they can or should be kept separate is totally untenable. And the people who end up paying the price are innocent children.”

MORE HOMES NEEDED: Regardless of the number of foster children available for adoption, there are still not enough adults signed up to be foster or adoptive parents. A common belief is that the most needy children are not adopted from foster care because adoptive white parents are interested only in healthy newborns. That is a myth, according to Conna Craig, director of the Institute for Children. She points to the Children with aids Project in Phoenix, which has recruited more than 1,000 parents to adopt aids orphans and HIV-positive babies.

Craig concedes that the longer a child is in the system, the more the likelihood of adoption dwindles. But Craig emphasizes that the notion that nobody wants older children or children with emotional and physical problems is untrue. Research indicates that no child is unadoptable, says Craig. Her organization commissioned a study by the Polling Company, which found that 71 percent of adults would, if deciding to adopt, consider a child who had spent time in foster care.

fa*gan says, “We have no major national efforts going on in adoption, and there are potentially up to 2 million who would be willing to adopt if asked.”

To increase adoptions, one public perception in need of change is the belief that the foster-care system is too intimidating. Don Simkovich, director of church relations for Child Share, says, “This system walks into your living room—attorney, birth parents, birth parents’ attorney, judge, social workers, social worker’s supervisor. It takes an adventurous spirit to work through the system.”

As foster parents, Richard and Lisa Pferdner of Chatsworth, California, have placed themselves in the crossfire between parents and the state. The casualty rate for foster parents is extremely high. Many drop out within a year when they witness the painful battle over children in the system. Most important to the Pferdners now is the support their faith and Christian community provides in their demanding role as foster parents to Taylor, who came to them one year ago at the age of six months.

Even though Taylor’s birth mother said from the beginning that she does not want to work toward reunification, Taylor remains in a holding pattern while the court gives a legitimate opportunity for blood relatives to seek custody.

Meanwhile, the Pferdners’ dual task is to work toward family reunification even as they hold themselves out as Taylor’s potential adoptive parents. Once a week they take Taylor to his birth mother, who the Pferdners say loves her son. But she has drug-related problems that make her an unreliable parent. Parental abuse of alcohol and other drugs is a factor in the placement of more than 75 percent of all children in care, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. “It’s so easy to look at the dysfunctional parents and say, ‘I could give this person a better home,’ ” Richard Pferdner says.

Pferdner compares foster parenting to foreign missionary work. “Being a foster parent is on that level of intensity, being in the trenches in direct spiritual warfare, having your faith completely tested.”

Under the new federal law, foster parents are being given greater powers in determining the fate of foster children in their care. Foster parents must now be notified every time the court schedules a hearing and be given the opportunity to voice their opinion on the child’s status.

Child Share executive director Joanne Feldmeth believes that new legislation will take time to be applied at the local level. “It’s an enormous change, and because people aren’t ready, because social workers have been schooled in the old line of thought that family reunification was the only way to go, it’s going to take a long time for it to filter out.”

CUTTING THE COST OF WAITING: Foster care has the reputation for being the kiss of death for an at-risk child’s mental and emotional well-being.

Connecticut officials estimate that 75 percent of youths in the state’s criminal justice system have been in foster care at some point in their lives. Experts say that placement in three or more foster families is the highest risk factor for a child who ultimately ends up in prison.

Studies also show that former foster-care wards make up a substantial portion of the nation’s homeless. A 1991 national study found that 25 percent of foster-care wards had been homeless at some point.

fa*gan says that too many foster children are needlessly delayed in being permanently placed into adoptive families. National statistics show that the number of foster children has increased by 65 percent over the past decade. fa*gan calls delay of permanent placement “child abuse by the child protective services.”

Until the ASFA legislation, states had a disincentive to place children in adoptive homes, in part because budgets were based on the number of foster children under state care. This disincentive results in children bouncing in and out of multiple foster homes, triggering many educational and emotional problems.

The ASFA plan to make foster care temporary gives federal money to each state that places more children into adoption. It aims to double—to 54,000 annually within the next four years—the number of children adopted out of foster care and to reduce status hearings from a maximum of 18 months to 12 months.

NEW MINISTRY MODELS: As churches have partnered with families, agencies, and governments, new models of ministry are emerging.

There is a new willingness by churches and some of their never-married single members to open their homes to needy kids. Gale Parker, 39, of Canoga Park, California, quickly lost her na•ve optimism about ministry to troubled children when she became a single foster parent. “Before I became a foster parent, I was idealistic,” Parker says. “I thought, I’m going to take them in, they’re going to love me. It’s going to be great.“

She sees it as a calling and understands why some two-parent families in her church say they would not consider foster parenting until after their kids are grown. “You have to have your life and your family in order, because the demands are so great that it could tear your family apart,” she says. “You need to have your strength from the Lord—and to have the time.”

Another attempt to expand care for foster children is a small, but growing back-to-orphanage movement. Most American orphanages closed more than 30 years ago due to high costs and the perception that institutional life is psychologically damaging.

But today’s orphanages tend to be smaller and based on a homelike atmosphere. Advocates say they provide a sense of permanence, security, structure, and camaraderie that is superior to being bounced from family to family through the foster-care system. Many of the new orphanages, as with their predecessors, have been founded by Christians.

“If the church really responded, we would solve the problem in our county,” says JoAnne Morris, who, with her husband, runs Mission to Children at Risk, which places foster children in Santa Clara County, California, through a network of 700 churches.

Morris says she encounters many Christians who find the cost in dealing with the state and a troubled family too high.

“I see Christians saying, I’m going to go through a private agency, because I’m not interested in dealing with the kids that come with all that baggage.“

Some church leaders are reluctant to become involved because they are afraid of the negative impact on their congregation. “One church told us that they were sorry, but they didn’t want to expose their families to the kind of sin that these kids have come from,” Morris says. “When you bring these children into your church, they’re going to teach the other kids things that they’ve never heard of before.”

Yet, families such as the Pferdners are eager to learn and respond to the needs that Christians are uniquely poised to meet. “It takes tremendous grace to be a foster parent,” says Richard Pferdner. “I don’t understand how non-Christians can do it without the resources of the Lord.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

[Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” -Matthew 22:37

Bruno Walter was once rehearsing a choir for a performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. He was trying to get the choir to sing the main chorale a certain way. (Think of the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” and you’ll have the music.) Walter kept rehearsing the choir, and they kept trying; but they weren’t giving him the sound he wanted.

So he called a halt and said something like this: “Your singing is talented, but it’s not right for this music. You need to sound more like a congregation. You’ve got to sing this chorale more simply and deeply.” Walter told some of his boyhood memories of going to church in Germany and the way people sang there. Then he said to the choir: “Now sing this chorale as if you were back in my childhood church.”

So they sang again. They sang with simple depth, with deep simplicity. Of course, they didn’t sound exactly like a congregation. They probably couldn’t have sounded like that if they had tried. They brought all their musical understanding to the singing of the chorale and thus sang it with an educated simplicity, with a second simplicity, with a simplicity that lay beyond complexity.

We all know this phenomenon. According to a famous story, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth was once asked to sum up the thousands of pages of his dense theology in one sentence. He paused. Then he said, “Jesus loves me! this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

It’s one thing for a child to recite these words and quite another for Barth to say them. It’s one thing to fool around at a piano by plunking out the notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with your index finger; it’s another thing to hear that tune as a reprise, as a recap just after a fine pianist has played Mozart’s variations on it. As a reprise, the tune seems loaded.

Second simplicities lie beyond complexities and incorporate them.

And so it is with loving God. A child can love God. In some ways, a child can become our teacher in doing it. But there are also adult ways to love God, and these take some time to learn. Adults learn to love God considerately. Adults learn to love God with all the powers of an educated mind. Adults bring to God a love that has all the law and the prophets compacted in it.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” says our Lord (Matt. 22:37). In other words, you shall love God with everything you have and everything you are. Everything. Every longing, every endowment, each of your intellectual gifts, any athletic talent or computer skill, all capacity for delight, every good thing that has your fingerprints on it—take all this, says Jesus, and refer it to God. Take your longing, and long for God; take your creaturely riches, and endow God; take your eye for beauty and appreciate God. With your heart and soul and mind, with all your needs and splendors, make a full turn toward God.

That is the great commandment, and Deuteronomy and Matthew give it to us in two versions. In Matthew’s gospel a lawyer asks Jesus what may have been a trick question, “Which is the greatest commandment?” Jesus replies by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, words that were on the lips of pious Jews morning and evening, words as familiar as “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

Jesus responds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” —not with all your strength (that’s Deuteronomy), but with all your mind (that’s Jesus).

Here is a change worth a little gasp. What if a four-year-old prayed one night: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my brain to keep”? You would notice.

Love God with all your mind, says our Lord. Take it as a charter for Christian intellectual life. What is the project for Christians engaged in this pursuit? What is the big idea within it? The simple answer is that we are trying to become better lovers. We want to love God with all our mind. Of course we want to offer our hearts to God, and we want to do it promptly and sincerely. And the same with our souls. But we are also intellectual beings, and Jesus Christ calls us to mindful love; he calls us to intellectual love.

Love with all your mind. The command sounds simple, but it requires from us a second simplicity, a simplicity that incorporates a good deal of complexity.

So what does the command mean? To love God intellectually is to become a student of God—a student who really takes an interest in God. Have you ever noticed that a fair number of Christians are not particularly interested in God? Some of them are ministers. These are people who don’t ask about God, don’t talk about God, and maybe don’t even think about God unless they really have to. Their interest in God seems merely professional.

Isn’t this strange? Shouldn’t we be somewhat preoccupied with God? Lovers get preoccupied with their beloved, they notice things about the one they love.

And isn’t there quite a lot to notice about God? Isn’t God remarkable, after all—so surprisingly fierce, so surprisingly tender? The Scriptures give us a portrait of God we would never have guessed. Sometimes the portrait makes us squirm. Think of some of the biblical images for God: God is lion and lamb, church and home, fire and water. God is not only a leopard, eagle, and bear, but also a moth; not only a parent, but also a child; not only a king and a warrior, but also a barber and a whistler (Isa. 7).

To love God with all one’s mind means taking an interest in God and in the peculiarities of God. It means letting God be God. This is mere courtesy toward God, and you cannot have love without it. The idea is that God gets to write his own autobiography. God gets to write his own drama of life with us, including his own character description. Our calling is not to rewrite the script, but to find our role there and fill it.

Mindful love of God means other things, too. Dietrich von Hildebrand once observed that lovers give their beloved a good-sized benefit of the doubt. Thus, if our beloved acts well, we look upon the action as typical. If our beloved acts badly, we look upon the action as an aberration. To love somebody is to give that person a big line of moral and spiritual credit.

So with our love of God. God does not act badly, and if we really thought he did, then we ought to give up our religion. But it sometimes looks as if God acts badly. It looks as if God goes off duty while children in Romania become hookers and while masses of Africans starve so wretchedly. It looks as if God blesses many of the wrong people and ignores many of the right ones. It looks for all the world as if God has a lot of explaining to do. That’s what Job thought, and Job is in the Bible.

How do you love God when, for a while, you can’t make any sense out of God? This question is bigger than I am, but I think we have to trust Jesus Christ. Even before his crucifixion Jesus suffered a lot more than most of us, and he says we ought to love God with everything we have. He clears the way to love God with a second simplicity. Doesn’t God deserve at least the same benefit of the doubt that we give to anyone we love? It’s a matter of faithfulness, of intellectual humility, of mere loyalty.

Loving God intellectually means taking an interest not only in God, and in the peculiarities of God, but also in the works of God. I’m thinking of creation in all its strength and majesty; creation in all its stupendous variety; creation in all its unguessable particularity. I’m thinking of humanity itself in all its multicultural riches. For, of course, God loves not only humankind, but also human kinds, and it’s our delight to love what God loves.

To respect creation is to show love for its Creator. How do you respect creation? You give it room to be itself. You let it unfold before your watchful eye. You search it and know it with the preoccupation of a lover. Then you tell the truth about the actual state of creation, including not only its bird songs, but also its terrible carnivorousness; including not only the way purple and coral impatiens thicken into great mounds of color in a cool September, but also the way lions in Kenya beard themselves with the blood of fawns. You tell the truth even when you have to tell it about us—human creatures who look so much like God, and act so little like God, and have fallen so far from God.

To hear in the world both the song of God and the groaning of all creation, to prize what is lovely and to suffer over what is corrupt—to ponder these things and to struggle to understand them and God’s redeeming ways with them—these are ways of loving God with all our minds. Becoming a real student of God and of the works of God—becoming alert, respectful, and honest in your studies—is an act of flagrant intellectual obedience because it is an act of flagrant intellectual love.

Where must all this love lead? Intellectual love must lead us out into the lives and habitats of other human beings in order to do them some good. Even that—doing people some good—sounds simpler than it is, of course. It’s another of those second simplicities. Isaiah 1 tells us that we have to learn to do good, suggesting that good in a fouled-up world is often elusive and ambiguous. The point is that we need to think and reflect lest we unwittingly do a half-cooked good, a dangerous good, a ruthless good.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind. This is our job. Our job is to become better lovers. Taking into account all the questions and complexities, all the obstacles and ambiguities, all our growing pains, we have to love God with the second simplicity of grownup children—a deep simplicity, an educated simplicity, a simplicity that lies beyond complexity.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind. Let this command defeat every anti-intellectualism. What a sin this is, and how much of the Christian church happily commits it! Anti-intellectualism is anti-Christian. Never give in to it. Never concede anything to it. Never quit fighting against it. Anti-intellectualism is the sin of lazy people or of fearful people who content themselves with first simplicities and who resist the pain it takes to grow beyond them.

Anti-intellectualismis anti-Christian. Nevergive in to it.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind. Let this command also defeat every selfish intellectualism, every worldly intellectualism, every idolatrous intellectualism. Let it remind us that the life of the mind has nothing to do with carving a niche for ourselves, or making a name for ourselves, or conquering some field of study as if it were an enemy. The life of the mind is an act of love, an act of reverence. It is an act in which we get pulled out of our nervous little egoisms and combine together in a kingdom project so much bigger than any of us, so much grander than all of us that we cannot help getting stretched by this move.

Intellectual love of God is thus the antidote to proud, envious, and angry scholarship—and to all the other deadly sins of scholarship. Intellectual love sets us free from anxious striving and opens the way for intellectual joy, the kind of joy that you can see in a fresh-faced nine-year-old.

Love the Lord your God with all your mind. Whether we are nine years old or ninety, whether students or professors or lifelong students, our job is to think more deeply, observe more alertly, research more thoroughly, and write more clearly—all in the service of loving God. It’s a matter of mere obedience.

Let us begin.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is dean of the chapel at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

“When local merchants wanted to meet Saint Paul, they asked the Christians where to find him,” recounted our tour guide during a recent trip to Turkey. “The Christians said, ‘Go out on the way to Lystra and look for a man of short stature, with a crooked nose, hollow eyes, and a face like an angel.’ “

We were also “on the way” to see Paul. Not to Lystra, but to modern-day Konya (formerly Iconium, near Lystra)—another of the apostle’s haunts. And the Christians on our tour, like those first-century merchants, wanted a glimpse of Paul’s world. That’s not easily done in this country where minarets pierce the skyline in places where Paul’s footprints have long since disappeared.

Paul and Barnabas fled to Konya after a successful ministry tour in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13). They “spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord” and performed “miraculous signs and wonders” (Acts 14:3, niv). But you’d never know it from the tourist’s point of view: The main attraction in Konya is the sema—the mystical trance-inducing dance of the “whirling dervishes,” an Islamic sect. But the Christians on our tour wanted to see something related to Paul in Konya, so with a coveted free hour we made a spontaneous visit to the Church of Saint Paul.

We arrived unannounced in the early evening (the first building we had seen enclosed behind a security gate). Mass, we learned, was being held inside for the five Christians who attended the church, but the overseeing nun was so pleased we had come that she invited us to hold our impromptu service in the garden. (The fact that this was a Catholic church was beside the point for us Protestants; we were thankful for any sort of a Christian presence.)

Withering marigolds and snapdragons served as our stained-glass windows, and tomatoes left too long unharvested, our greeters. Father Michele (from the Vatican) gathered us around the plastic patio table and read from the Psalms. Father Luis (from Spain) read in Spanish from Hebrews, and Father Jean Claude (from France) read in French from Genesis. Pastor Bob (my husband)—the Baptist—read in English from Mark.

Our worship, strained as it was by the language barriers, competed with the roar of motorbikes and the blaring of horns from the streets of Konya. As we stood outside this rundown church—the only Christian presence in Konya—struggling to understand and be understood above the din of the traffic, under the arbor where dead grapes dangled on the vine, we proclaimed the cross of Jesus in this land of Muhammad’s sword. My heart ached that Paul’s labors had come to this: one small, deteriorating building, an unkempt garden, shriveled grapes, five worshipers. We held forth the name of Christ, but I stood there for Paul, too. I wanted to call to him in heaven and say (as he once exhorted the Corinthians): “Your labors were not in vain!”

How could so rich a Christian heritage be so strikingly disenfranchised? Turkey is second only to Israel in the number of biblical sites it offers to Christian pilgrims. Noah’s ark landed here! (Mount Ararat commands pride of place in the mountains of eastern Turkey.) Turkey was once the land of the Hittites, which the Lord promised to Joshua (1:4). Many who gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost when the Spirit gave birth to the church had traveled from what is today Turkey (“Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia,” Acts 2:9-10). Peter’s first epistle—addressing the suffering Christians “scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia”—went to Turkey. Paul was born here; he spent the majority of his active ministry here. The apostle John lived the latter part of his life here and, tradition says, buried Jesus’ mother here in Ephesus. When the Lord gave him the vision in Revelation, with a message for the “seven churches” (Rev. 1:11) exhorting them to “overcome,” all of these congregations were located in what is now Turkey.

Beyond the biblical heritage, the early church fathers bequeathed a rich Christian legacy to Turkey. Polycarp, a direct link to the apostle John, became bishop of Smyrna (modern Ismir) in the early second century; Irenaeus, probably a native of Smyrna, sat under Polycarp and emigrated to Lyons where he became bishop in the late second century. In the third century, Gregory the Wonder Worker was appointed bishop of Pontus (northern Turkey); in A.D. 325 the Nicene Creed was fashioned in Nicea (present-day Iznik); in A.D. 330 Constantine moved the seat of the empire to Constantinople (Istanbul); in the late fourth century Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and friend Gregory of Nazianzus (a.k.a. “the Cappadocian fathers”) brought final shape to the doctrine of the Trinity (helping to overthrow the Arian heresy); in A.D. 398 John Chrysostom was reluctantly consecrated archbishop of Constantinople; and the original “Santa Claus”—Bishop Nicholas of Myra—made his home on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast, also during the fourth century.

Christians fleeing persecution in these early centuries found shelter in the rugged Cappadocian “fairy chimneys” in central Turkey. Inside these bizarre jutting rock formations—eroded tufa and volcanic ash enveloped in basalt that look like something out of Star Wars—magical frescoes, carved archways, baptismal pools, dining tables, and living quarters have been cut out of the rock. Christians also set up house in “the underground city” elsewhere in Cappadocia, a seven-story inverted “skyscraper” where they lived during some of the worst seasons of persecution.

But the present-day abundance of Turkish carpets, minarets, and Qur’anic calligraphy that I saw everywhere compelled me to conclude painfully that Paul’s congregations, the seven churches in Revelation, and the suffering Christians in hiding evidently did not “overcome.”

Secular versus religiousThe Turkish government is offering Paul’s lost legacy a chance for resurrection. It has been posturing itself for admission into the European Union (EU) and trying to win acceptance in the West generally. Turkey’s leaders recognized the importance of projecting their society as fully democratic, tolerant, and embracing of all forms of belief—particularly those identified with the West, which includes Christianity. Their hopes were dashed last December when the EU blocked Turkey’s admittance, citing (among other things) its inability “to overcome serious human rights problems.”

Despite rejection by the EU, Turkey is still a virtual gold mine for tourist dollars. Europeans have long indulged themselves vacationing along the country’s still pristine Mediterranean coastline. But the Turkish government has only recently tapped the tourist potential their biblical sites promise. As the Israel Government Tourist Office will attest, Christians make great tourists in the land of the Bible. And as Turkey’s ministry of tourism is waking up to that fact, Christians are being beckoned to come to Turkey and recover their lost legacy. Ertug-rul Dokuzog-lu, the governor of Isparta, where the ruins of Pisidian Antioch are found, asked us as we left the ruins of the synagogue where Paul preached: “What do you feel, being here where Saint Paul was?”

One woman had been so overcome with emotion when my husband read from Acts amidst the ruins of the synagogue that she burst into tears. Father Michele expressed frustration that, after being so overtaken by emotion, Christians had no place to go where they could respond in worship.

The governor seemed genuinely affected. “We agree that there is no building for the Christians to pray. That is because no Christians live here. But there are two churches [nearby] waiting to be rebuilt. I want them to be rebuilt and used and visited.” (He then invited and challenged us to come back to do so.) Ibrahim Gurdal, the Turkish government’s minister of tourism, echoed the governor’s sentiment: “We want you [Christians] to see your past. You are our brothers and sisters.”

But this is where Turkey’s ideological war with itself asserts itself and betrays its contradictions. Prospective Christian tourists are assured, says Gurdal, that people of faith are welcome and have complete freedom. They are “brothers and sisters.” Yet Christianity still makes many squirm. The government’s aggressive commitment to secularization has resulted in policies outlawing “propaganda” and “missionary” activity of a religious nature. Christians (and fundamentalist Muslims) have acutely felt this pressure. The government has resisted the pleas of the Ecumenical Patriarch (Bartholomew I, archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome) to reopen the only Orthodox seminary (closed in 1971). In January, a second violent assault against Eastern Orthodox holy sites occurred in Istanbul, this time involving the murder of a custodian. Since then, some Orthodox Christians, including the archbishop, are questioning the government’s commitment to protect their presence. And beyond this, save for a single administration in Turkey’s modern history, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, the government has yet to acknowledge the Armenian genocide (1915-16), which remains a bitter point of hostility between them and their Armenian Christian “brothers and sisters.”

Turkey’s premier historical monument, Hagia Sophia, serves as a metaphor for this country’s conflicted identity. The 1,460-year-old “crowning glory”—at one time the central church in the Byzantine empire and later a great mosque where the Ottoman sultans were crowned—is now listed by the World Monument Watch on the list of “the world’s most endangered heritage sites.” Its dome and pillars and priceless mosaics remain in a state of steady deterioration, due either to a lack of funds or a lack of will to restore it (admission fees go straight to Turkey’s capital, Ankara, for general expenses). Says Stephen Kinzer in the New York Times, the Hagia Sophia “is at the heart of battle that … still burns in the minds of many people in the eastern Mediterranean: Who owns Istanbul, Christians or Muslims?”

The road to secularizationThis cultural schizophrenia has arisen, as noted, out of the country’s wrenching history. A museum on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast offers a visible lesson in this conflicted history. The first room yields rustic pots and jars, pins and coins from the Old Stone Age and the Hittite period. This quickly gives way to expansive galleries of armless, sometimes headless, marble ghosts of Greece and Rome. Beyond this, and off to the side, there is a small darkened room where the relics of Saint Nicholas, from nearby Myra, are housed along with Byzantine icons and ornate Bibles. Then everything changes when the visitor enters room upon room of carpets, Qur’anic calligraphy, sultans’ gowns, and swords. (You could almost hear the hoofbeats of the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks.)

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I meant that the proud, fierce Ottomans were forced to relinquish portions of their territory (including Istanbul) to the British, French, Italians, and Greeks. This excited the dormant nationalist impulse in Turkey, which military hero Mustafa Kemal (“the only hero the Turks had left”) seized upon. General Kemal, recognizing his country’s weakened and demeaned position, gathered a cohort of like-minded thinkers, aroused nationalistic sentiment, consolidated military support, and renounced rank and titles to set up his makeshift government in Ankara. He was determined to secularize the nation and break Islam’s stranglehold on the culture.

He convened the first meeting of the Grand National Assembly (GNA) in April 1920. After solidifying his standing as the new leader (sending the last of the sultans into exile) and eventually wresting the territories from their foreign occupants, Kemal secured Turkey’s sovereignty in a peace treaty signed in Lausanne in July 1923. (The event was covered by a Toronto Star journalist named Ernest Hemingway.)

A few months later the GNA unanimously endorsed the proclamation for the Republic of Turkey, and Kemal began the herculean task of dismantling the Umma (the strict Muslim identity) and building a new, secular nation.

This required a “new interpretation” of Islam. Kemal abolished the caliphate (the sultans) and banished all males of the royal family; secularized education, banning convents run by religious sects (including “the whirling dervishes”); discarded the Arabic script for the Roman alphabet; banned the turban and the fez (the headgear of officials); encouraged women to enter the professional class; and made the adoption of surnames obligatory. The GNA gave him the surname “Ataturk” (father of Turks).

Turkey has followed the trajectory toward modernization ever since, though Ataturk’s methods have been modified over time. (His one-party government made strides toward a more democratic system in the 1950s when a multiparty system was introduced.) But they are still experiencing “growing pains.” In elections in 1996, the extreme right-wing Muslim Welfare party candidate, Necmettin Erbakan, won with only a 21.3 percent plurality. Fearing a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, the military quickly forced him from office, and Mesut Yilmaz of the Motherland party now serves as prime minister.

Traveling in Turkey

Hos, geldiniz! (“Welcome to Turkey”)—”the dividing line between the Orient and Occident.” Since the dawn of civilization, this land mass of mountains, plateaus, and river valleys has been integral to the rise and fall of many nations. The scope of touring possibilities in this mysterious and multifaceted landscape is endless, especially for the Christian pilgrim. Below are some helpful travel tips.

—Language. Thanks to Ataturk’s reforms, the Turkish language uses the Roman alphabet (with an abundance of Ks, Zs, and curious additional markings), so reading signs and navigating roadways can be managed with the help of a phrasebook or dictionary. Many Turks have undertaken an independent study of English, but an English-speaking guide is a must.

—Money. Exchanging American dollars for Turkish lira (TL) can be a formidable challenge. The exchange rate (at the time of publication) is 270,000TL to the dollar. You can’t get by without a calculator—and even then your head will spin at the first several attempts at purchasing.

—Size. Turkey encompasses 300,000 square miles, 3 percent in Europe and 97 percent in Asia. The Black Sea lies to the north, with the Mediterranean to the south. Greece and Bulgaria border Turkey to the northwest, Georgia and Armenia to the northeast, Iran to the east, and Iraq and Syria to the southeast.

—Biblical and historical sites. Istanbul (still called Constantinople by the Orthodox Christians) once stood as the center for Christendom under Constantine. The seven churches of Revelation (in the western and central portions) include modern-day Bergama (Pergamum), Akhisar (Thyatira), Alasehir (Philadelphia); Sart (Sardis); Pamukkale (Hierapolis, which is near Laodicea); Efes (Ephesus); and Izmir (Smyrna). Mount Ararat is in the east, Paul’s birthplace of Tarsus, along with Myra and Patara (the birthplace and home of Saint Nicholas), are on the Mediterranean coast. Pisidian Antioch and Iconium, two haunts of Paul’s, are found in central Turkey (Yalvac and Konya, respectively), and the Cappadocian fairy chimneys, also in central Turkey, offer a glimpse into the life and struggles of the early church.

—Be warned. The cliche “He smokes like a Turk” is well-deserved. “No Smoking” sections seem not to exist in Turkey—or on Turkish Airlines.

This intentional secularization has resulted in a strange concoction of moderate Islam mingled with fierce Islamic nationalism (not to be confused with “fundamentalism”). From a religious vantage point, the more developed areas of the country embrace Islam nominally—more culturally than religiously. Our guide said (to my shock), “Islam means nothing.” And in its effort to keep modernization on track, the government encourages this nominalism and, in fact, limits certain religious expressions. Last March the government proposed legislation that would curb radical Islam by limiting the building of mosques and creating harsher penalties for violating the secular dress code.

This has resulted in a surprising show of force and solidarity by progressive Islamic women, many of whom are professionals and would be considered “modern,” but who are demanding the right to wear—of all things—their headcoverings (presently forbidden in many public places, like the university). “Instead of a symbol of subservience to men, many Islamic feminists view the scarf or the veil as a guard against the intruding eyes of men and as a sign that their first allegiance is to God—not to their husbands or fathers,” writes Philip Smucker in U.S. News & World Report.

The first principle of the Turkish government is to maintain internal stability at all costs. This has meant that there remains a fierce unwillingness to allow any “extreme” religious expressions to flourish for fear of introducing political instability. In that sense, “the Kurds, the communists, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the Christians are often all lumped together,” notes Andy Jackson, founder of the International Turkey Network of Phoenix, Arizona. All threaten internal stability.

The lukewarm religiosity has also incited the fervor of the traditional, or “extreme,” Muslims, who compose 5 to 6 percent of the population (another source puts them closer to 10 or 20 percent). As the 1996 elections demonstrated, they are a force to be reckoned with.

All of this has conspired to keep the Christian population negligible. The Greek, Armenian, Syrian, and Arab Christian populations together make up less than 1 percent of the population (maybe 50,000 out of more than 65 million people). The number of “evangelical” Christians is even harder to calculate. Roger Maldsted, who has worked in Turkey since 1961, estimates that there have been about 750 Turkish converts to Christ in the 30-plus years he has been there, with 500 of those conversions occurring within the last five or six years. Andy Jackson estimates that the number of Turkish believers who belong to some form of regular indigenous fellowship (where Turks with Muslim backgrounds, not missionaries, are the leaders) hovers around 600. He estimates there are approximately 14 indigenous Turkish fellowships, with 50 to 60 members each. The “secretive” believers who have not publicly affiliated themselves with a church number anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000.

Small as these numbers are, it is a vast improvement over the number of converts 30 years ago when there was only a handful of evangelical Christians (some estimates put it between 10 and 50). The first Protestant church was registered in 1988, and in 1995 the government officially recognized evangelical churches. So the gospel is making inroads, even if at a torturously slow pace.

At the same time, many younger, more modernized Turks are looking for spiritual answers. One young Turk told me: “Nominal Islam is pervasive because Arabic is used in the mosques and most young people can’t read it. Our Qur’an is in Arabic, but young people want to learn it in Turkish.” Nevertheless, many of the younger Turks who want to learn the Qur’an in Turkish are not interested in a strict interpretation of Islam: “We don’t have this kind of Islamic concept,” he said. “I believe in God, but I do not have much sympathy for Islam.”

Western ideas are also infiltrating the culture (for better or worse), which is similarly eroding Islamic allegiances. Our guide told us about his sister, who was studying at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. He lamented (shaking his head): “All that women’s liberation stuff has made her very tough.”

The disillusionment with nominal Islam, the encroaching Western ideas, and general spiritual hunger have given the up-and-coming generation of Turks new ears with which to hear the good news of the gospel. The religious orientation they have been reared in, nominal though it may be, has aroused, but not satisfied, their search for spiritual answers.

Where from here?Christian tourism will not provide answers to all their questions. In fact, as Turkey awakens to the economic gold mine that Christian pilgrims can generate, there is the potential for harm to the efforts of some long-termers. Andy Jackson says that “tourism will draw in a lot of Christian crackpots who will not be incarnating the gospel” and who could adversely affect those Christians already in Turkey who are struggling to plant churches and nurture spiritual maturity in these young believers. Our guide told me he was baptized during one tour simply to allay the zealous Christians’ unrelenting badgering.

But encouraging Christian tourism, says Jackson, will ultimately help the struggling church in Turkey. It will create a less hostile, more welcoming environment to Christians generally and will put the government on the record as celebrating Christians as “brothers and sisters” (such as Minister Gurdal did before our group). In addition, it will mean more and more tour guides will have to study the New Testament in order to know the history their guests are interested in, and the Turkish government will have to produce Christian materials for pilgrims. So, on that level, Christian tourism can be God’s tool to break up the hardened ground of Turkey’s anti-Christian ethos and to prepare for seeds of the gospel to be planted and nourished by indigenous believers.

Paul rebornThe Reconciliation Walk project, sponsored by Youth with a Mission, has inaugurated a four-year international effort to seek forgiveness for atrocities committed in the name of Christ during the Crusades. Representatives have been surprisingly well received in Turkey. Says Matthew Hand in Charisma, who drafted the written apology that is read to any who will listen: “We accept the blame for something we didn’t do, just like Jesus did.” Many Turks find that hard to fathom.

One person recounts that, after speaking for 45 minutes with a Turk named Rafad and reading him the document of confession, he said, “Please don’t touch my heart. It is very thin, and it will break. I want to go cry in the mosque.”

The Walk is an example of the Turkish government’s willingness to welcome Christians as part of their larger desire to become a welcomed partner in the West. Perhaps, too, it could serve as a model to help them overcome aspects of their history that have inhibited their acceptance by the West—like their less-than-sparkling human-rights record (particularly with regard to Kurds in the east) and the lingering cloud of the Armenian genocide.

Christian worker George Bellas, who has ministered to the Turkish Kurds for nine years, thinks that a public confession and corporate repentance for past sins such as has been exhibited in the Reconciliation Walk may be beyond the scope of possibility at this stage of Turkey’s evolution as a modern nation. “The Muslims do not have the basic Judeo-Christian concept of making restitution,” says Bellas. The Turks do not understand the notion of accepting blame for something they themselves didn’t do and certainly not based on doing something “just like Jesus did.”

That is because they are only just beginning to hear about what Jesus did—an irony, since so many of the New Testament churches were born here and so much of the theological foundation of the faith was established here.

But hearing it all over again for the very first time is better than not hearing it at all. Regardless of their profit motive, the Turkish government wants Christians to come. And for all its potential complications and theological hazards, Christian tourism is helping to create an environment for this country—with its checkered history and fragmented identity—to rediscover its Christian heritage.

I thought of Paul another time when I was in Konya as I talked with a young Turk in a spot not far from where Paul himself stood when he “preached boldly about the grace of the Lord” (Acts 14:3). The young man was assailing me with a battery of questions about Christianity.

“Do Christians believe in reincarnation?” he asked.

I told him about the Christian belief in resurrection.

“How is this possible?” he asked.

I explained how Jesus made it possible for everyone.

“How did he do this?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “after he was executed his friends buried him in a cave, but they had to rush because the Sabbath was about to start. So they waited another day, and then went back to the grave on the third day, to finish the burial preparations.

“When they approached, they noticed that the grave entrance was open. So they went in and saw that the body was gone.”

“Where was it?” he asked.

“He came back to life,” I said. “He wanted everyone to understand that he, alone, was sent by God. He appeared to hundreds of people.”

The young man’s eyes burned with astonishment.

“Did this really happen?” he said.

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

While some of his 13-year-old friends are having fun this summer behind home plate in shorts and T-shirts, Mitchell Johnson is behind steel bars in an orange jump suit at the Craighead Juvenile Detention Center near Jonesboro, Arkansas. In jail since March 24, Johnson, accused along with an 11-year-old boy of shooting and killing four classmates and a teacher in the worst episode of schoolyard violence in American history, awaits trial on murder and weapons charges.

Johnson’s youth pastor, Chris Perry, is one of the few outside the prison system granted access to him, even though it is limited to 30-minute intervals through a thick glass barrier. Last fall, Johnson attended the youth group at Central Baptist Church for about two months and showed a growing openness to Christian faith. But Perry saw no warning signs indicating that trouble lay ahead.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: When Perry, 37, arrived at the scene after the shootings, he was welcomed as a familiar face, not as an outsider. For years, Perry has sought to be a visible presence as a youth pastor in all areas of the community. “It’s very important to build meaningful relationships with the community, the police, the judicial community, the schools,” Perry says. “When a crisis strikes, a friend has access that a stranger doesn’t.”

Since the shooting, Perry has motivated his youth group attendees to see themselves as a buffer within the public-school system, encouraging them to break out of their church subculture and be more intimately involved in the life of their schools.

“I have a heightened sense of the responsibility of the youth group to be a spiritual immunity system on campus for when a little evil hops in,” says Perry.

In the aftermath of the killings, the youth of Jonesboro found themselves preoccupied with life-and-death discussions. “The teenagers were concerned about their safety, asking, Could it happen again?” Perry says. “There was a sense of responsibility among some that they should have reported dialogue that they had heard before the shooting.”

One especially sensitive area was how Perry’s youth group would relate to Monte Johnson, Mitchell’s 12-year-old younger brother. Monte Johnson told Perry that he had no friends and he feared returning to school. Perry says the youth group faced the matter head-on.

“We spent time talking about an emotional safety net,” Perry says. “Could we be the kind of youth group that a hurting teen can come to and find comfort and hope and love?” At one of the youth group’s meetings, 80 teens gathered around Monte to show their support and let him know they cared about his well-being.

Perry says Christian teens at school should focus on setting a good example for others as well as reporting to authorities behavior by their peers that might suggest serious underlying emotional problems.

In search of outside resources, Perry contacted Rick Lawrence, editor of Group magazine for youth ministry leaders. Lawrence says, “We don’t recommend that youth ministers get in over their heads in counseling kids with serious problems.” He believes that youth pastors are “incredibly resourceful people” who usually show good instincts in dealing with crisis situations.

But recognizing the need for outside assistance is critical. Lawrence says, “Perry had started a networking group with other youth ministers in the town so they were able to come together in the crisis. Perry was smart and wise about seeking help.”

Perry told Group magazine, “I’ve tried to lead our students into what it means to be discerning in terms of immunity and protection. Our group is now realizing in light of what happened at Westside that they need to tangibly express their Christian faith by being safety nets and immunity systems.”

Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Why are kids shooting their classmates?David Grossman is a military psychologist who coined the term killology for a new interdisciplinary field: the study of the methods and psychological effects of training army recruits to circumvent their natural inhibitions to killing fellow human beings. Here he marshals unsettling evidence that the same tactics used in training soldiers are at work in our media and entertainment. CT thinks that parents, the church, scholars, and the government must come together to study this question more intensely:

Are we training our children to kill?I am from Jonesboro, Arkansas. I travel the world training medical, law enforcement, and U.S. military personnel about the realities of warfare. I try to make those who carry deadly force keenly aware of the magnitude of killing. Too many law enforcement and military personnel act like “cowboys,” never stopping to think about who they are and what they are called to do. I hope I am able to give them a reality check.

So here I am, a world traveler and an expert in the field of “killology,” and the largest school massacre in American history happens in my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was the March 24 schoolyard shooting deaths of four girls and a teacher. Ten others were injured, and two boys, ages 11 and 13, are in jail, charged with murder.

My son goes to one of the middle schools in town, so my aunt in Florida called us that day and asked, “Was that Joe’s school?” And we said, “We haven’t heard about it.” My aunt in Florida knew about the shootings before we did!

We turned on the television and discovered the shootings took place down the road from us but, thank goodness, not at Joe’s school. I’m sure almost all parents in Jonesboro that night hugged their children and said, “Thank God it wasn’t you,” as they tucked them into bed. But there was also a lot of guilt because some parents in Jonesboro couldn’t say that.

I spent the first three days after the tragedy at Westside Middle School, where the shootings took place, working with the counselors, teachers, students, and parents. None of us had ever done anything like this before. I train people how to react to trauma in the military; but how do you do it with kids after a massacre in their school?

I was the lead trainer for the counselors and clergy the night after the shootings, and the following day we debriefed the teachers in groups. Then the counselors and clergy, working with the teachers, debriefed the students, allowing them to work through everything that had happened. Only people who share a trauma can give each other the understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness needed to understand what happened, and then they can begin the long process of trying to understand why it happened.

Virus of violence

To understand the why behind Jonesboro and Springfield and Pearl and Paducah, and all the other outbreaks of this “virus of violence,” we need to understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in this country between 1957—when the fbi started keeping track of the data—and 1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the rate people are attempting to kill one another—the aggravated assault rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for two major factors.

First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The prison population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. According to criminologist John J. DiIulio, “dozens of credible empirical analyses … leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes.” If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would undoubtedly be even higher.

Children don’t naturally kill; they learn it from violence in the home and most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, movies, and interactive video games.

The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical technology. According to the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed nine out of ten soldiers in World War II, nine out of ten could have survived in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times higher than it is. The magnitude of the problem has been held down by the development of sophisticated lifesaving skills and techniques, such as helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, cpr, trauma centers, and medicines.

However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen in other countries in the per capita violent crime rates reported to Interpol between 1977 and 1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in both nations. The assault rate tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland, while all these nations had an associated (but smaller) increase in murder.

This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations with draco-nian gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse, poverty, or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented as entertainment for children.

Killing is unnatural

Before retiring from the military, I spent almost a quarter of a century as an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning and studying how to enable people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. But it does not come naturally; you have to be taught to kill. And just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.

After the Jonesboro killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don’t naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.

Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one’s own kind. I can best illustrate this from drawing on my own work in studying killing in the military.

We all know that you can’t have an argument or a discussion with a frightened or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the blood vessels, has literally closed down the forebrain—that great gob of gray matter that makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog. When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from your dog’s. If you’ve worked with animals, you have some understanding of what happens to frightened human beings on the battlefield. The battlefield and violent crime are in the realm of midbrain responses.

Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind.

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths—who by definition don’t have that resistance—lack this innate violence immune system.

Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of posturing. Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to daunt the enemy. There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles were nothing more than great shoving matches. It was not until one side turned and ran that most of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back. All of the ancient military historians report that the vast majority of killing happened in pursuit when one side was fleeing.

“Few researchers bother any longer to dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has aneffect on kids who witness it.” (Time, April 6, 1998)

In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel—one with 23 loads in the barrel.

In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And so he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy’s head.

During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this “problem.” From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent.

The methods in this madness: DesensitizationHow the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.

Brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.

Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media—but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn’t until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.

When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a “splatter” movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child’s eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Sure, they are told: “Hey, it’s all for fun. Look, this isn’t real, it’s just TV.” And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can’t tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children’s lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That’s what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That’s what the media are doing to them.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three- to five-year-old to reach the “prime crime age.” That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that “the introduction of television in the 1950’s caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually.” The article went on to say that ” … if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults” (June 10, 1992).

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov’s dogs you learned about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell without salivating.

The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet “their” prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly) teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A Clockwork Orange. In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.

Every time a child plays an interactive video game, he is learning the exact same conditionedreflex skills as a soldier or police officer in training.

We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend’s perfume.

After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. “They laughed,” she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.

The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call AVIDS—Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed anybody. It destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn’t kill you become fatal. Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence. And once you are at close range with another human being, and it’s time for you to pull that trigger, Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain resistance.

Operant conditioning

The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is wetting his seat cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.

When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do. In fire drills, children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion. One day there is a real fire, and they are frightened out of their wits; but they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do, and it saves their lives.

The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern battlefield. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull’s-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response—soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.

Now, if you’re a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.

I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed.38 pistol at the clerk’s head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes—which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range—and killed this father of two. Afterward, we asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill the guy—it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, “I don’t know. It was a mistake. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

In the military and law-enforcement worlds, the right option is often not to shoot. But you never, never put your quarter in that video machine with the intention of not shooting. There is always some stimulus that sets you off. And when he was excited, and his heart rate went up, and vasoconstriction closed his forebrain down, this young man did exactly what he was conditioned to do: he reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately just like all those times he played video games.

This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever more homemade pseudosociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to kill and learning to like it; and then we have the audacity to say, “Oh my goodness, what’s wrong?”

One of the boys allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other one was a nonshooter and, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over 100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That’s pretty remarkable shooting. We run into these situations often—kids who have never picked up a gun in their lives pick up a real gun and are incredibly accurate. Why? Video games.

Role models

In the military, you are immediately confronted with a role model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence and aggression. Along with military heroes, these violent role models have always been used to influence young, impressionable minds.

Today the media are providing our children with role models, and this can be seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but it can also be seen in the media-inspired, copycat aspects of the Jonesboro murders. This is the part of these juvenile crimes that the TV networks would much rather not talk about.

Research in the 1970s demonstrated the existence of “cluster suicides” in which the local TV reporting of teen suicides directly caused numerous copycat suicides of impressionable teenagers. Somewhere in every population there are potentially suicidal kids who will say to themselves, “Well, I’ll show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV, too.” Because of this research, television stations today generally do not cover suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect is the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little boy who says to himself, “Well, I’ll show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV too.”

Thus we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like a virus spread by the six o’clock news. No matter what someone has done, if you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere, will emulate him.

The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi, fewer than six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing his mother and then going to his school and shooting nine students, two of whom died, including his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread to Paducah, Kentucky, where a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three students and wounding five others.

A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime virus occurred in Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl and just a little over 90 days before Jonesboro. In Stamps, a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates, hid in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. Sound familiar? Only two children were injured in this crime, so most of the world didn’t hear about it; but it got great regional coverage on TV, and two little boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas, probably did hear about it.

And then there was Springfield, Oregon, and so many others. Is this a reasonable price to pay for the TV networks’ “right” to turn juvenile defendants into celebrities and role models by playing up their pictures on TV?

Our society needs to be informed about these crimes, but when the images of the young killers are broadcast on television, they become role models. The average preschooler in America watches 27 hours of television a week. The average child gets more one-on-one communication from TV than from all her parents and teachers combined. The ultimate achievement for our children is to get their picture on TV. The solution is simple, and it comes straight out of the suicidology literature: The media have every right and responsibility to tell the story, but they have no right to glorify the killers by presenting their images on TV.

Reality Check

Sixty percent of men on TV are involved in violence; 11 percent are killers. Unlike actual rates, in the media the majority of homicide victims are women. (Gerbner 1994)

In a Canadian town in which TV was first introduced in 1973, a 160 percent increase in aggression, hitting, shoving, and biting was documented in first- and second-grade students after exposure, with no change in behavior in children in two control communities. (Centerwall 1992)

Fifteen years after the introduction of TV, homicides, rapes and assaults doubled in the United States. (American Medical Association)

Twenty percent of suburban high schoolers endorse shooting someone “who has stolen something from you.” (Toch and Silver 1993)

In the United States, approximately two million teenagers carry knives, guns, clubs or razors. As many as 135,000 take them to school. (America by the Numbers)

Americans spend over $100 million on toy guns every year. (What Counts: The Complete Harper’s Index © 1991)

Unlearning violence

What is the road home from the dark and lonely place to which we have traveled? One route infringes on civil liberties. The city of New York has made remarkable progress in recent years in bringing down crime rates, but they may have done so at the expense of some civil liberties. People who are fearful say that is a price they are willing to pay.

Another route would be to “just turn it off”; if you don’t like what is on television, use the “off” button. Yet, if all the parents of the 15 shooting victims in Jonesboro had protected their children from TV violence, it wouldn’t have done a bit of good. Because somewhere there were two little boys whose parents didn’t “just turn it off.”

On the night of the Jonesboro shootings, clergy and counselors were working in small groups in the hospital waiting room, comforting the groups of relatives and friends of the victims. Then they noticed one woman sitting alone silently.

A counselor went over to the woman and discovered that she was the mother of one of the girls who had been killed. She had no friends, no husband, no family with her as she sat in the hospital, stunned by her loss. “I just came to find out how to get my little girl’s body back,” she said. But the body had been taken to Little Rock, 100 miles away, for an autopsy. Her very next concern was, “I just don’t know how I’m going to pay for the funeral. I don’t know how I can afford it.” That little girl was truly all she had in all the world. Come to Jonesboro, friend, and tell this mother she should “just turn it off.”

Another route to reduced violence is gun control. I don’t want to downplay that option, but America is trapped in a vicious cycle when we talk about gun control. Americans don’t trust the government; they believe that each of us should be responsible for taking care of ourselves and our families. That’s one of our great strengths—but it is also a great weakness. When the media foster fear and perpetuate a milieu of violence, Americans arm themselves in order to deal with that violence. And the more guns there are out there, the more violence there is. And the more violence there is, the greater the desire for guns.

We are trapped in this spiral of self-dependence and lack of trust. Real progress will never be made until we reduce this level of fear. As a historian, I tell you it will take decades—maybe even a century—before we wean Americans off their guns. And until we reduce the level of fear and of violent crime, Americans would sooner die than give up their guns.

Top 10 Nonviolent Video Games

The following list of nonviolent video games has been developed by The Games Project. These games are ranked high for their social and play value and technical merit.

1. Bust a Move
2. Tetris
3. Theme Park
4. Absolute Pinball
5. Myst
6. NASCAR
7. SimCity
8. The Incredible Machine
9. Front Page Sports: Golf
10. Earthworm Jim

For descriptions, publishers, and prices for these games, including a searchable database for additional recommendations, check The Games Project Web site at: http://www.gamesproject.org/. This list is updated periodically. Others are encouraged to make recommendations in their “Add your favorites” section.

Fighting back

We need to make progress in the fight against child abuse, racism, and poverty, and in rebuilding our families. No one is denying that the breakdown of the family is a factor. But nations without our divorce rates are also having increases in violence. Besides, research demonstrates that one major source of harm associated with single-parent families occurs when the TV becomes both the nanny and the second parent.

Work is needed in all these areas, but there is a new front—taking on the producers and purveyers of media violence. Simply put, we ought to work toward legislation that outlaws violent video games for children. There is no constitutional right for a child to play an interactive video game that teaches him weapons-handling skills or that simulates destruction of God’s creatures.

The day may also be coming when we are able to seat juries in America who are willing to sock it to the networks in the only place they really understand—their wallets. After the Jonesboro shootings, Time magazine said: “As for media violence, the debate there is fast approaching the same point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco reached some time ago—it’s over. Few researchers bother any longer to dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has an effect on kids who witness it” (April 6, 1998).

Most of all, the American people need to learn the lesson of Jonesboro: Violence is not a game; it’s not fun, it’s not something that we do for entertainment. Violence kills.

Every parent in America desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV and other violent media on children, just as we would warn them of some widespread carcinogen. The problem is that the TV networks, which use the public airwaves we have licensed to them, are our key means of public education in America. And they are stonewalling.

In the days after the Jonesboro shootings, I was interviewed on Canadian national TV, the British Broadcasting Company, and many U.S. and international radio shows and newspapers. But the American television networks simply would not touch this aspect of the story. Never in my experience as a historian and a psychologist have I seen any institution in America so clearly responsible for so very many deaths, and so clearly abusing their publicly licensed authority and power to cover up their guilt.

Time after time, idealistic young network producers contacted me from one of the networks, fascinated by the irony that an expert in the field of violence and aggression was living in Jonesboro and was at the school almost from the beginning. But unlike all the other media, these network news stories always died a sudden, silent death when the network’s powers-that-be said, “Yeah, we need this story like we need a hole in the head.”

Many times since the shooting I have been asked, “Why weren’t you on TV talking about the stuff in your book?” And every time my answer had to be, “The TV networks are burying this story. They know they are guilty, and they want to delay the retribution as long as they can.”

As an author and expert on killing, I believe I have spoken on the subject at every Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions Club in a 50-mile radius of Jonesboro. So when the plague of satellite dishes descended upon us like huge locusts, many people here were aware of the scientific data linking TV violence and violent crime.

The networks will stick their lenses anywhere and courageously expose anything. Like flies on open wounds, they find nothing too private or shameful for their probing lenses—except themselves, and their share of guilt in the terrible, tragic crime that happened here.

A CBS executive told me his plan. He knows all about the link between media and violence. His own in-house people have advised him to protect his child from the poison his industry is bringing to America’s children. He is not going to expose his child to TV until she’s old enough to learn how to read. And then he will select very carefully what she sees. He and his wife plan to send her to a daycare center that has no television, and he plans to show her only age-appropriate videos.

That should be the bare minimum with children: Show them only age-appropriate videos, and think hard about what is age appropriate.

The most benign product you are going to get from the networks are 22-minute sitcoms or cartoons providing instant solutions for all of life’s problems, interlaced with commercials telling you what a slug you are if you don’t ingest the right sugary substances and don’t wear the right shoes.

The worst product your child is going to get from the networks is represented by one TV commentator who told me, “Well, we only have one really violent show on our network, and that is NYPD Blue. I’ll admit that that is bad, but it is only one night a week.”

I wondered at the time how she would feel if someone said, “Well, I only beat my wife in front of the kids one night a week.” The effect is the same.

“You’re not supposed to know who I am!” said NYPD Blue star Kim Delaney, in response to young children who recognized her from her role on that show. According to USA Weekend, she was shocked that underage viewers watch her show, which is rated TV-14 for gruesome crimes, raw language, and explicit sex scenes. But they do watch, don’t they?

Education about media and violence does make a difference. I was on a radio call-in show in San Antonio, Texas. A woman called and said, “I would never have had the courage to do this two years ago. But let me tell you what happened. You tell me if I was right.

“My 13-year-old boy spent the night with a neighbor boy. After that night, he started having nightmares. I got him to admit what the nightmares were about. While he was at the neighbor’s house, they watched splatter movies all night: people cutting people up with chain saws and stuff like that.

Every parent in America desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV and other violent media on children. But the TV networks—our key means of public education in America—are stonewalling.

“I called the neighbors and told them, ‘Listen: you are sick people. I wouldn’t feel any different about you if you had given my son p*rnography or alcohol. And I’m not going to have anything further to do with you or your son—and neither is anybody else in this neighborhood, if I have anything to do with it—until you stop what you’re doing.’ “

That’s powerful. That’s censure, not censorship. We ought to have the moral courage to censure people who think that violence is legitimate entertainment.

One of the most effective ways for Christians to be salt and light is by simply confronting the culture of volence as entertainment. A friend of mine, a retired army officer who teaches at a nearby middle school, uses the movie Gettysburg to teach his students about the Civil War. A scene in that movie very dramatically depicts the tragedy of Pickett’s Charge. As the Confederate troops charge into the Union lines, the cannons fire into their masses at point-blank range, and there is nothing but a red mist that comes up from the smoke and flames. He told me that when he first showed this heart-wrenching, tragic scene to his students, they laughed.

He began to confront this behavior ahead of time by saying: “In the past, students have laughed at this scene, and I want to tell you that this is completely unacceptable behavior. This movie depicts a tragedy in American history, a tragedy that happened to our ancestors, and I will not tolerate any laughing.” From then on, when he played that scene to his students, over the years, he says there was no laughter. Instead, many of them wept.

What the media teach is unnatural, and if confronted in love and assurance, the house they have built on the sand will crumble. But our house is built on the rock. If we don’t actively present our values, then the media will most assuredly inflict theirs on our children, and the children, like those in that class watching Gettysburg, simply won’t know any better.

There are many other things that the Christian community can do to help change our culture. Youth activities can provide alternatives to television, and churches can lead the way in providing alternative locations for latchkey children. Fellowship groups can provide guidance and support to young parents as they strive to raise their children without the destructive influences of the media. Mentoring programs can pair mature, educated adults with young parents to help them through the preschool ages without using the TV as a babysitter. And most of all, the churches can provide the clarion call of decency and love and peace as an alternative to death and destruction—not just for the sake of the church, but for the transformation of our culture.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an expert on the psychology of killing, retired from the U.S. Army in February. He now teaches psychology at Arkansas State University, directs the Killology Research Group in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and has written On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Co., 1996). This article was adapted from a lecture he gave at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, in April.

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