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Christians respond to the health-care crisis.
Alert Americans have known for several years that the U.S. is on the brink of a health-care crisis. But on April 26 of this year, any doubts should have been eradicated: the nation’s second-largest medical society, the 68,000-member American College of Physicians, went on record, calling for sweeping reform of the health-care system—including a nationally funded health program in some form. The professional organization for specialists in internal medicine thus broke ranks with the larger American Medical Association and the profession’s 30-year tradition of trying to keep a great gulf fixed between the government and the doctor’s office.
What could so shake this segment of the medical establishment that it did everything but endorse “socialized medicine”? No one factor accounts for the phenomenon, but a quick look at American health care shows that the doctor’s white coat is frayed, worn, stained, patched, and darned at so many points that more patchwork is not the answer. Americans—both consumers and medical professionals—are shopping for a new look.
Here are the main threadbare points on our present system:
• Emergency rooms have become the family doctor for the nation’s poor. For example, the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan’s Lower East Side looks like a bus station waiting room. But because Bellevue is already full, those people could wait there for two days or more.
The scene at Bellevue, typical of urban hospitals, is so bad because the number of health-care centers has been cut back. One survey of ten poor communities with 1.5 million people found just 22 full-time doctors below retirement age willing to take Medicaid patients. A shortage of primary care encourages patients to wait until they are seriously ill before seeking medical care—and then they go straight to the hospital.
Hospitals are restricted by a 1986 law from refusing to treat poor patients. But when the vast majority of those who seek help at a hospital’s emergency room are not privately insured, the institution cannot cover its own costs. With Medicaid rates too low to pay the hospital’s own bills, it is good business sense to close the emergency room. It is bad health-care sense, however. Not the poor only, but the affluent as well suffer when there is no emergency room in the immediate vicinity. Longer ambulance rides mean more untimely deaths for rich and poor alike.
• Lack of insurance keeps the threat of medical bills or no treatment at all hanging over 37 million Americans. Another 50 million have inadequate insurance.
Because health-insurance costs are rising much faster than the cost of living (about 20 percent per year, according to one estimate), many employers are being priced out of the group-insurance market. They either cut benefits or place the burden of insurance back on the employee.
Hawaii, the only state that requires employers to provide health insurance, is an exception to this picture. After over a decade with 95 percent of the state’s population having access to health care, the practice of preventive medicine and the availability of good treatment has brought health insurance premiums to a point 25 to 30 percent below the rates charged on the mainland.
• Race and social class predict poor public-health statistics better than any other variable. This is probably because those who can afford health insurance tend to get preventive care and, when they are sick, can see a physician more easily. In Chicago, for example, poor persons using that city’s public clinics must wait an average of 68 days for an appointment. Some have waited as long as 181 days. By the time 68 days have elapsed, a simple cold or case of the flu can become an otherwise preventable disaster requiring expensive hospitalization.
• Epidemics—AIDS, drug abuse, and mental illness—account for much of the overload in urban emergency rooms. These same factors affect public-health statistics. When a study showed District of Columbia infant mortality rates at 23.2 deaths per 1,000—more than twice the national average—officials pointed to a rash of cocaine babies. In addition, once-dormant diseases—such as tuberculosis—are reappearing on the American scene due to poor hygiene in substandard housing.
• A litigation-happy society, in which too many frivolous and nuisance lawsuits are filed, has caused medical costs to surge upward. Often insurance companies find it cheaper to settle a case out of court than to fight a winnable case.
In the five years between 1981 and 1986, professional liability claims per hundred doctors nearly tripled (from 3.2 per 100 physicians to 9.2 claims per 100), and between 1980 and 1987, the average jury award more than quadrupled (from about $400,000 to $1.76 million). As a result, professional liability insurance—rising at about 22 percent per year—has become one of the fastest-growing factors in a physician’s overhead. Doctors, who face a growing likelihood of having to defend themselves in court some day, practice “defensive medicine,” ordering laboratory tests and medications that their intuitions may tell them are unnecessary, but that, should something go wrong, would be evidence of the care with which they practice.
• Health-care administration also has been increasing. Due to the requirements of both government agencies and insurance companies, paperwork has multiplied. Total health administrative costs have been estimated at about 22 percent of all health-care spending in the U.S. And the average medical claim requires an hour of staff time at the doctor’s office to prepare forms for Medicare, Blue Shield, or other insurers—much longer than your physician probably spends examining you.
• High-tech innovations have transformed American health care. From helicopter “ambulances” equipped for the treatment of trauma to sophisticated scanners that can allow a physician to study a clear image of any diseased organ without invasive surgery, the frontiers of medical effectiveness have been pushed back.
But these innovations are not cheap. A typical magnetic resonance imager can cost $2 million. So when a patient with serious headaches needs her brain examined, the bill for 60 minutes of machine use can run just under $1,000.
The U.S. health system can now provide much more intense and complete medical care than we can pay for. But do we want less?
• Physician incomes are a sensitive subject, not often discussed. Everyone agrees doctors have to pay for long, expensive educations. Nevertheless, the median earnings of physicians increased an average of 6.9 percent per year between 1981 and 1988—a period when consumer prices rose an average of 4.6 percent annually and overall wages and salaries only 4.5 percent.
Not all doctors are nightly killing the fatted calf. Certain specialties—such as heart surgery or neurosurgery—earn at the high end of the scale, but general practitioners and pediatricians (the foot soldiers of medical practice) earn far less.
Nevertheless, the overall rise in physician incomes has played its part in the rising cost of health care.
Thanks to these factors and others, many experts are predicting that two out of every five U.S. hospitals will close during the nineties, largely due to shrinking revenues and the increasing burden of unreimbursed care. In a time like this, Christians have a duty to examine the issues and bring biblical values to bear on the way society shapes the solutions.
When infants die and young adults suffer for lack of proper access to medical care, our prophetic sense of justice should feel at least a twinge of outrage.
As Christian citizens, we must be the outspoken social conscience of the nation. And as giving members of Christ’s church, we must be his hands in the nonmedical ways that can bring comfort and a sense of belonging to those for whom the system doesn’t work. Perhaps, then, someday Jesus will say to us, “I was sick, and you visited me.”
By David Neff.
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American society is on a collision course between rising expectations for high-cost care at all ages and an apparent unwillingness to pay for such care. Logically, only two measures can prevent the collision: Spend more money or deny expected care. A third measure—wringing more care out of the present health-care expenditure level—is only a temporary fix. Even if more inefficient and/or unnecessary care can be found and eliminated, the increasing cost demands of new technology and labor-intensive care, combined with a growing number of senior citizens, will eventually outstrip even the current level of almost 11 percent of the GNP spent on health care.
Currently, the favored choice seems to be to deny care whenever possible, rather than to give more money to an already gluttonous system. This option is supported by two perceptions—both of which could be reversed in public thinking. One is the understandable human tendency not to want to pay for getting sick—and the consequent desire to have someone else (meaning government or employer) pay for our health care. The other is the understanding that we pay more for health care than other nations with similar values and health outcomes—suggesting that our health money is not being well spent. (That we pay more is an indisputable fact; that our money is not being well spent is a matter for debate.) However, as more members of our society are being denied actual care, or at least easy access to desired care, the debate about how to balance the spending of money and efforts to limit care will become more urgent. Barring international catastrophe or a major recession, I believe it will become the major political issue of the nineties. And the question Christians must ask is whether spiritual values have anything to contribute to the outcome of the debate.
I would suggest that there are two very important Judeo-Christian spiritual themes that speak intensely and provocatively to the current health-care debate, and that are seemingly contradictory. Only one of these values is widely held in our society, but the other may be increasingly needed to balance the debate.
A Time To Heal
The first theme, deeply ingrained in the American psyche, is that all human lives are of value. That theme clearly stems from Judeo-Christian teachings about the worth of each human life in the eyes of God. And even though the specific religious underpinnings for that belief have diminished in our society, the conviction is still widely held by current generations of adults. Translated into health-care policy, that belief drives us to provide at least basic health care to all our citizens, something we have always tried to do with either private charity or public insurance, and even to consider care that may not be logically called basic. For example, in a recent discussion on health-care policy, a doctor described the foolishness and wastefulness of the speech therapy being offered to his mother in a nursing home. He said, rightly, that his mother, who had suffered a severe stroke, was in no condition to benefit from this therapy, which was costing $50 an hour. But a rabbi in the audience got up to say that such therapy was evidence of our societal commitment to the dignity of even a woman in her condition—and we should therefore support the effort.
Clearly, however, our theoretical commitment to health care for all has never translated into a public policy of truly universal health insurance provided through federal guidelines and financed by general taxation. Instead, we have attempted a patchwork of private and public insurance that increasingly has left large holes in the health-care safety net. The biblical call for social justice, with special attention to the needs of the poor, leaves no doubt about the need for some form of national health insurance that will guarantee such needs will be met. I believe that by the end of this decade we will finally have such insurance, probably along the lines of the Canadian model in which federal and state money, as the sole source of health-care dollars, are parceled out to states and/or local governments to distribute according to local guidelines and negotiations. This model is far superior to a “national health service” that literally runs health care from Washington. That would be a bureaucratic nightmare of the highest order.
This spiritual/moral commitment to provide basic health care for all is the easy part, although translating it into reality and overcoming the political barriers to national health insurance will indeed take time—about ten more years in my judgment, possibly sooner if there is a change in political attitude in the White House. The much harder spiritual value to digest will be our second theme: that we should not blindly worship at the altar of physical existence. Specifically, this should cause us to look at what we spend money for and especially how much we spend for prolonging death or for rescuing life.
A Time To Die
At the heart of our Judeo-Christian tradition lies the belief that there is more to our ultimate pilgrimage than the physical life span of human existence. The familiar injunction of Ecclesiastes about “a time to die” often gets lost in the modern cultural worship of life at all costs. This concept is sharpened and provocatively enlarged by Jesus when he challenges his disciples to understand that “whoever loses his life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24). The apostle Paul carries this liberating concept to exquisite heights when he is able to write, “If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom. 14:8).
I am also reminded of Jesus’ question to his disciples as recorded in Luke 12:25: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” Obviously this rhetorical question was asked in the context of a lecture regarding foolish worry and anxiety about earthly sustenance. But perhaps some of our worry and effort to salvage or prolong physical existence falls into the category of “foolish” or even “sinful.” Put bluntly, when does the effort to rescue physical existence from the jaws of otherwise certain death—or at least certain vegetative existence—qualify as spiritually foolish?
Even to ask this question puts a different spin on the way the matter of medical rescue is usually approached. Typically, the question of whether to engage in extraordinary medical effort is approached by simply asking whether or not it is technically possible—or, today, by asking whether or not the effort is “cost effective” in terms of the quality of life expected. Also, today, the questions must always be asked in the context of the current local or state legal climate—an indication of just how secularized decisions about life and death have become. But if we are to ask about the spiritual value of our medical efforts, we are forced to bring the debate to a new level—one in which easy answers simply will not work. At best, we can only approach the questions in light of basic principles that can guide us to more spiritually sound decisions about how we should use our health-care resources.
First, it is spiritually sound to accept death as part of life. If the church taught and preached this concept more regularly—and discussed it more thoroughly—it would become a more natural and pervasive part of our medical decision making. We need to be reminded of this valid spiritual principle time and time again so that it automatically becomes part of the data in specific decision-making situations.
Second, it is spiritually sound to care as much about the quality as the quantity of life. That is clearly the message of Christ’s own life and teachings. During his ministry, he did not frantically attempt to salvage all the lives about him—though he did heal and restore life in many instances. By his own life example—a ministry of only three years and a very premature death—it would be hard to conclude that longevity in and of itself is the proper measure of meaning.
Third, it is spiritually sound to consider limits on the application of modem medical technology. Jesus’ teachings often ask us to question the value of and the concern for earthly existence or the comforts and idols thereof. He was not, of course, an ascetic in substance or style. But he was remarkably free of worry about how long he would live or even how well he would live.
Taken together, these three principles direct us to be willing to consider more limits on the use of present and future medical technology than is now the case. Specifically, I think they guide us not to:
• Rescue very young (very low birth weight) preemies where current medical skill cannot reasonably predict a nonvegetative life;
• Prolong the artificial physical functioning of a person who would otherwise clearly be dead;
• Prolong the natural physical functioning of a person who has no hope of human—that is, conscious—existence.
This means that when choices must be made, these principles compel us to use limited resources to provide for the basic medical needs of the living rather than to support heroic measures for the dying. In other words, I would not deny a liver transplant for an otherwise physically intact person on this basis but I would remove life-support measures—including food and water—for a person with no hope for conscious recovery. The secularization of health care has elevated physical existence to a near-idolatrous level, but this need not be a terminal condition. Health care that is infused with Judeo-Christian values will not only teach us to respect human life, but also to accept and respect the inevitable end of earthly existence.
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C. Everett Koop not only distinguished himself in 8 years of service as Surgeon General of the United States, but served for 33 years as one of the nation’s most innovative pediatric surgeons. He spoke with CHRISTIANITY TODAY managing editor David Neff about U.S. health-care policies.
Is the magnitude of our health-care crisis as big as the media have portrayed it to be?
I think it’s at least that big. First of all, we have a failure in the delivery of health care to upward of 33 to 37 million of our citizens, which is 12 to 15 percent of our population. These people are either uninsured or underinsured or seasonally insured, and there is ample evidence to show that the lack of insurance and the seriousness of health problems go together.
The second problem is that we have a seriously deteriorated doctor-patient relationship. Neither side trusts the other, leading to a situation where doctor and patient see each other as potential legal adversaries. That sparks the profession to practice defensive medicine and to pay exorbitant malpractice-insurance premiums to protect themselves. Just those things alone are enough to make the present situation intolerable.
How should the U.S. attack these problems—through expanded tax-supported entitlement programs or through private-sector employers funding private insurance, or a combination of both?
The first thing the government has to do is deal with poverty. Poverty is at the base of almost all the problems that I see in health, whether they are in Appalachia or a Chicago ghetto.
There is a tremendous clamor every place I go. I hear it in the halls of Congress. I hear it from business. I hear it from labor, doctors, and patients: We need to restructure the health-care system. And I agree with that. But it cannot be patched up with Band-Aids any longer. It has to be done from top to bottom. And it won’t work to enact a national health service, because those types of government-supported programs are based upon a system of planned scarcity, which ultimately leads to a deterioration in health care. It starts with a lack of innovation and is felt first in research and then in patient care. Then the bureaucracy becomes further separated from the sensitivity of patients, and we end up with rationing and standing in line for health care. Americans do not stand in line well for anything.
Yet people in the United Kingdom are used to standing in line for things.
The infatuation with any other country’s health-care system is based more upon a dissatisfaction with our own than it is with a true understanding of any other system. Nobody really wants the UK system, because it’s bankrupt and everybody is moving in another direction. Mrs. Thatcher is trying to kill it. But people are very enthusiastic about the Canadian system, which is just a few years behind. But it has changed a lot in the last three years, and people there are becoming disenchanted. So I don’t think we should try to copy those models.
What do you make of the American College of Physicians’ statement, which was tantamount to recommending that we eventually adopt some form of socialized medicine?
I think they haven’t looked at it thoroughly, because wherever there is truly socialized medicine, what I just described eventually happens.
Are you more favorable toward the Oregon proposal to quantify the value of each medical procedure and then limit their spending on medical entitlements for only the most valued procedures?
The first thing that’s wrong with the Oregon plan is that it discriminates against the poor. You can have anything you want in Oregon as long as you have money, but if you’re poor, you can’t have much. That means that if you are poor, you can’t have an organ transplant in Oregon. But if you live in Washington, Washington Medicaid will pay for you to go to Oregon for the transplant, because Oregon is the national liver-transplant center. That seems to me to be extraordinarily unfair.
Do you think we need legislation that limits physician liability and encourages a freer and less-expensive approach to medical practice?
I think we have to have it. It’s very difficult to get because Congress is made up of so many lawyers that they’re not likely to act against their brothers with such legislation. But I think there are several things that could be done. The tort system has to be rearranged so that exorbitant awards are not made on the basis of pain and suffering. Second, the contingency fee must be eliminated [the practice in which lawyers take cases with no money up front, but in hopes of a percentage of a settlement or damages; the practice clogs the courts and plagues insurance companies with suits that are unlikely to be won, but that are often cheaper to settle out of court than actually to defend before the bench]. And finally, if a doctor wishes to devote himself to a charitable enterprise—to the care for patients who do not pay him in any way—he should be exempt from malpractice-insurance liability premiums.
Malpractice does indeed exist, but most of today’s lawsuits are for maloccurrence, not malpractice. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m 73. If I had my gall bladder operated on tonight and I had a myocardial infarct on the table and died, it would be what we used to call “an act of God.” You expect it to happen to a certain number of people who are 73 and undergo that kind of stress. But now the tendency is to blame someone. Was the anesthesia too deep or too light? Did they not give me the proper premedication? Was the surgeon slow or fast? We expect today’s health-care system to be perfect, but it can’t be, because people are not carburetors.
Do we also need a new approach to physician compensation that emphasizes time and energy spent in patient contact?
A lot of people are opting for that as a solution. As I do polls of my own among medical students and young doctors around the country, it doesn’t interest them in any way unless you eliminate the stupendous debt that they leave medical school with. Few Americans realize that young doctors leave medical school $50 thousand to $150 thousand in debt. Such a huge debt leads many of those young men and women to change their specialty so they can pay that off sooner. And although they don’t set out to be dishonest in any way, they soon become more likely to perform procedures that are not absolutely necessary. One solution would be to find some way to compensate physicians for providing free or reduced-price service for those who cannot afford it—perhaps by reducing their medical school debt whenever they donate their services.
Prescriptions for a Sick System
At both the state and federal levels, legislators are proposing strong medicine to cure our sick-unto-death health-care system. Here are some of the programs being considered.
Basic Health Benefits for All Americans Act (BHB)
Aim: Introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.); would provide health-care coverage for all U.S. citizens by the year 2000.
Advantages: By channeling most coverage through employer-based insurance, BHB avoids creating a large, centralized, bureaucratic state monopoly; provides additional protection for small businesses by offering subsidies.
Disadvantages: By increasing labor costs (equal to a 16 percent increase in the minimum wage), it may reduce employment; does not address flaws in the present system.
Funding: Employers to provide access to a minimum package of health insurance for all working Americans; combined federal-state program to provide comparable health benefits for uninsured Americans; because of budget deficit, the public portion would be phased in gradually. Value of the employment-based insurance purchased as a result of BHB: about $33 billion; net cost: about $18 billion.
The Comprehensive and Uniform Remedy for the Health Care System Act of 1989, Part I (CURE)
Aims: Introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah); would be geared to improve the health of mothers and their babies; remove barriers to affordable health insurance; improve health-care quality and medical liability reform; reduce health-care costs through prevention and public-awareness programs; and improve the trauma-care system. Medicaid would be expanded and returned to its original purpose of providing health care to the economically disadvantaged.
Advantage: Attacks specific areas in need of reform rather than simply providing more funds for present system.
Disadvantage: Increased federal taxation.
Funding: $8 billion additional tax revenue.
Should we, both as a society and as the church, encourage people who are clearly near the end of life to view dying as an honorable and acceptable choice rather than something always to be avoided through high-tech life support?
We have to be very careful how we approach this, because a positive view of death can be mistaken for euthanasia, assisted suicide, and other things that don’t belong in the Christian community. But I do think Americans lose sight of the fact that they have to die of something. And we must recognize that sometimes the best thing that a reasonable physician can do in an elderly person’s terminal illness is to step back and let nature take its course. That is not euthanasia, although some ardent prolife groups would confuse it with that and demonstrate outside a hospital where it might be practiced. That’s wrong.
You are known for pioneering in experimental pediatric surgeries. Under most proposed solutions to the health-care crisis, what would have happened in those cases?
Many of the proposed solutions to the high cost of medical care call for a cutback in research and high-tech procedures. Under such a climate, most of the babies I operated on would never have been saved.
What can we do to ensure that necessary research and experimental surgery will continue?
We need to recognize the difference between doing outlandish things that only affect one or two people and doing things that can benefit hundreds, thousands, or sometimes millions of people. And then we should focus our research on those kinds of problems and be just as discriminating in our treatment of newborns as we are in our treatment of the elderly. It doesn’t help anyone to maintain a child for six months who has a condition that will render him incapable of ever doing anything just to say we saved another baby that was born at 1.5 pounds. That’s not killing a Baby Doe, and it’s not in any way being unethical. Generally, neonatal physicians know how to make those decisions; it’s people looking over their shoulders telling them to try harder that brings us to some of our dilemmas.
Denominations—Catholics, Adventists, Evangelical Covenant, Lutherans—have traditionally been involved in running hospitals. Is it now no longer economically feasible for churches to be in the hospital business?
Inasmuch as hospitals were once considered either hospices or places for acute care where a lot of the service was provided by church members as a form of ministry, that doesn’t exist anymore. So the cost of running the business of a hospital is the same no matter who runs it. With all the changes in the hospital industry, I don’t think the church necessarily has to get involved in that. But I think the church can be a partner in the overall health-care picture by doing those things that always seemed to fall on the Christian church before the days of entitlements.
Universal Health Insurance for Ohio (UHIO)
Aims: Introduced by Rep. Robert F. Hagan (R-Ohio), modeled after the Canadian system; offers comprehensive health care for all Ohio citizens; eliminates unnecessary administrative costs through a single, universal system of health insurance for all necessary services without out-of-pocket expenditures.
Advantages: Wider choice of doctors; almost no insurance paperwork; universal coverage.
Disadvantages: Increased taxation; restricted flexibility in choice of medical providers: A person enrolled in a practice reimbursed on a per-patient basis would be allowed to change providers no more often than once a year.
Funding: Funded by an 8 percent payroll tax and an equivalent tax on the self-employed, a 1 percent wage tax on employees, a 2 percent tax on interest and dividends, and a 10 percent sales tax on alcohol and tobacco.
The Oregon Basic Health Services Act
Aim: To guarantee access to basic health care for all Oregonians and provide economic incentives to providers for employing those services and procedures that are effective and appropriate in preference to those that are marginal or unproven.
Prioritizes health services using criteria based on social values and according to the degree of benefit each service or procedure can be expected to have on the health of the entire population being served.
Additional legislation would encourage small businesses that have not previously offered health-care benefits to provide such benefits; would spread the cost of providing health care to the uninsured or uninsurable to as broad a base as possible.
Advantages: Reduces the practice of “defensive medicine” (unnecessary tests and procedures to avoid potential lawsuits) by providing a “liability shield” for providers; contains costs by not paying for procedures ranked low on the priority list; would not reduce Medicaid coverage for the aged, disabled, the blind, and wards of the state.
Disadvantages: Allows reduction in benefit packages; may have serious effects on some people who now receive Medicaid by ranking prevention of illness and early detection much higher than operations that may prolong the life of somebody who is profoundly ill.
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In this century, the churches and synagogues have yielded their appointed sovereignty over the affairs of birth, health, life, and death to the medical profession and to the “health-care industry.” So argues sociologist Paul Starr in The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (Basic Books).
Such a “twilight of the gods” should not and will not befall us. This demise, like Mark Twain’s, is greatly exaggerated. Were it allowed to occur, it would not only harm the general welfare, but it would impoverish religion and medicine as well.
But perhaps it is not too late for America’s religious community to reclaim some of this sacred territory. Taking cues from Starr’s analysis, we must see first that while an attitudinal shift has indeed occurred, transcendent hope and fear—those impulses linking belief and body—forever remain in place.
Second, we must see that, on the practical level, the church’s historic commitment to hospice and hospital is likely to prevail over the current patterns of secularization.
In the nineteenth century, Starr claims, Americans developed a skeptical, rational, and secular posture toward medical authority.
In a society where an established religion claims to have the final say on all aspects of human experience, the cultural authority of medicine clearly will be restricted. But … [m]any Americans who already had a rationalist, activist orientation to disease refused to accept physicians as authoritative. They believed that common sense and native intelligence could deal as effectively with most problems of health and illness (p. 17).
Medicine’s Religious Roots
According to medical historian Henry Sigerist, Christianity entered the world as a “religion of healing.” Take, for example, the way Christians tried to help afflicted fellow Christians and pagans alike during the mid-third century plague. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, described his flock’s activities as “visiting the sick without a thought as to the danger, assiduously ministering to them, tending them in Christ.”
In the fourth century, Christians increasingly venerated martyrs and saints, whose remains, or relics, were thought to have healing powers. The church established martyrs’ shrines, to which people streamed in search of healing. The fourth century also saw the rise of monasticism, which, in its Western forms, emphasized charity and care for the sick and needy. Monastic clergy established hospitals, orphanages, and homes for the poor and the aged.
During the Middle Ages, claims of miraculous healing continued, while clerical and monastic medical practitioners grew in number. Pilgrimages to the shrines of saints were popular during this period, and sometimes clergy administered medical treatment there. This was seen as completely in accord with the New Testament injunction to minister to the sick, especially if clergy tended to the destitute and expected no payment. Monasteries became the refuge of the sick, the poor, and the persecuted.
Enemies or allies?
It used to be argued by some that the church thwarted medical progress during the Middle Ages and opposed the revival of human dissection during the Renaissance on grounds that it was sacrilege to desecrate the dead. Some argued that eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century clerics tried to suppress the introduction of inoculation and vaccination by linking these measures with “sorcery and atheism.”
Such objections to medicine were far less significant than the criticism from conservatives within the medical community who feared change. It is easier to make a case for Christianity’s having been an ally of medical science than its enemy. It was, for example, a Puritan divine, Cotton Mather, who initiated the first American trials of inoculation.
While Mather once described the combined practice of spiritual and physical healing as the “angelical conjunction,” medicine and religion took increasingly divergent paths in modern times. This drift toward secularization can be seen in the history of the hospital. At first, hospitals were closely identified with the church, which provided personnel for day-to-day operations. In fact, before the rise of professional nurses in the late nineteenth century, few besides members of religious orders were sufficiently motivated to carry out the menial tasks that hospital patients required.
In the eighteenth century, however, physicians began to view hospitals as centers for the study of clinical medicine rather than as mere charitable institutions. Conflict became almost inevitable, as events at the Hötel-Dieu of Paris on the eve of the French Revolution testify. At this gargantuan establishment, Augustinian nurses controlled the most important areas of hospital policy. When the First Surgeon of the hospital in 1787 attempted to transform it from a custodial to a medical institution, the sisters protested that poverty-stricken patients, who were often homeless, might now “be thrown out just as soon as they cease to be afflicted with illness.”
The proliferation of therapeutically active hospitals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created a demand for qualified nurses. Hospitals in Catholic countries could rely on the nursing orders, but Protestants had nothing comparable until the 1830s when a Lutheran pastor and his wife in Kaiserswerth, Germany, founded a nursing school for pious young women interested in a life of service. In 1851 Florence Nightingale visited Kaiserswerth and returned to England to set up a secular version of the deaconesses, as they were called.
In the late nineteenth century, as nursing shifted from a domestic to a medical function in response to diagnostic and therapeutic advances, the profession became more secular. Not only did secular nurses generally receive better medical training, but some physicians found them more flexible. Catholic sisters, for example, disliked catheterizing and bathing patients and in some instances refused to care for persons suffering from venereal diseases. On occasion they were known to place religious duty above medical need, perhaps calling the priest before the physician in cases of emergency.
The church continued to play a role in health care, largely through denominationally affiliated hospitals. This became especially obvious in the 1840s and 1850s when large numbers of Catholic and Lutheran immigrants began arriving. Inspired by their successes, all the major—and some minor—Protestant bodies established hospitals. By the mid-twentieth century, church-related hospitals cared for one-quarter of all hospitalized patients.
In the face of recent ethical dilemmas created by increasing medical technology, many religious organizations and individuals are turning to their religious traditions for moral guidance. What remains to be seen is whether the church will take up the burden of caring for others again in an institutional setting, or relinquish that task due to the high cost and complexities of modern medicine.
Source: Ronald L. Numbers and Ronald C. Sawyer, “Medicine and Christianity in the Modem World” and other essays in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, edited by Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Fortress).
Had Starr read Luther or Wesley on medicine, he would understand that the root of such a skeptical and secular stance was to be found in religion, at least in its Protestant temperament. Luther, in his Table Talk and elsewhere, and Wesley, in his Primitive Remedies, expressed doubt verging on ridicule toward physicians. Because God is Lord, giver of life, sustainer of health, receiver of death, they wrote, no subordinate or penultimate entity can claim authority over us. Biblical faith, in its prophetic and iconoclastic mood, allows power to no lesser authority. Likewise the church claims all authority, in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, over “body and soul, in life and death,” for the “faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”
The Protestant spirit is grounded in a vivid awareness of transcendence. The reality of God conveys to our experience and faith that life and health, suffering and death are divine bequests prompting us to fear, trust, and hope as if our life belonged to God alone. A subliminal form of this religious awareness is manifested in today’s distrust of the sovereign and omniprovident state, seen, for example, in Eastern Europe, and in the widespread demand for justice and kindness toward the oppressed, diseased, disabled, and aged.
Today, church and synagogue are “taking back the street.” Fifty years ago we transferred the “tithe” to the state and asked it to replace the church as provider for security, health, the widowed, orphaned, and homeless. On all counts it failed. Culturally marginalized groups—Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventists, Hutterites, and Christian Scientists—persevered in these responsibilities. But now even our dominant religious culture—Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, and Protestant—is reclaiming responsibility in the realm of human vitality and mortality.
To exercise cultural authority, religion must receive it from the people and their sense of transcendence and finitude. Such a consensus of the faithful is the only ground for any authority. The practical working out of this faith renaissance can be seen in the religious character of the way we deal with such matters as human sexuality, parenting, suffering, and dying, and the structures and services we call on in such moments.
The history and future of hospitals and hospices are a case in point. I suppose that in my home city, Chicago, two-thirds of the hospitals are founded in and sustained today by patronage originating in the churches and their faithful laity. The names Michael Reese, Lutheran General, Christ, Mercy, Presbyterian—Saint Luke’s, Loyola, Foster McGaw, McCormick, Swedish Covenant, and Norris Nessett among others betray this fact. Starr argues that hospitals, though once “religious and charitable institutions for tending the sick,” are now “medical institutions for their cure” (p. 145). Rather than altruistic ministries in the face of human need, hospitals have become “doctors’ workshops,” “multiunit firms” and “profiteering corporations.”
Indeed, this is so! The budget of just one of the hospitals in our medical center (Presbyterian—St. Luke’s) is four times the annual budget of one entire religious denomination (Presbyterian Church [USA]). But is this expropriation the whole story? Certainly not. The will of devout Jews and Christians in our time still finds moral and pastoral expression in the places where our birthing and dying, our suffering and healing are watched over. Right now this ministry occurs in public and private institutions and agencies ranging from hospitals to hospices to home-care organizations. The significant change in recent years is the reintroduction of charitable care and personal involvement. If we study carefully the agencies that care for the homeless, the elderly, persons with AIDS, and women and children, we realize we are witnessing the ministry of the church. This becomes clearer yet if we observe the individuals who daily offer the helping hand, the cup of cool water, the listening ear, the understanding and consoling presence. Indeed, a significant back swing seems to be occurring as churches become the focal point of holistic health centers, medical clinics, divorce-support groups, havens for the handicapped, sanctuaries for persons with AIDS, and care centers for those growing old, becoming incapacitated, and dying. Right now the church seems too preoccupied with budget raising, building keeping, and fire dousing to be about truly effective ministry, but she will come roaring back. When she gets going strong, she will discover, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, that she is “back where she had started.”
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Love toward sick members should have a special place in the Christian congregation. Christ comes near to us in the sick.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In light of the health-care crisis in the United States, as well as in the entire global village, it is significant that many churches are experiencing a renewed awareness in health care as a mission. Increasingly, churches are perceiving themselves as healing fellowships, wellness centers, and caring communities for the wounded, the disabled, the afflicted, and the dying. The compassionate and healing ministry of the church’s Lord has become a prime motivation again as we move toward the end of the twentieth century.
Although not all congregations, denominational bodies, or interchurch agencies have caught the vision, the movement is gathering momentum and deserves the attention of all those who would be faithful to Christ’s servant mission. This movement reminds us that every human being is created in the image of God and thereby carries a dimension of transcendence. Likewise, it reiterates the apostolic mandate to bear each other’s burdens.
What follows are concrete examples of the church’s modeling of health care. Many of the models are drawn from America’s Midwest, but they are representative of what is happening across the country. In addition, many of these examples are Lutheran, primarily because Lutheran bodies have been at the forefront of hospital and church-based health-care programs.
Churches In Partnership
Health needs are so massive that their alleviation calls for heightened and deepened levels of cooperation, not only between congregations but also between congregations and health-care institutions. For example, Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, has developed a health-care program with 16 Protestant and Catholic congregations in the Chicago metropolitan area. This Congregational Health Partnership is conceived as a new expression of the biblical injunction to the people of God to be a “healing community.” It is rooted in a wholistic philosophy that underscores the interrelationships of soul, mind, and body.
A strategic component of this health ministry is the parish nurse program in which registered nurses serve on the staffs of local congregations and seek to focus attention on a diversity of health needs.
Through the partnership of several institutions of the United Church of Christ, 12 congregations, 9 of them predominantly African-American, have joined forces to establish the United Church of Christ South Side Health Project in Chicago. Three wholistic health centers are being formed in the Kenwood, South Shore, and Woodlawn areas of the city. The primary foci of the three sites are to be, respectively, maternal and child health, the frail elderly, and general medicine. The Reverend Stephen Camp, project director, has indicated that at each site, services offered will include preventive medicine, stress management, AIDS awareness, parenting and grandparenting, nutrition, referrals for foster care, and social services. “We are seeking,” he comments, “to offer health care in intentional ways to people who are often ‘locked out’ of the system. Many of our clients have little or no income. The church is called to be an advocate for health care.”
In Nebraska, advocacy for health-care needs on a statewide basis is undertaken by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. A constant presence at the state house is kept by the director of the Lutheran Advocacy Office in Lincoln, the Reverend James Bowman. As pending legislation that relates to health and health care is introduced into the legislature, information and often recommendations are sent to all congregations in the state synod. Over the past three years, subjects have included: health-care needs of the indigent, aid to the mentally retarded, Medicare provisions, Medicaid, child care, environmental issues, and nursing home standards.
The Northside Ecumenical Night Ministry in Chicago addresses the health-care needs of homeless youth and others on the streets. A team of a nurse practitioner, a Dominican sister, and a pastor combine their efforts on behalf of over 130 congregations. A motor van is on the streets several nights a week as a presence of the church. Videotapes are available on such subjects as substance abuse, AIDS, and other health-related issues. Most frequently, the ministry is one-on-one, or in twos and threes in conversation with one of the staff.
Program director Peter Brink speaks of establishing trust and relationship with people who have been alienated by society. “It is encouraging that many who have no church connections call us pastor,” Brink says.
Congregations As Caring Communities
One of the pioneers in the area of church and health is Granger Westberg. A Lutheran clergyman, Westberg encourages churches to become wholistic health centers—congregations that will be both “a wellness center to which people come regularly for prayer, worship, and serious discussions of life issues from a Christian perspective,” as well as a “place where task forces plan strategies for bringing health and wholeness to the immediate community, starting with congregation members.
Westberg helped develop the parish nurse program, an outgrowth of his conviction that every church should care for its own members as well as residents of the surrounding community. Under this program, a nurse affiliated with the church serves as a personal health counselor, a health educator, a referral source or liaison to community services, and as a facilitator who can recruit and train volunteers and support groups within the congregation. Each church is encouraged to form a “Health Cabinet” in which lay members can offer helping services.
One model is exemplified by the Lutheran Church of the Atonement in Barrington, Illinois. For five years the congregation has been yoked with Lutheran General Hospital in meeting health-care needs, as well as accenting wholeness in daily living. The nurse, Lois Coldeway, speaks of her role in these terms: “The most valuable thing I do is listen for what a person’s needs are, seeking to be a reflection of God’s love. The activities grow out of the expressed needs.”
One important activity of the parish nurse program is to provide services for the elderly in the congregation and community. The church offers a meal, followed by Bible studies and social activities. Blood pressure screening is frequently done before and after services. According to the pastor, Said Ailabouni, there is a quarterly service of healing, often related to confession and forgiveness. One sermon consisted of a dialogue between the pastor and a cancer patient. Community referrals and resources are utilized, including hospice care when needed.
“Problems arise faster than we can handle them,” Ailabouni says. “There simply is no end to how broad the program can be. It will require vigilance, education, and prayer.”
Two congregations just two blocks apart on Chicago’s north side, Lake View Presbyterian and Lakeview Lutheran, participate in a joint parish nurse arrangement. Sue Cox, a registered nurse, divides her working time between the congregations and the community, and has stimulated a variety of endeavors: a lunch meal for senior adults, accompanied by brief talks on such subjects as hypothermia, safety in the winter, living wills, grieving, medication, adjusting to limitations, diet and nutrition, cancer prevention. Cox also spends time with children of the parishes, encouraging them to take care of their bodies and make informed health-care decisions. In a drop-in center, she has discussed personal hygiene, sex education, AIDS, smoking, drinking, stress, and diet.
A congregation that has sought to deal compassionately and insightfully with persons struggling with addictions is the Covenant Church of Long Island, New Rochelle, New York. A smaller congregation of 60 members, there are upwards of 300 who participate regularly in the various meetings scheduled: AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), NA (Narcotics Anonymous), OA (Overeaters Anonymous), Al-Anon (spouses or significant others who live or work with alcoholics), and Co-Da (codependency). According to the pastor, Michael Hardin, these activities serve to fulfill the biblical mandate to care for the poor and marginalized. Hardin believes that “reaching out to addictive persons is one form of the church’s being a healing community. We are under obligation to bring the gospel to those who need it. Being the church in this way has taught us much about compassion.”
A half-century after Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “Christ comes near to us in the sick,” churches are returning to their roots of care for the sick and afflicted. For those who think it might be too difficult to get involved in the health needs of the church and community, Bonhoeffer offered an ideal way to start: “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.”
Selected Bibliographical Resources
An expanding volume of literature is available to the pastor, Christian educator, church leader, and congregation in grappling with the current health crisis. Many of these titles relate directly to the role of the churches in linking religion with medicine.
Robert H. Blank, Rationing Medicine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). A focus on problems and stresses in the health-care system of the U.S.
Larry R. Churchill, Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). A case is made for justice and compassion in health care.
Joseph C. Hough and Barbara G. Wheeler, The Congregation As a Focus for Theological Education (Decatur, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1988). See especially “Pastoral Care and the Study of the Congregation.”
Bruce Hilton, First, Do No Harm: Wrestling With the New Medicine’s Life and Death Dilemmas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991). This volume, to be published soon, explores from a Christian perspective several bioethical issues—transplants, life-support systems, genetic engineering, surrogate parenting, euthanasia, right to privacy, durable power of attorney, abortion pill.
Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, eds., On Moral Medicine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987). A diversified collection of essays that offer theological perspectives in medical-ethical issues.
Bruce Larson, There’s a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1981). A book about “wellness” and “wholeness” rather than about illness, written to encourage the Christian community as “a fellowship of priests.”
Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux, eds., Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). A collection of essays concerned with the interface of medicine and religious faiths.
See especially the contributions by Vaux, “Topics at the Interface of Medicine and Theology” and “Theological Foundations of Medical Ethics” and by F. Dean Leuking, “The Congregation: Place of Healing and Sending.”
Granger E. Westberg and Jill Westberg McNamara, The Parish Nurse: How to Start a Parish Nurse Program in Your Church (Park Ridge, Ill.: Parish Nurse Resource Center, 1987). An indispensable manual for any congregation that may consider implementing the parish nurse plan.
Walter E. Wiest, ed., Health Care and Its Costs: A Challenge for the Church (New York: University Press of America, 1988). A collection of essays commissioned by the Task Force on Health Costs/Policies of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). All 14 essays are worthy of study and discussion in the churches.
For your church
As churches develop their own resource centers to offer materials to congregants on the current health-care crisis, these journals and packets may assist:
AIDS and the Ministry of the Church. Published by the United Methodist General Board of Discipleship, P.O. Box 189, Nashville, TN 37202.
Harvard Medical School Newsletter (monthly). Department of Continuing Education, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115.
Hastings Center Report (bimonthly). The Hastings Center, 255 Elm Road, Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510.
Health Care and Caring: Aids for Study Groups (1989), edited by Barbara Peterson. From the Covenant Resource Center, The Evangelical Covenant Church, 5101 N. Francisco Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625.
Nutrition Action: Health Letter (10 times a year). Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1501 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036–1499.
Responding to the Challenges of AIDS: A Resource Guide for Congregations, edited by Mary E. Klassen. Mennonite Mutual Aid, 1110 N. Main St., Goshen, IN 46526.
Second Opinion: Health, Faith, and Ethics (three times a year). The Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, 676 N. St. Clair, Suite 450, Chicago, IL 60611.
A helpful visual aid on churches working together and individually in the field of health care is Congregational Health Partnership: A Focus on the Congregation as a Health Place. Parish Nurse Resource Center, Lutheran General Health Care System, 1700 Western Avenue, Park Ridge, IL 60068–1174.
Compiled by F. Burton Nelson.
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Also reviewed in this section:
All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, by Kenneth A. Myers
Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, by Marva J. Dawn
A Stranger in the Kingdom, by Howard Frank Mosher
Dictionary of Christianity in America
The Wizard’s Tide, by Frederick Buechner
The Illuminating Icon, by Anthony Ugolnik
A Latin Great Awakening
Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, by David Martin (Basil Blackwell, 342 pp.; $39.95, hardcover). Is Latin America Becoming Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth, by David Stoll (University of California Press, 424 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Samuel Escobar, Thomley B. Wood Professor of Missiology, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
In the last three decades there has been a remarkable growth of Protestantism in Latin America, especially of evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Yet it has become commonplace among academics in the North and the South to follow the interpretative line of liberation and ecumenical theologians and to attack or dismiss fast-growing evangelical churches as fundamentalists, using that word in an overtly derogatory way. The well-organized communication system of the Catholic Left and the WCC-related bodies have added their quota of criticism by stressing the North American connections and the supposed social passivity of these evangelicals and Pentecostals.
These books by David Martin and David Stoll will no doubt provoke controversy in all these circles. If taken seriously, they will help to clarify some issues and dismiss some myths. Though Martin is well known as a sociologist of religion, the fact that his study has been sponsored by Peter Berger will subject his book to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in liberal and liberationist circles. On the other hand, David Stoll had very good credentials with the Latin American Left as a result of his previous book, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?, allegedly an exposé of Wycliffe Bible Translators, published in Spanish by DESCO, a German-financed leftist think tank in Lima, Peru. I have serious doubts that DESCO will translate this second book of Stoll’s.
Though both authors show deep interest and even enthusiasm about their subject—to the point of having processed patiently an incredible amount of information—for them Latin American Protestantism is basically a subject for research, and neither has a missiological perspective. Both books, however, will be very helpful for the practitioner of mission, the church statesman, and the student of Latin American affairs.
The Facts And Figures Of Revolution
Stoll had two goals when he conceived this book: “I wanted to explain the Evangelical awakening in Latin America to nonbelievers, myself included … [and] I wanted to warn evangelicals … against allowing their missions to be subordinated into the militaristic and immoral policies emanating from Washington.”
The amount of information Stoll has accumulated is considerable and provides a good foundation for the conclusions at which he arrives. The evidence makes him dismiss the “conspiracy theories” with which the Roman Catholic hierarchies, both conservative and progressive, try to explain away the presence and unexpected growth of evangelicals and Pentecostals.
Abundant evidence also gives ground to his conclusion in relation to his second concern. Several Latin American evangelicals, like this reviewer, agree that Stoll’s warning should be taken very seriously: “To the extent that the religious right’s visions of holy war continue to infuse American foreign policy, the activities of all evangelicals will be identified with it. Missionaries will continue to face accusations of working for the U.S. government, and they will have mainly themselves to blame, by failing to take a stand against the perversion of their message.”
David Martin’s book majors in interpretation and has been more selective in the presentation of facts. Martin uses Latin American Protestantism as a broad frame to interpret “the four hundred year clash between the Hispanic imperium and the Anglo-Saxon imperium” and “the dramatically different ways in which Catholic cultures and Protestant cultures have entered into what we call modernity.”
For contrast, he also provides a sociological interpretation of the evolution of Protestantism in Europe, using the rise of Methodism as a model for understanding Pentecostalism in Latin America.
Martin’s conclusions are especially valuable for the missiologist. In relation to the Catholic background, he concludes that “as far as the larger ethnic groupings are concerned their openness to Protestantism depends on the depth of Catholic coverage currently provided.” And in relation to the sociological conditions, “By far the largest conduit for evangelical Protestantism is provided by the massive movement of people from the countryside or hacienda to the mega-city. The new society now emerging in Latin America has to do with movement, and evangelicals constitute a movement.”
As it is to be expected from this type of study, Martin and Stoll are especially interested in the social effect of the evangelical presence and message. Pentecostalism is explained by Martin as a way in which “millions of people are absorbed within a protective social capsule where they acquire new concepts of self and new models of initiative and voluntary organization.” He thinks that like Methodism at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Pentecostalism flourishes today in Latin America as a “temporary efflorescence of voluntary religiosity which accompanies a stage in industrialization and/or urbanization,” but he points out that the European experience may not necessarily provide a universal paradigm.
On the other hand, Stoll believes that “the history of social movements is replete with shifts from a redemptive (saving one’s soul) to a transformative (changing the world) emphasis, or vice-versa, often after the first generation.”
As he speculates about the future social effect of evangelicals and Pentecostals in Latin America, he envisages three possible scenarios: a confrontation with the state that would make them a redemptive force; social mobility that would create a dynamic rising middle sector to change society by negotiation and leadership ability; or, third, a failure to become a major force for social change because of sectarianism and a refusal to assume political responsibilities.
Though he thinks that the third “is the most defensible scenario at present,” he also believes that “evangelical Protestants are giving Latin Americans a new form of social organization and a new way to express their hopes,” thus acting as “survival vehicles” in a time of serious social crisis. “Where traditional social organization is breaking up,” concludes Stoll, “evangelical churches constitute new, more flexible groups in which participation is voluntary, where leadership is charismatic, and which are therefore more adaptable to rapidly changing conditions.”
Bourgeois Liberation
Martin and Stoll also develop a fascinating critique of the legacy and significance of liberation theology. Martin reminds us that “[l]iberation theology is a major rival to Pentecostalism,” a reason that explains why the more cautious members of the Catholic hierarchy have accepted it in spite of its critical attitude toward traditional Catholicism. He then points out that liberation theology has not been successful in stopping the Pentecostal advance. “The reason,” says Martin, “is that however much it represents ‘an option for the poor’ taken up by hundreds of thousands of the poor themselves, that option is most eloquently formulated by radical intellectuals … not usually ‘of the people.’ Liberation theology has a decidedly middle class and radical intellectual accent alien to the localized needs of ‘the poor.’ ”
Stoll agrees with Martin: “The central exercise in liberation theology, consciousness-raising, raises a tangle of issues. To begin with there is a risk of failing to speak to the actual needs of the poor as opposed to idealized versions of those needs.”
Stoll comments that the kind of defiance of the established order that liberation theologians encourage among the poor “have been suicidal in many times and places.” His criticism becomes acid when he points out that “given this fact of life out in the hard places where liberation theology must prove itself, the frequent assumptions of the need for revolutionary upheaval indicate that more or less safely situated intellectuals have had an outsized role in its production.”
Stoll’s description of the alternative role played by evangelicals in these conflicts is worth careful consideration: “Evangelicals also captured the poor emotionally, in ways highly politicized Christians often failed to. In the most difficult situations, calls for revolutionary commitment were not engaging the religiosity of the people and sustaining them through long, hard years of struggle for survival, at least not in the way that evangelical sects could. As revolutionary visions faded into the grim reality of endless political violence, governments encouraged evangelicals to pick up the pieces.”
Not all the conclusions reached by Martin and Stoll will resist the confrontation with facts that they only know partially and that insiders understand better. Evangelical and Catholic missiologists will assess critically interpretations that lack the illumination that theology can provide. Sociological and anthropological studies are not the source from where missiologists derive their agenda, but they can be very helpful to understand better the empirical realities of the Christian mission.
Giving A Bop To Pop
All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, by Kenneth A. Myers (Crossway, 213 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, a writer living in Colorado Springs.
Asking American Christians to analyze popular culture is a bit like asking a fish to evaluate water. Even if the water is highly polluted, the fish can’t distinguish between the endangered self and the toxic environment.
Into these turbid waters dives Ken Myers, whose book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes urges Christians to understand pop culture—that omnipresent wall of images, sound, and hot air that includes everything from “Donahue” to Madonna to Cosmopolitan. Myers describes our present challenge not in terms of fish and water, however, but in terms of Christians and lions.
“The challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecutions and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries,” writes Myers, who edits newsletters on culture and public policy and formerly served as editor of the now-deceased Eternity magazine. But he is convinced today’s followers of Christ don’t need to be devoured, and the bulk of All God’s Children is committed to helping us get a grip on the brave new world pop culture has given us.
This Is Not Your Father’S World
The story of Lot in Sodom and Paul’s discussion of meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 10 provide the theological framework in which Myers discusses how twentieth-century Christians should cope with our culture. Like Lot and his family, American Christians have submitted themselves to the influences of a godless culture. While we haven’t joined a coven or New Age cult, he claims that we have bowed down to the gods of immediacy, diversion, and distraction. We haven’t endured death, violence, and rape, but we have stood idly by as the culture merchants have persuaded us to sacrifice art for entertainment and to give up personality for “celebrityism.” The surprising thing is that all this has happened with our permission and at the electronic hands of the very gadgets we trust to help us relax.
Not that Christians aren’t concerned; they are. Some boycott mainstream culture, while others create a “parasite” parallel Christian culture. But both strategies make the same mistake: focusing on pop culture’s content while ignoring its greater, nastier power—its sensibilities.
Advocates of the boycott approach won’t find a handy hit list here. Myers calls us “not to change the world, but to understand it,” a rare challenge in these days of shoot-from-the-hip evangelical culture critiques.
Nor will advocates of a copy-cat Christian subculture find much support. Whether it’s “Christian” rock music, “Christian” soap operas, or worship music that takes its cues from Barry Manilow, Myers argues that this carbon-copy approach “takes all its cues from its secular counterpart, but sanitizes and customizes it with ‘Jesus language.’ ” Myers effectively argues that such efforts further reveal the church’s enslavement to cultural forms that “effectively cancel out the content you’re trying to communicate.”
Balanced Diet
How, as cultural beings, should we then live? Myers has plenty of good advice. He begins with Paul’s exhortation to the troubled believers in Corinth: all things are permissible, but not everything that is permissible is constructive. He calls us out of our comfort and couch-potatoism into a “culture of transcendence.” He begs us to consider our ever-growing appetite for cultural junk food, urging us to expand our tastes by substituting our unhealthy diet of TV sitcoms and movies of spectacle for a balanced diet that includes art, music, literature—and even TV shows and films—whose quality and values reflect our inherent sense of nature’s ordered beauty and our Spirit-illumined sense of truth.
Along the way, Myers delivers a solid analysis of folk, high, and pop cultures. He reaffirms the validity of making qualitative aesthetic judgments, and as if to prove his point makes quite a few himself. And he challenges those who have given in to cultural relativism, sounding a bit like Allan Bloom when he holds classical and contemporary music to the same high standard: “When I say I ‘like’ Bach, and you say you ‘like’ Bon Jovi, are we really using the same verb?”
Myers clearly shows that our cultural choices mean more than the difference between “The Simpsons” and “Roseanne.” They are part of a bigger whole. “If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives.”
While Myers has not offered an approved list of TV shows, films, and CDs, he has performed a greater service to the church. He has articulated the major concepts in which each of us can work out our life between the “eschatological parentheses” of Christ’s resurrection and his return. “The main question raised by popular culture concerns the most edifying way to spend one’s time,” writes Myers. “If we cannot expect our culture to be a holy enterprise, we can at least try to avoid participating in its profanities.”
Book Briefs
God’S Health Plan
Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn wants Christians to rediscover the Sabbath. In Keeping the Sabbath Wholly (Eerdmans, $10.95), she argues that by focusing on beauty, worship, and rest on one day, we can be more aware and faithful on the other six days of the week. The Sabbath can become a garden park amid “the technization of life,” returning us to a place of tranquillity and intimacy with God.
Even in the midst of the current renewal of interest in spiritual disciplines, the importance of Sabbath practices sometimes gets overlooked. And we are the poorer for it. We have forfeited the wholeness that comes from observing God’s intended rhythm of working six days and setting apart one day for worship, rest, festivity, and relationships. The solution Dawn offers is a “quartet” of Sabbath functions: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting.
In this popularly written and practical book, Dawn is more reformer than scold. She weights her discussions on the side of the benefits of Sabbath keeping, not the perils of neglect. Anecdotes from her years of personal grappling with finding a place for Sabbath show that the battle to guard a Sabbath time of rest, worship, and recreation will be hard won. She has found that abstaining from work weekly (the Hebrew shabbat means primarily “to cease or desist,” she notes) not only allows her to honor God but also provides a means for keeping her values on track.
While Dawn writes with the fervency of a convert, she avoids the temptation of legalism. Hers is a an attractive, sane vision of Sabbath rhythms. It grows out of her reading of Scripture, research into a wealth of Jewish Sabbath traditions, and reflection on her own Christian experience.
But some things would have helped this volume. For all its helpful suggestions about practice, the book avoids almost completely the issues surrounding the when of Sabbath keeping. At least some discussion about the controversies of church history could have strengthened her approach.
Overall, Dawn gives the interested Sabbath keeper wise advice on how to honor a day Jewish tradition greets with the anticipation reserved for a queen or beloved bride.
By Timothy K. Jones.
Troubled Kingdom
The United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common called a new Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Walter Andrews. It had not been easy to find someone willing to come to the remote village in Vermont, but the former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force seemed eager. He was so qualified the search committee made its decision after only a few telephone interviews. They were in for a surprise.
Their new pastor was black. By bringing his teenage son, he raised the black population in Kingdom County to two. Thus Howard Frank Mosher sets up the narrative tension in his novel A Stranger in the Kingdom (Doubleday, $18.95).
The story is told from the point of view of Jim Kinneson, 13-year-old son of the local newspaper editor, and it is richly evocative of small-town boyhood in 1952. That summer, though, brought more than the gentle joys of baseball and trout fishing.
When a 17-year-old runaway comes to Kingdom, Andrews tries to find a place for her to stay. But no one in the congregation will have her, so he must take her in until another arrangement can be found. Tongues wag, but gossip is just the start of the trouble.
The girl’s brutal murder opens the door of the town’s soul, as it were, allowing ugly demons of racial hatred to escape. The trial, reminiscent of the one in To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes a study in fear and prejudice.
Mosher’s well-written story engages the reader at several levels. First, it is a page-turner. And just below this narrative lurk questions that insist on breaking through to trouble the reader: Why do we fear strangers? What accounts for the prejudice within us that seems more than ready to express itself given the slightest excuse?
But what the novel really offers is a sense of community. Mosher populates his town with characters that would please Dickens—they are not only memorable but true, faithful to both the blessedness and cussedness of ordinary humanity. But for all their individual peculiarities, they are tied together. Invisible bonds of a shared history somehow hold them and won’t let them go. The story of Kingdom Common, therefore, becomes a parable of the common life of another kingdom, of the way a certain history binds together selfish individuals, so often strangers to one another, into an extended family that witnesses to the power of grace over human brokenness.
By Donald McCullough, author of Finding Happiness in the Most Unlikely Places (InterVarsity).
A Dazzling Array
Normally, if you opened a book and found the Huguenots, Humanae Vitae, and Rex Humbard all discussed within two pages, you would assume someone at the book bindery had made a colossal mistake. Further, if you discovered that the book could describe a Reformed church body, papal encyclical, and Pentecostal televangelist with the same accuracy and evenhandedness, you would assume the book would be too bland to attract attention or sell well.
In the case of the recently released Dictionary of Christianity in America (InterVarsity, $39.95), however, both assumptions would be wrong. The DCA is instead a welcome surprise in a field (American religious history) crowded with reference works.
The volume’s 2,400 entries cover everything “from Christopher Columbus to the Crystal Cathedral,” the book jacket claims, and once inside, the reader will find the diversity impressive. With few exceptions, the DCA describes the movements (like Black Catholics), people (like Aimee Semple McPherson), and practices (like foot washing) that have shaped American Christianity. The list of over 400 contributors is virtually a catalogue of active scholars in American religious history.
In the preface, coordinating editor Daniel G. Reid admits the book’s bias toward evangelicalism and the United States; readers with expertise in other traditions or from Canada or Latin America will find gaps. And sharp-eyed historians will quibble over occasional omissions (for example, James Caughey, the enormously popular nineteenth-century Methodist evangelist who greatly influenced Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth).
Forget all that. The Dictionary of Christianity in America provides clear, concise information on a dazzling array of items and packages it attractively in one volume. And the cross references, occasional diagrams, and introductory overviews take you from merely consulting it to roaming around in it for fun. InterVarsity Press, not known for reference books, has created a lasting work for historians, pastors, and any American who needs to understand his or her religious heritage or settle a bet.
DCA will not replace the monumental Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or the colorful Handbook to Christianity in America. But it deserves a place beside them. How else will you find out that in seventeenth-century Florida, Franciscan friars worked with an astounding 30,000 Christian Native Americans? Or that in 1971 evangelist Billy Zeoli changed the spiritual outlook of Gerald Ford?
At $39.95, DCA’s price may seem steep. But skip your next dinner for two and buy it.
By Kevin Miller, editor of CHRISTIAN HISTORY magazine.
A Wintery Journey
“And as they traveled the soft, steep way downward into their dreams, it was always snowing.” It seems to me that this sentence, which ends the first chapter of The Wizard’s Tide (Harper & Row, $13.95), represents not only the essence of this book, but also provides a fitting epigram for Frederick Buechner’s entire corpus.
The “they” of the quote are Teddy Schroeder and his younger sister, Bean, and this short novel takes these children, their parents, and their grandparents from summer to Christmas in 1936. It is a Depression-era story that explores the complex relationships and tensions within a family whose men have lost their jobs and their dignity.
Though Buechner ostensibly retells the story told by Teddy as an adult, the narrative comes from the perspective of Teddy as an 11-year-old. It is therefore straightforward and unsophisticated. With Teddy we experience the specialness of daily life, the magic of birthdays and holidays, and the once-in-a-lifetime event that widens and deepens Teddy’s consciousness—both emotionally and spiritually.
Particularly through Teddy’s observations and his father’s actions, the book portrays a special kind of sadness, one present in both Buechner’s life and in our age as a whole. But, as in most of Buechner’s work, there is a level of faith that undergirds—or perhaps haunts—the narrative and mitigates the sadness, leaving us hopeful (if not actually cheerful).
That Buechner accomplishes all this in only 100 pages is remarkable. The book is very finely crafted, with a strong sense of emotional accumulation and a climax that comes inevitably, though without any sense of authorial intrusion. After many years of successful experimentation, Buechner has here attempted and achieved the hard-won simplicity reminiscent of The Old Man and the Sea and The Great Gatsby.
At its heart, Buechner’s artistic vision tends to explore cold and darkness rather than warmth and light; Buechner’s work moves downward rather than upward. He does not make the confident assertion of Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” but echoes the puzzled, fearful cry of the disciples in the boat, “Who then is this, that the wind and sea obey him?”
By Pat Hargis, assistant professor of literature, Judson College, Elgin, Illinois.
Orphaned Orthodox
The Orthodox church has been called an orphan on American shores. While Catholic, mainline, and evangelical churches battle for the spotlight, Orthodoxy remains on the sidelines. Peter Ugolnik is trying to change that.
Professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ugolnik wrote The Illuminating Icon (Eerdmans, $18.95) “to introduce Americans to the spiritual wealth of the Russian [Orthodox] Church.”
Ugolnik feels that because of its theology and recent history, the Orthodox church has four things to teach us. First, Orthodoxy can remind our culture, oriented as it is to the printed word, of the importance of image. Second, Russian Orthodoxy can show individualistic American Christians the wonder and glory of Christian community. Third, Ugolnik believes that Orthodox liturgy can bring a better balance to sermon-centered services of the West, with their undue emphasis on the intellect. And fourth, Russian Orthodoxy can teach us about beauty, which they see as an aspect of holiness.
Ugolnik’s arguments are elaborate and nuanced. The themes of individualism versus community, rationalism versus mystery, and dominance versus submission reverberate throughout the book. In fact, there are moments when the veil is momentarily lifted, and the Western reader is awed by the mystery of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Ugolnik, unfortunately, fails to correlate some of his lofty descriptions of Orthodoxy with the stubborn facts of history. In truth, the Orthodox can be just as factious as the rest of us. Furthermore, in spite of Orthodoxy’s sympathy with theologies that exalt the image and castigate the word, evangelicals must continually probe which images are good, how they affect us, and when they become idolatrous. Protestants may tend toward rationalistic religion, but the Orthodox can promote a foggy faith that turns theology into a warm fuzzy. Our Lord is probably unhappy with both extremes.
By Mark Galli, associate editor of LEADERSHIP journal.
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Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Basic Satanism
Selfishness and immorality are far more consistent with Satan’s strategies than drinking blood or drawing pentagrams.
—Al Menconi in Today’s Music: A Window to Your Child’s Soul
Faith Without Passion
Very few of us [Christians] could say with Paul’s conviction, “For me to live is Christ.” If we experienced this as a transforming joy, a life-bearing truth, we would not be so generally passive about it.
—John Garvey, quoted by Martin Marty in Context (May 1, 1990)
A Prayer
Thou who mad’st the mighty clock
Of the great world go;
Mad’st its pendulum swing and rock,
Ceaseless to and fro;
Thou whose will doth push and draw
Every orb in heaven,
Help me move by higher law
In my spirit graven.
Like a planet let me swing—
With intention strong;
In my orbit rushing sing Jubilant along;
Help me answer in my course
To my seasons due;
Lord of every stayless force,
Make my Willing true.
—George MacDonald, from Discovering the Character of God (compiled by Michael R. Phillips)
No End To Growth
The landscape gardener looked surprised. “Will you say that again, ma’am?”
The lady-of-the-house waved a hand to include the several-acre woodland she was having landscaped. “I want a picture of how it will all look when it’s finished—fish pond and rose garden included. Could it look like this sketch in Better Homes and Gardens?”
“Hard to say, you know,” the man said.… We’re dealing here with living things. I can show you a pattern, I guess, but these things grow. Okay? So you’re going to have to keep on planting, cultivating, and trimming. Who’s to say what it will look like some day? It’s just never going to get finished growing!” …
“I had no idea I was hiring a philosopher,” [my friend] said over coffee.
“But that little speech reminded me that growth doesn’t stop when we reach our full height.”
—Julie Masters Bacher in The Quiet Heart
To obey is better than sacrifice
The utter obedience required in the military is accepted as necessary, even when one’s life may be the price of that obedience. Why does the Christian fail to practice the same obedience in spiritual matters?
—Allan C. Emery, Jr., in A Turtle on a Fencepost
In Search Of The Thinking Christian
The church can’t be blamed for all the ailments of the world. On the other hand, I’m quite willing to concede and insist that the church has unnecessarily accommodated a failure of cognitive analysis. For the past half generation evangelical churches have gravitated toward the experiential and even the emotional at the expense of the intellectual.
—Carl F. H. Henry in Tabletalk (January 1990)
Getting Our Hands Dirty
We are the agents of the Creative Spirit in this world. Real advance in the spiritual life, then, means accepting this vocation with all it involves. Not merely turning over the pages of an engineering magazine and enjoying the pictures, but putting on overalls and getting on with the job. The real spiritual life must be horizontal as well as vertical.
—Evelyn Underhill in
The Spiritual Life
Doing It Our Way
We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they’re small and mean enough so that we can feel in control.
—P. D. James in
Devices and Desires
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The judicial system is making antiabortion demonstrators think twice, as many are paying a heavy price.
In Pittsburgh, Bob Irwin must wear an electronic device around his ankle 24 hours a day for the next several months. He is under house arrest for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic last year. The authorities have installed surveillance equipment in his bedroom phone to monitor his whereabouts. He is allowed to go back and forth to work. He is permitted to go to church on Sundays, but not on Wednesday nights.
“I was told that higher authorities felt the Wednesday services were political,” he explains, adding that the services actually consist merely of praise, worship, and prayer. Irwin is considering going to a midweek service anyway, something he says could cost him two to seven years in jail. It is a difficult choice for Irwin and his wife, who are parents of four preteen children.
In Milwaukee, some of those who have participated in similar illegal demonstrations are having their driver’s licenses taken away for five years for refusing to pay fines. In Portland, after being found guilty following a jury trial, Randy Alcorn left the pastorate so authorities could not garnish his wages.
And in California, hundreds have been arrested for trespassing at abortion clinics. Among them are about a dozen employees of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. One of them, Steve Kipp, the father of four children aged five and under, has been sentenced to over seven months in prison, with no chance of reduction, per the judge’s order.
From coast to coast, those who have lent their bodies to the rescue movement are paying a price for it. And even some who oppose the concept of illegally blocking the entrances to abortion clinics believe that price is too high. “The punishment Operation Rescue people have received has been barbarous,” said columnist Nat Hentoff of the liberal Village Voice.
Hentoff, who opposes both legal abortion and illegal prolife activities, said he is particularly concerned about pain-compliance techniques routinely used on protesters who go “limp” instead of cooperating. Said Hentoff, “The head of a [Los Angeles] police unit who trained cops in the use of pain techniques actually said in a court deposition that it was okay to [use the techniques on] Operation Rescue people because they’re religious” and “consider it necessary to absorb pain.”
Trying Times
But the rough treatment does not stop when rescuers leave the paddy wagon. Prolife advocates in southern California note that actor Martin Sheen, after his eighteenth conviction for antinuclear protest, got 3 hours of community service; some first-time antiabortion activists got 300 hours. Others have received jail terms of 30 days or more for trespassing, which, in another context, would typically draw a minor fine.
“There is no protest group in this nation that is being treated with anywhere near the degree of harshness that we are receiving,” said Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue (OR), (see interview below).
Said Sam Casey, an attorney with the California-based Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, “There have been more Christians put in jail on behalf of the unborn than for any other civil-rights movement in this country’s history.”
Perhaps most important, attorneys representing prolife demonstrators say they have consistently been denied the opportunity to present an intelligent defense. Such a defense rests on the premise that a fetus is a human life with civil rights, including the right to survive. Judges have routinely barred this premise from juries’ consideration by dismissing as irrelevant any testimony regarding defendants’ motives.
OR Founder Terry Unabashed
A coalition of prolife organizations at a major rally this summer turned down the opportunity to hear from Randall Terry, the controversial founder of Operation Rescue (OR). Many in the prolife movement have distanced themselves not only from OR’s tactics, but especially from what they regard as Terry’s inflammatory rhetoric. As evidenced by the following interview, Terry will never be accused of pulling punches.
In your view, why has the judicial system been so tough on Operation Rescue?
Politically, our view on child killing is not the popular one right now. Most other activists find sympathizers in the media and in the judiciary. We find virtually none. From a spiritual perspective, there’s no question in my mind there are forces of darkness behind the judicial oppression of Christians. I believe rescuers are the first fruits of God handing his people over to be oppressed. He has promised that when innocent blood is shed, especially the blood of children, he will hand his own people over to their enemies.
Have the court actions against the rescue movement slowed its momentum?
It has slowed rescue down some, but 1990 is a year for us to catch our breath. I believe in 1991 there’ll be fresh growth. We’re having another [Washington] D.C. project in November. We expect hundreds to participate.
Several big-name leaders have lent their names to the cause, but so far none has actually participated in a rescue. Does that frustrate you?
I wish the whole Christian church would rescue. We have the sheer numbers to grind the killing to a halt. But people have to make that decision on their own before God. They’re not going to face me on the day of judgment.
If you had known when you started OR what you know today, what would you have done differently?
I would have made more of an effort to mobilize Christians to defend rescuers. That’s why we’re starting the Christian Defense Coalition, which will mobilize Christians to write, phone, picket, visit, have prayer vigils in front of judges’ offices or homes to hold them accountable for our treatment. When the Christian community rises up with a voice of outrage over either police brutality or judicial tyranny, the tyrants have a tendency to back down. We have to send a message that we will not tolerate oppression, that if you mess with a few of us, you’re going to deal with a lot of us.
Yet a large segment of the Christian community doesn’t care to defend OR. They feel that the rescue approach is wrongheaded.
Historically, silence and accommodation has done nothing to help the oppressed. It only strengthens the hands of the oppressors. That is the lesson of Nazi Germany and of the Eastern Bloc countries. Hitler went after the insane, the feeble, the elderly. The Christian community, by not taking action, contributed to Hitler’s strengthening and its own weakening, and ultimately to the death of 30 to 40 million people. When the Christian community tolerates the oppression of a few, it paves the way for the oppression of the many. It doesn’t stop with rescuers. Today, people are being arrested for praying or picketing on sidewalks, something they have a constitutional right to do.
But the nonrescue wing of the prolife movement has not exactly tolerated abortion. It merely maintains that the rescue approach hurts the chances of political success.
The church has played Mr. Nice Guy. We’ve said, “Let’s play within the system. Let’s be nice. Let’s not be confrontational.” And America has slid into the jaws of hell. The Christian community does not control the levers of power in any major institution in this country. We are in the back of the humanist bus. There are people who hate our God and his Word, who are determined to push the church into irrelevance. The way they are doing it is by terror, and it has started with rescuers. You strike out at one group of people and then you look at the others and say, “Do you want this to happen to you?”
Do you really think it helps your cause, though, to call Supreme Court justices “Nazi judges”?
We’ve got to stop being like Neville Chamberlain and start being like Winston Churchill. Chamberlain wanted to appease Hitler, wanted to win him, to reason with him. He never understood you cannot appease someone who is dedicated to your destruction. When we have godless enemies of Christ who are sitting in judgment on the Supreme Court bench, why are we concerned about winning their favor instead of calling them what they are: tyrants?
That goes for the whole Supreme Court?
No. But there are some—Blackmun and Stephens are enemies of Christ. When history’s final editorial light is cast upon them 50 or 100 years from now, they’re going to be remembered with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Harry Blackmun opened the floodgate of bloodshed that will cost 30 million children their lives. He is a vile human being. Why should we wait for the next generation to say what’s true?
Cyrus Zal, who defended prolife demonstrators in El Cajon, California, is serving a 290-day sentence—200 of those days for refusing to pay a $10,000 fine—for contempt of court. Zal said he was cited for contempt because, in violation of the judge’s instructions, he “asked a police officer if he’d ever been an unborn child,” and asked an abortion clinic worker “if she was familiar with those places where two people go in and only one comes out alive.”
But it is not just strident prolife attorneys such as Zal who say they have smelled a rat in the judicial system. Los Angeles County public defender Jeffrey Crowther, who defended the Focus on the Family employees, was chosen not for his prolife credentials but by the luck of the draw.
Said Crowther, “I just wanted to represent my clients as best I could, but the cards were stacked against us from the beginning.” Crowther observed that in the rescue cases he has followed, judges’ rulings—from pretrial motions to instructions to the jury—seemed uncannily uniform. Though he said he had no “direct evidence,” he suggested the possibility that judges had gotten together to discuss how to handle these cases. “I’ve heard Operation Rescue is investigating this,” he said. “If they’re not, they should be.”
Crowther said his experience has changed his perspective on the judicial system: “To feel [as if] the judicial system was set up differently for Operation Rescue [is] very upsetting.”
The Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom’s Casey offers various explanations for the harsh treatment of antiabortion trespassers. For one thing, he alleges that judges must pass political tests to move up in the system, and those tests, as of the present, require a prochoice position.
And, according to Casey, rescuers are being punished for slowing down an already clogged system by refusing to plea bargain. He said he also suspects the tough sentences are based not on what protesters have done, but on judges’ suspicions of what they will do. “This is unjust,” said Casey. “You can’t be punished for a crime you haven’t committed.”
Chilling Effect?
Undoubtedly, the consequences of illegal abortion protests have caused many to think harder about whether to participate, or at least about making better preparations. Businessman Rex Moses, well known in Austin and Corpus Christi, Texas, for his leadership in the rescue movement, made over $200,000 in 1988. He left his business and sold most of what he owned to help finance rescue activities. He owes over $1 million after losing two civil lawsuits, but he has claimed, “I would die before I would pay them a cent.”
According to Operation Rescue spokesperson Mary Ann Baney, the pace of rescue has slowed to about eight to ten occurrences a month, down from about three times that many a year ago. But, she said, over 100 rescue organizations, none of which have any official ties to any other, remain active around the country.
Operation Rescue’s paid staff, once as high as 23, is down to 3. OR can accept donations, but has stopped soliciting funds, the result of a $50,000 judgment against OR in a lawsuit filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW). (According to OR’s CarolAnn Krzykowski, the money is due the New York attorney general, since NOW suffered no damages.)
New Directions
Another result of the crackdown in the courts has been diversification of prolife activities. The organization Life Chains has succeeded in getting tens of thousands to stand in line on city streets wielding antiabortion placards.
The New Jersey-based Operation Goliath has been established with the strategy of nonviolently closing “the [abortion] mills one at a time and for good,” said organizer Skip Robokoff, pastor of the Fort Lee Gospel (Christian & Missionary Alliance) Church. Robokoff called the approach “multipronged and omnidirectional.” It emphasizes raising awareness in the community through contacting clergy and through aggressive distribution of Christian literature, as well as street preaching.
Operation Goliath demonstrates at the homes of doctors who perform abortions, an increasingly common tactic among prolife groups.
According to Robokoff, the group has cut by 90 percent the business at one local clinic. Robokoff said other tenants at the office complex where the clinic is housed are leaving and that insurance rates have skyrocketed, due to insurance agents’ fears of violence.
OR founder Terry recently has helped launch the Washington, D.C.-based Christian Defense Coalition, whose purposes include raising awareness of “judicial oppression” of Christians and motivating believers to put pressure on authorities on behalf of those being punished for their prolife activities.
Meanwhile, Joseph Foreman, one of the organizers of Operation Rescue, is one of eight “Prisoners of Christ” being jailed in Atlanta. This organization, he said, emphasizes noncooperation with the legal system “at the points at which it defends child-killing.” As of last month, the organization was aware of 79 people serving time for antiabortion activities.
Foreman said that if Christians would take seriously the biblical teachings on material things, they would be “less vulnerable to lawsuits and the consequences of losing a job.” His organization is trying to recruit as many as possible—particularly the single and retired—to be willing to spend time in jail for the sake of unborn children.
He said this emphasis is a result of his philosophical struggle with the rescue rationale, which, he said, in theory would justify violence to prevent abortions. Though he does not view antiabortion violence as morally wrong, he maintains that “God has provided a better way.”
That way, he said, is patterned after Christ’s approach to “socially entrenched and legalized immorality”: the Cross. “In the same way Jesus erased the distinctions between God and man,” Foreman said, “we’re trying to erase the distinctions between adult human beings and unborn children by standing in their place.”
By Randy Frame.
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He will lead the Church of England through its self-proclaimed “Decade of Evangelism,” and he will also very likely oversee the introduction of women priests into the Mother Church of Anglicanism. As the one-hundred-second successor to Saint Augustine as archbishop of Canterbury, he will take the church he has inherited into the twenty-first century.
He is George Leonard Carey, at 54 the youngest man in more than six decades to be called to the Primacy of All England and the leadership of the world’s 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians. A leader in the evangelical wing of the church, with sympathies to the charismatic renewal movement, Carey’s appointment in many ways has broken the Canterbury mold.
Unlike his predecessors, Carey was born of working-class parents in London’s East End. He left school at 15 and worked as an office boy. Converted two years later, he decided to make something of his life for God. After serving with the Royal Air Force in the Middle East, he put himself through a crash course of study that gained him entry to theological college and eventually led to a Ph.D., specializing in the early church fathers.
Another unusual aspect of Carey’s background is his seven years as a working vicar—more parish experience than had the past four archbishops combined. His other posts have been in theological education and as bishop of Bath and Wells, a predominantly rural diocese in the west of England.
Few observers placed Carey’s name on their list of likely replacements when Archbishop Robert Runcie announced last April that he would be stepping down next January, eight months ahead of mandatory retirement at age 70. Carey himself scoffed at the idea. He was too young, had served only two-and-a-half years as a bishop, and had little experience of ecclesiastical politics or the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Evangelical Rank And File
The commonly held view was that the job would go to either the strongly liberal John Habgood, archbishop of York, or the liberal evangelical David Sheppard, bishop of Liverpool, with Carey coming into the reckoning next time around.
But the Crown Appointments Commission, charged with nominating Runcie’s successor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, decided that the church’s predominantly liberal leadership was out of step with the increasingly evangelical rank and file. The commission surprised everybody with the speed and boldness of its choice. Carey himself said he was “dazed and unworthy.”
Carey’s writings and utterances are characterized by an evangelical submission to the authority of Scripture, though he is no literalist; the insights of critical scholarship have, he says, helped to unlock the Bible’s message for him. He is unequivocal on the historicity of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and constantly emphasizes the need for personal conversion and the life-changing nature of Christian faith. He takes a traditional line on homosexuality but fervently supports the ordination of women. He has strong social convictions, especially about the environment, but he is likely to voice them less often than his predecessor and other leading churchmen.
Aside from extreme radicals and the homosexual lobby, Carey’s appointment has been generally welcomed, especially by evangelicals. Clive Calver, director of the Evangelical Alliance, said Carey was “a fine choice to lead the church into a decade of evangelism.” The Church of England Evangelical Council described him as “exactly what we wanted; a perfect match.” The only sour note came from the Protestant Church Society, which accused Carey of being too friendly with Rome and too ready to ditch “received evangelical teaching.”
Carey’s attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church is certainly warmer than many who share his theology. In his book The Meeting of the Waters, (published in America as A Tale of Two Churches), which is about reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant traditions, he expresses high hopes for the eventual reunion of the two streams of Western Christendom. He says he has learned a great deal from Catholic spirituality.
Charismatics, with whom Carey has also been identified, have so far been silent. This may reflect his own ambivalence to the renewal movement. In 1972, when his spiritual life was at a low ebb, he had a deep experience of the Holy Spirit that revitalized his faith. During his seven years as a parish priest, he turned a traditional, conservative “petrol station” church (where the congregation filled their spiritual tanks once a week) into a lively community center, raising more than £300,000 (over $700,000) to modernize the building and introducing charismatic emphases into the worship.
Carey, however, rejects a two-stage concept of charismatic theology—conversion followed by “baptism in the Spirit”—which, he says, is contrary to the New Testament. He believes Christians should experience continual “renewal in the Spirit” as part of their growth in grace. He is grateful for the influence of the charismatic movement in his own life but sees it as one stream among many in the church.
By its imaginative choice, the Crown Appointments Commission has already proved that the Church of England, so often written off as a lost cause, can still spring a few surprises now and then. The signs are that as Carey comes to terms with a job many regard as “impossible,” a job he can fill for up to 16 years, the biggest surprises may be yet to come.
By John Capon in London.
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Imagine a girl who grows up not knowing who her father is, who is never told during her childhood that she is pretty, that she is loved and needed. The first time she hears such words of affection, they overwhelm her. But they come from a streetwise male, perhaps a few years older, who knows what it takes to get what he wants: sex.
Unfortunately, in the black community, with the increase in single-parent families—almost all of which are headed by mothers—the above scenario requires little imagination. While illicit teen sex is widely recognized as a national problem—one not confined to a single racial or ethnic group or social class—black leaders are increasingly realizing they must address the problem within the context of black culture.
Toward that end, black pastors and heads of black youth ministries gathered last month at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to work toward a strategy to address the problem of teen sex. The gathering, Consultation ’90, was cosponsored by the Detroit-based Institute for Black Family Development and the Dallas-based Josh McDowell Ministry.
McDowell, a widely known author and speaker, was on hand to facilitate the discussion and strategy sessions. Over 2 million young people have seen McDowell’s video series on teen sex, No! The Positive Answer. But McDowell said he believes the video’s impact on the black community is limited, because it lacks cultural context.
McDowell acknowledged he is still learning what is needed in the black community to address the problem of teen sex. “This is an effort that needs to be led by blacks and supported by blacks,” he said. “I want to offer myself as a resource for that vision.”
Over 10,000 young people attended a McDowell “Why Wait?” campaign event in Detroit in 1988. About 4,000 of those youth were black. This launched a series of discussions and events that led to last month’s consultation.
The recent meeting helped youth leaders identify and articulate what leads to sexual activity among teens, including those causes unique to the black community. Said consultation participant Wilfred H. Samuel, Jr., a corps commanding officer with the Salvation Army, “Sexuality is perceived by some in the black community as a way of gaining equality. The thinking goes, ‘I cannot compete with [white counterparts] socially or economically, but I can compete sexually.’”
The emotionally outgoing nature of black culture was also cited as a positive that, in the context of sexuality, could become a negative. And participants generally acknowledged that in the black community the problem of teen sexuality cannot be addressed without examining related problems, including the lack of job, recreational, and extracurricular opportunities.
Those who met in Chicago decided to launch a national prayer movement and, eventually, an organization, which will operate under the umbrella of the Institute for Black Family Development. A task force was named to determine the purpose and activities of the new organization. Its possible functions include: sponsoring youth conferences, creating a video and/or curriculum materials addressing teen sexuality, and starting a magazine for black teens.