News
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
—Evangelism, Inc., is sponsoring the first-ever national conference on the persecuted church, March 26-28 in Columbia, South Carolina. The gathering will bring together experts, scholars, and authors familiar with persecution of Christians around the world, including professor Walid Phares, authors Paul Marshall and Bat Ye’Or, and religious-rights activists Steven Snyder, Jim Jacobson, Steve Haas, and Ann Buwalda. For information, phone 803-252-4146.
—Georgi Vins, founder of Russian Gospel Ministries International in Elkhart, Indiana, died January 11 at age 69. He had been diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor last fall. Vins had served as general secretary of the Council of Evangelical Baptist Churches, an organization of 2,000 persecuted congregations in the former Soviet Union. He spent nine years in prison and labor camps before being exiled to the United States in 1979.
—The Mongolian government has agreed to release 10,000 children’s Bibles seized by customs officials last May. The government had received hundreds of letters of protest from around the world at the confiscation of Scriptures, which had been shipped to the Mongolian Bible Society. The government continues to hold 600 impounded Christian videotapes.
—World Concern Asia director Terril Eikenberry, 47, died January 11 in Bangkok from complications associated with scleroderma. Eikenberry had been with World Concern since 1980. For the past three years as Asia director, he provided leadership to 37 relief-and-development projects.
—Alan Bergstedt, 61, has become the first chief executive officer of the Orange, California-based Wycliffe Associates, which is the support ministry of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Bergstedt had previously been chief financial officer for World Vision and founder of Visionary Management Group.
—Alexander S. Haraszti, a 77-year-old Hungarian-born physician, professor, and Baptist minister who helped secure invitations for Billy Graham to hold crusades in five Eastern European countries in the 1970s and 1980s, died January 16 in Atlanta of complications from a hip fracture.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Michael G. Maudlin, Managing Editor
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
In 1968 our nation suddenly and unexpectedly lost its leading light on racial issues. I felt history repeating itself for me when I heard the news that Spencer Perkins had been taken from us. On January 27, the president of Reconcilers Fellowship in Jackson, Mississippi, and the son of evangelist/activist John Perkins died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 43 (see the obituary on p. 73).
In 1993 Spencer and his white ministry partner, Chris Rice, authored More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (InterVarsity). CT ran an excerpt about Spencer’s early struggle to assimilate two facts: one, that he was redeemed by Christ and, two, that many whites, allegedly redeemed by the same Christ, hated him (“How I Learned to Love White People,” Sept. 13, 1993, p. 34). He told of his despair when, at age 13, a white principal assented to a classmate’s judgment that Spencer was “just a nigger”; his pain at 16 when he saw the humiliation in his father’s eyes after John was ambushed and beaten almost to death for his civil-rights work; the confusion and hurt of being befriended and then rejected by a white college student. While his story of growing up black in America was powerful, it was not unique. The freshness came in his gospel-centered message.
For Spencer, the burden for racial reconciliation was heavy: “If white and black Christians could not be reconciled, then either the gospel was a lie or we really weren’t indwelt by the Christ we said had taken up residence in our lives.”
Yet this burden never provided an excuse to play down hard truths: “Most black people are angry—angry about our violent history, angry for the hassle it is to grow up black in America, angry that we can never assume that we won’t be prejudged by our color, angry that we will carry this stigma everywhere we go. … And most of all angry that white America doesn’t understand the reasons for our anger.” This anger can be “a very destructive force” or “channeled positively,” but it “must be reckoned with.”
In journalist Edward Gilbreath’s cover story on evangelicals and race 30 years after Martin Luther King, Jr. (see “Catching Up with a Dream,” p. 20), we hear more of Spencer’s hard truths: how segregation in the church is what both blacks and whites want, “but that puts comfort and culture over Christ.”
Lately Spencer talked about “radical grace” as the key to moving to the next step in racial reconciliation. But once again God has left it to us to finish the conversation without our group leader.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromMichael G. Maudlin, Managing Editor
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
TRUCKER’S TESTIMONY* The message in large, bold letters on the mudflap of a tractor-trailer truck passed on I-80 somewhere between Iowa and Connecticut last November riveted my wife and me with its terse ONLY JESUS SAVES. A lively discussion ensued about the importance of the word only. Little did we realize it was the Lord’s preparation for the insights in Daniel B. Clendenin’s powerful presentation [“The Only Way” Jan. 12]. With hindsight, it can be concluded that the long-haul trucker was correct in his exclusiveness and diligent in his obedience to the Great Commission.
Peter KushkowskiHaddam, Conn.
* I agree with the points Clendenin made. I just wish he had not overlooked the words of the apostle Paul. Romans 1:20 tells us God is so clearly seen in his creation that man is without excuse, and Romans 2:14-15 tells that us when the Gentiles instinctively do the things contained in the Law they reveal the law written in their hearts, an experience analogous to the new covenant.
Because God does not want anyone to be lost, because God always does that which is right, in my opinion Paul suggests that God could save those who never heard the gospel because they saw Jesus the Creator revealed in his creation and on that basis lived instinctively for him experiencing what we would call the new covenant.
On the basis of biblical evidence, I would have to answer Clendenin’s question, “Yes, God can certainly save those who have never heard the gospel.” I believe he would prefer that all hear the gospel. But not all have heard or will hear the gospel because of our failure to proclaim it. Should they then be lost because of our failure? It seems to me that Paul describes for us a just, fair, and loving God’s alternative.
* Clendenin’s article is to be commended for its pointedness and sensitivity. Perhaps it is too simplistic an observation, but for any Christian to believe that Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God and also to believe theological pluralism is an ultimate absurdity. In fact, it is just plain slanderous of God. If Jesus is indeed God’s Son and theological pluralism be true, then God is both foolish and evil; not only foolish to have needlessly sacrificed his only Son when there were other ways for man to be saved, but also evil to have done so, the other ways making it quite unnecessary.
Pastor Clifford A. HurstHurst Union Road Pentecostal ChurchDayton, Ohio
I believe the error of pluralism is a failure to understand who Christ really is. What comes out from this world-view is that Christ is a “peer” of Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, and the like. The Christian knows this is not accurate and that Christ is very God, one with the Father. To say that no one comes to God except through Christ is not narrow; it just acknowledges the truth that no one comes to God except through God. Any attempt to reach God through other religions must go through Christ eventually if it has any hope of being successful. A high view of who Christ is solves the problems of exclusiveness, narrowness, and so on.
Robert C. VanstrumDellwood, Minn.
A PLACE FOR DISCOMFORTFrederica Mathewes-Green’s article “Wanted: A New Pro-Life Strategy” [Jan. 12] encourages the pro-life community to trade political activism, which she says does not work, for a model of sympathetic persuasion. I believe Mathewes-Green draws up a false dichotomy. Active listening and sympathetic discussions are effective in crisis-pregnancy centers and in intimate settings, but they are not sufficient to end abortion. There is no need to take an either/or stance on pro-life strategy. The sin of abortion is invasive both at the personal and the institutional level. Different tactics are called for depending on the intended audience and on specific goals.
As Mathewes-Green acknowledges, most people know it’s a baby. However, the American conscience needs to be stung repeatedly by the truth that killing a baby is wrong. Old Testament history reminds us how easy it is for a generation to slide into complacently accepting evil. Many pro-lifers are weary, and some may wonder if the battle is worth it. Just as we are called to persevere in our personal walk with God, so we need to persevere in the down and dirty business of telling the world that abortion is wrong, and in the sometimes even dirtier business of political involvement.
Mary A. WaalkesBoulder, Colo.
* While applauding Mathewes-Green’s suggestion that we move beyond “avoidance and fury” in the abortion debate, I would add one further consideration to her suggestion that “we should explore whether marriage is a possibility.” While she cites statistics of the success of “shotgun” marriages (and they are impressive statistics), shouldn’t the spiritual state of both parties be included in our exploration? If the principle of being “unequally yoked” mentioned in 2 Corinthians applies to the marriage bond, then we could find ourselves complicating sin with sin by encouraging a believer to marry an unbeliever [just because] one of them is pregnant.
James MenziesWakefield, R.I.
Mathewes-Green lists three points for a new strategy: (1) It’s a baby, (2) Abortion hurts women, (3) We can live without abortion. Under these she further details how to advance this strategy by speaking to the woman about preventing pregnancy, supporting those who experience an unexpected pregnancy, becoming a friend, exploring marriage to the baby’s father, encouraging adoption, and so on.
This made me wonder: “What have I been doing for the last 13 years?” We have been, on a daily basis, setting this strategy before the clients of the pregnancy-help centers for many years.
There was a fourth point with which I must take great exception—the recommendation not to speak to people who are not religious about God or Scripture because Mathewes-Green has found such an approach to be “nearly always ineffective” and because you may be seen as “one of those.” However, I have found the opposite to be true.
When first in the pregnancy-help center movement, we were taught to counsel women without bringing up the concept of God. However, if it appeared the woman was receptive, we could broach the subject but be ready to retreat if there was any sign she was not ready to hear the mention of his name. Years of frustration followed as I and those I taught struggled to present that strategy. We knew deep in our hearts there was something missing.
Eventually we realized that gagging our speech about God was wrong. Without speaking about God, sharing his message of salvation, peace, mercy, forgiveness, and love, there cannot be a change of life and heart. As much as I agree that we must (continue to) “listen carefully to pro-choicers in order to understand their reasoning,” my experience with women in the counseling room, as well as my understanding of Scripture, indicates that the abortion issue is not a faulty-reasoning issue but rather a matter of the client’s heart and spiritual condition.
When done in a respectful, loving, and sensitive way, speaking about the God of love through biblical counseling is the most effective and longest-lasting approach.
Pat DundasHope Counseling CenterDover, Del.
* At first, the article urged cooperation between pro-life and pro-choice groups in a way that could dramatically impact the annual carnage wrought by abortion. However, it turned out merely to be a smoother approach to the standard bottom line: We must pass laws that will force all pregnant women to carry every pregnancy to full term regardless. Such an absolute stand means the carnage will continue.
Don HawleyPortland, Oreg.
About a year ago I came across a statistic saying that 85 percent of women contemplating abortion, who then have an opportunity to view their own sonogram, choose not to abort the child. This explains why abortion clinics position the screen so that only the physician can view it. It occurred to me that the most effective deterrent to abortion may be a law that required clinics to offer a woman the option of viewing her sonogram.
I began calling pro-life leaders throughout our state. I expected to have someone politely explain to me why such an idea was nave and unpractical. To my surprise, I was met with praise and excitement.
I talked with a couple of individuals about devising a strategy for such a bill. We spoke of presenting it from a pro-choice perspective, the difference being that our bill allowed for informed choice rather than blind choice. The initial reaction was one of enthusiasm. I was asked to come to Annapolis to meet with pro-life leaders. [But dates for] meetings to be held in August or September passed. I then spoke with a representative who came to my office and asked me to abandon this approach, at least temporarily, and get involved in an attempt to ban partial-birth abortion in Maryland. I agreed.
Still another contact with Maryland Right-to-Life suggested I abandon all hope for “an informed consent bill.” Her logic: “We don’t want to be perceived as being too pushy.” I was then told that if I persisted in pushing for informed consent, the local news media “will rip you to shreds.”
If a bill requiring clinics to give women the option of seeing their sonogram is not feasible, then fine. But if we are backing off under the threat of a hostile press, something is wrong.
Pastor Howard GardnerBel Air Assembly of GodBel Air, Md.
LIFE IS PRECIOUSYour editorial “What Really Died in Oregon” [Jan. 12] prompted me, for the first time, to consider the seriousness of the assisted-suicide issue. Life is very precious, and for a person to lose that divine spark, it must be the result of the unavoidable collapse of one’s health, not the product of a bad day. Whether or not I’m a burden to myself and society, the breath that is within me was given to me by the grace of God, and to snuff it out by my own hand would be a denial of the providence of the Almighty.
Perhaps if the naysayers, who adamantly proclaim the end of the Age of Miracles, would quiet their rumbling, the afflicted might be able to hear the voice of God, for God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, above all we can ask or think. That would include healings as well.
David A. BrayshawTampa, Fla.
The largely HMO-controlled medical industry in this country does, indeed, create a market for the services of Dr. Death. HMOs are set up to serve persons with illnesses and injuries that have a specific etiology and a limited duration and, therefore, are readily treatable with one or two of the conventional therapies.
Those persons whose bodies suffer from more mysterious, intractable ailments and so refuse to recover quickly and efficiently soon get the message that the maintenance of their health is not worth the required trouble and expense. Negative conclusions about the relative worth of their own (increasingly miserable) existence follow predictably.
When the bottom line is, well, the bottom line, much that is so much more valuable than the saving and making of money is irrevocably lost. The Oregon vote is the voice of the future in HMO-land.
Rebecca Merrill GroothuisLittleton, Colo.
CONTENTMENT THROUGH CREDIT CARDS* Kudos to Charles Colson for his column on the spirituality spin that advertisers are more commonly employing as they try to charm the consumer [“Madison Avenue’s Spiritual Chic,” Jan.12]. Apparently these days not only sex but spirituality sells, and our corporate community continues to cash in on whatever works. Indeed, their philosophical motives are rarely neutral. Unfortunately, Colson failed to comment on the most prevalent and perhaps most pernicious message that all advertisers preach, hardly “neutral,” and certainly “spiritual”: consumerism. Our shopping malls are the cathedrals where we “worship.” As we excavate and critique advertising philosophies, let’s not forget the foundational philosophy that tempts all of us—contentment through our credit cards.
Andrew BeunkGrand Rapids, Mich.
* I wish evangelicalism’s foremost cultural critic would write what really needs to be said: Turn off the idiot box and get a life.
Greg MortimerEl Jebel, Colo.
Colson’s anecdote about how his criticism of one auto company’s ad campaign led to a change is encouraging. But he seems to extrapolate from that event a belief that similar complaints by the rest of us will have similar effects. He overlooks the reality of his own position and influence.
More disconcerting was the juxtaposition of the questions “When our kids hum the catchy jingle of the latest commercial, is their spiritual impulse being diverted into consumerism? Are they absorbing Madison Avenue’s false values?” with the statement “Ads with spiritual themes trivialize religion by reducing it to a marketing ploy.” I think Colson is confused about who is absorbing and trivializing what.
The trivialization of religion by commercialism can as easily be a charge laid against the “Christian” publishing houses that have often sacrificed content in their publications and replaced it with marketing glitz. And “Madison Avenue’s false values” were adopted long ago by churches in North America, which assumed a model of the corporate world as a standard of success. We have replaced the concept of a pastor with the idea of a CEO. Many of my colleagues in pastoral ministry are nearly being crushed by the expectations of Christians that we perform as corporate executives. I was wonderfully trained at seminary to perform theologically and pastorally, only to realize that the churches’ expectations require an M.B.A. rather than an M.Div. Christianity, at least in this country, bought “Madison Avenue” a long time ago.
By the way, my children know that humming “the catchy jingle of the latest commercial” will result in the swift imposition of a television viewing moratorium in our home.
Pastor Charles M. LyonsBethel Assembly of GodJacksonville, N.C.
Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address if intended for publication. Due to the volume of mail, we cannot respond personally to individual letters. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com ( * ).
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Ideas
We are called to be suspicious of the Christian celebrity culture.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Several years ago, in the aftermath of Christian musician Michael English’s affair with a backup singer, one Nashville pastor told Billboard‘s Debra Evans Price: “We dress people up, put make-up on them, have stylists do their hair, put them on a stage in front of thousands of people, shine a spotlight on them, and then expect them to be humble.”
And this is the surprising part: We are still surprised when they are not humble or when Christian celebrities fall.
This past February was the ten-year anniversary of the public disgrace of Jimmy Swaggart, who has become a powerful symbol of Christian celebrityism gone wrong. On page 30 of this issue, Randall Balmer recounts a visit to Swaggart’s church and reports on a weary evangelist and preacher who has had a hard time forgiving those who were critical of him and who has not been entirely successful at learning from his mistakes.
Swaggart, the media figure, reminds us that the Christian-leader-as-personality cult is dangerous for both the celebrity and his or her followers. Humility is indeed a tall order for those in the seductive glow of the spotlight. Celebrityism, even among Christians, is a snare.
Wisdom demands that we become suspicious of celebrities. A big, red “Be skeptical” sign should flash in our minds whenever we see Christian personalities plastered on our book and magazine covers or hear their smooth voices sweetening our tvs and radios. Skepticism is not cynicism; Paul’s poetic description of how love “believes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7) is not an excuse for credulity or blind faith, least of all not in human beings with feet of clay. After all, Jesus admonished us to be “as shrewd as snakes” as we try to be as “innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16, NIV) in a sinful world. And Paul knew the necessity of testing everything (1 Thess. 5:21). We need to recognize the painful truth that the pervasiveness of worldly entertainment values within the evangelical subculture has a tendency to minimize the gospel content.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s antidote to racism—that we judge people by “the content of their character”—also works as a powerful antidote to the personality culture in which we live. The headlines make it painfully obvious that fame cannot be equated with character.
So we ask: Have we learned these lessons about celebrityism in the church? Have we taken to heart the painful truths Swaggart taught us?
TRANSFORMERS VS. SECTARIANSChristian singer Steve Camp doesn’t think so. In an October 1997 manifesto studded with 107 theses (a 13 percent gain over Luther’s 95), Camp raised alarm over the contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry’s lack of holy living, its penchant for skewed doctrine, and its unequal yoking with the secular owners of the once-Christian record labels. Camp called for a renewed devotion to Scripture along with a renewed infusion of biblical teaching in CCM lyrics. And he called for the record labels to buy back their independence from the media conglomerates that own them.
His separationism, he claims, is not isolationism. (We must befriend unbelievers and witness to them, he explains). Neither is his vision one that could ever be as salt and light, transforming an industry. His harsh denunciations of Christian artists working for secular companies makes one wonder how Christian conductor Herbert Blomstedt, to take one example, could work for the Communist government of East Germany as the director of the Dresden Staatskapelle for many years and have such a vibrant witness. How artists can have a Christian witness while working for secular organizations is unimagined in Camp’s philosophy. Yet many have.
Despite his naive come-outism, many of Camp’s prescriptions are precisely what will preserve or rescue those whose lives are devoted to the personality-driven worlds of the CCM industry, of religious broadcasting, and of the writing and publishing of bestselling Christian books. Those prescriptions are a return to biblical morality, literacy, and accountability—and, above all, repentance.
Interestingly, that is what some Nashville sources say is now happening. Having covered the Christian music business for over ten years, Billboard‘s Price says that the spiritual discipline of musicians has actually grown as the industry has exploded from just a handful of music celebrities whose influence was largely locked inside a Christian subculture to a new era when Jars of Clay can appear on Late Show with David Letterman, and Christian singers are entertaining and witnessing in a broader context.
“Our industry has ambassadors taking the message to the mainstream,” Price says, “but I haven’t seen negative fallout from that. People in our industry take great pains to be grounded in their faith and not to be distracted.”
Many artists have now established advisory boards to hold them accountable, she says, and Nashville pastors have begun focusing their ministry more tightly on the spiritual needs of touring musicians. Sadder but wiser artists have learned the hard way that they need to focus quality time on their families and home congregations. Singing in other people’s churches every weekend has proved to be a great way to lose your own soul.
PRESCRIPTIONS FOR HUMILITYIn the culture of celebrity, the entertainer, artist, or radio preacher is driven to be more persona than person, more icon than individual. Maintaining the persona forces artists into isolation, demanding the grooming and constant maintenance of an image. The result is a social life rich in glamour but poor in community. But as Christians know, only by the grit of community is our spiritual roughness worn smooth.
Late last year, singer Sandi Patty talked candidly with CT editors about the way she has restructured family, church, and community responsibilities as she moves back into public life after a public fall. An important part of her new plan is full participation in her own local church, where people know her well and are unimpressed, in a healthy way, with her celebrity. Artists who, like Patty, avail themselves of communities of true accountability put themselves in a position to be known as people by those who love them as friends, not fans, and who can warn them in strong language as well as support them in prayer.
Artists’ managers are key as well, as we learned from talking to Patty’s Matt Baugher and dc Talk’s Rob Michaels. Says Michaels, “We constantly remind our clients that God has given them an opportunity, and with opportunity comes responsibility. They do not have a call to celebrity, but a call to be faithful with their gifting. Whatever celebrity they have is a mantle, not a right.”
All public figures—politicians, radio preachers, performing artists—need someone close to them who can say balderdash when they begin excusing self-serving behavior. Writers’ agents and artists’ managers and all those close to religious broadcasters have a high moral responsibility to avoid being mere acolytes.
Artists also need to model commitment. Says Michaels, “People who sing to you and people who make you laugh can get things through to you that your pastor can’t. Fans give celebrities power over their lives, and the celebrity must use that power responsibly.” God bless those artists who have called their fans to service and sacrifice—as have the bands who play in the Rock for Life concerts. God bless those who use their brief fame for good and for telling the good news.
If the Christian music industry has needed to work at cleaning up its act, so do other parts of the evangelical subculture. Stories continue of egotistical celebrity authors who abuse ghostwriters and publicists, and politics is, well, still politics. Particularly in religious broadcasting and political activism, power and money are often treated as zero-sum games. These “industries” need to pray much about the calling of the Christian in the spotlight.
OUR ROLEUltimately, the responsibility for change is not centered in Nashville or Colorado Springs or any other concentration of personality-driven Christian ministry. We the public have a responsibility to be careful and critical consumers of mass culture—including its Christian forms. We have the power in our pocketbooks; we have power in our pulpits.
We can encourage what Camp calls a “Christ-less, watered-down, pabulum-based, positive alternative, aura-fluff, cream of wheat, mush-kind-of-syrupy, God-as-my-girlfriend” kind of music, or we can refuse to buy those CDs, attend those concerts, book those artists in our community’s venues. We can forestall our own spiritual growth by growing dependent on largely imagined links with Christian celebrities, or we can thrive in the soil of our local congregations, where God has planted us, rightly dividing the Word of truth under the guidance of our local leaders.
As a spiritually critical public, we must be hardnosed with our choices and purchases, supporting not only artistic excellence but spiritual maturity. And those decisions do not bear fruit in the market alone; they inevitably bring their own reward reaped in the growth of moral fiber.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Cover Story
Edward Gilbreath
Evangelicals and race 30 years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Spencer Platt / Getty
As one of only two Negroes attending Los Angeles Baptist College (now The Master’s College), Dolphus Weary was having the time of his life experiencing a new world of white faces and middle-class culture. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, Weary had assumed he would spend the rest of his life there—until a recruiting team offered him and a friend a chance to attend a Christian liberal arts college in southern California. Other Christian schools that Weary had been interested in refused admission to Negroes. But through the urging of a bold admissions director and an ambitious basketball coach, this ultraconservative institution agreed to make Weary and his friend the first blacks who attended in its 30-year history.
Weary earned above-average grades (knowing anything less would be unacceptable) and helped lead the school's basketball team to a 19-and-5 record. Things were good. The poverty and provincialism of Negro life in southern Mississippi were out of sight, out of mind. Weary was glad to have escaped it—that is, until the day's big news made its way across campus.
As Weary left the library on April 4, 1968, a white student approached him and said, “Did you hear? Martin Luther King got shot.”
“I remember running to my room, flipping on the radio, and listening to the news report,” he recalls. A rifle bullet had ripped into King’s neck as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil-rights leader was rushed to a hospital in serious condition. “I was devastated.”
As he sat on his bed holding back the tears, Weary could hear voices down the hall: white students talking about King’s shooting. But Weary quickly realized that they were not just talking; they were laughing.
“I couldn't understand what I was hearing,” he says. “These Christian kids were glad that Dr. King—my hero—had been shot. I wanted to run out there and confront them.” Instead, he steeled his fury and laid prostrate on his bed. Finally, as the newscaster delivered the awful update—“Martin Luther King has died in a Memphis hospital”—Weary could hear the white voices down the hall let out a cheer.
That was 30 years ago. Today Dolphus Weary is the executive director of Mission Mississippi, a Jackson-based community-development ministry that has drawn together black and white Christians throughout the state that King once described as “sweltering with the heat of oppression.”
After hearing the white students cheer on that terrible spring day in 1968, reconciliation was the last thing on Weary's mind. “I had to ask God how to respond,” he remembers. “It was around the time that H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and other young militant leaders were starting the Black Power movement, and I was tempted to join them. Laughing at Dr. King’s death was just like laughing at me—or at the millions of other blacks for whom King labored.”
Deep inside, Weary wanted to hate white people, to separate himself from their prejudice. “But then I remembered the heart of Dr. King—responding to hate with love. The Lord brought to my mind that those students were only playing back the tapes that had been recorded in their heads, and I needed to help change the tape.”
Weary resolved to “take every opportunity on that campus to help those young minds think differently.” He engaged students and professors in discussions about race. He welcomed them to ask him questions about the Negro experience in the South. He rechanneled his anger into building genuine relationships with his white peers.
“I think that is the way Dr. King would have approached it,” he says. “King's heart was to look at the broader picture. The small picture is to be angry. The broader, more prophetic picture is to devote yourself to changing the system and changing minds. That was King’s great work: He brought the race issue to the table and put it on the minds of the American people. It was not on our agenda before that. But he came along and told us that we’re all created in God’s image, and that we ought to start looking at each other as brothers and sisters, especially those of us in the Christian church.”
Three decades after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., the race issue is still very much on our minds. Across the nation the news is regularly filled with stories of racial tension and economic disparity between blacks and whites. Divided attitudes on political issues like affirmative action and welfare reform signal abiding strains between the races. A recent Gallup poll found that, by a margin of 76 percent to 49 percent, more whites than blacks believe blacks have equal opportunities for jobs, education, and housing. It also revealed that blacks are twice as likely as whites to favor affirmative action.
Faced with persistent “wake-up calls,” the nation is recognizing the widening gulf. President Clinton’s Initiative on Race has sought to get the issues “on the table” but has seen only lackluster results so far. Meanwhile, names such as Rodney King and O. J. Simpson have become symbols for America’s racial dilemmas.
Despite our national lack of momentum, Martin Luther King’s name has entered the national lexicon, evoking idealistic notions of integration, unity, and brotherhood—or, as King used to say, “the beloved community.” King’s memory stands as a reminder of how far we have journeyed as well as a disturbing beacon of the great distance left to travel.
For the church, King’s legacy is as multifarious as the nation he sought to reconcile. While some revere him as a hero and a prophet of peace, others look on him with disdain, a fact that has been magnified by revelations of King’s sexual improprieties and lapses in ethical judgment. Nonetheless, the enduring importance of King’s life and achievements have led many evangelicals who once dismissed him as a liberal rabble-rouser now to acknowledge the spiritual validity of his social mission.
VOLATILE DAYSRobert Graetz was in a tight spot for a white preacher in Montgomery, Alabama. It was 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycott—an unprecedented effort mounted by the Negro community to protest the city's segregated bus system—was in its embryonic stages. The Negroes of Montgomery had long endured the oppression of Jim Crow segregation with relatively few complaints. But with the quiet and unexpected revolt of Rosa Parks, a seamstress who had been arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man ("My feet were tired," she later said), the Negro community found itself inspired to take a stand.
As the pastor of the all-Negro Trinity Lutheran Church, Graetz could either remain silent and preserve his privileges as a white man, or forfeit his family's peace and safety by identifying himself with his Negro congregation. Graetz, a lanky, sandy-haired Caucasian, chose to remain faithful to his Negro flock and became the only white publicly active in the boycott. Graetz, now a 69-year-old interim pastor in central Ohio, explains it: "My family and I had to get involved. If we had remained aloof, our effectiveness as spiritual leaders in the black community would have disintegrated."
His involvement with the bus boycott introduced Graetz to Martin Luther King, then 26 years old and pastor of the middle-class Negro congregation at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "From the first time I met him, I was impressed," says Graetz. "In terms of his intellect, speaking skills, and ability to motivate people, he was at the top all by himself. He had the remarkable ability to inspire everyone in his presence."
Graetz remembers that King and his wife, Coretta, had only been in Montgomery for a year when he was tapped to head up the boycott. According to Graetz, King was recruited partly because of his charismatic leadership skills and partly because of his newness to the community—he hadn't made any enemies yet.
Though the boycott was ultimately a success, it was not easy. As the movement picked up momentum, angry segregationists cracked down on the protesters. King's home and those of other Negro leaders were bombed. Graetz was called a "nigger lover" and was frequently awakened at night by the blast of bombs tossed into his yard.
According to Graetz, the whites of the "Klan mentality" were a minority (others were just indifferent). But those who were racist made it clear that they would do everything possible to keep Negroes in their place. There was an even smaller number of Montgomery's whites who were "neo-abolitionists"—those who did everything possible to change the plight of blacks. "They were not nearly as outspoken," says Graetz, "because as soon as people spoke up, they were fired from their jobs, or their mortgages were foreclosed. Even a rumor that a white businessman was helping black people was enough to put him out of business."
But King and his movement ultimately secured integrated busing in Montgomery, and blacks throughout the South were buoyed by the triumph. Soon King, along with fellow Montgomery pastor Ralph Abernathy and other Negro Christian leaders, formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a national civil-rights organization. "The thing that is often overlooked is that the civil-rights movement was a church movement," observes Graetz. "The leaders were pastors, and the mass meetings were church services, with prayers, hymns, sermons, and offerings."
CHURCH AS CONSCIENCEThe son, grandson, and great-grandson of Atlanta preachers, King was raised under the religious pieties of the black Baptist church. "King came out of a very fundamental, evangelical church," explains H. Malcolm Newton, director of urban studies at Denver Seminary. "They taught the Bible at Ebenezer Baptist Church [in Atlanta]. That was his roots."
King's intellectual curiosity and desire to understand the very unchristian race situation in the South (combined with his education at liberal northern seminaries) compelled him to ask questions that would stretch his theology far beyond fundamentalism. Nonetheless, on a practical level, King's Baptist heritage always shone through. "In the quiet recesses of my heart," he often said, "I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher."
"King talked about love overcoming hate. But when we were taking part in marches and demonstrations, it was not love that was making us do it; it was our desire to win."—THE LATE SPENCER PERKINS
It was no accident that an effort as socially positive as the civil-rights movement began in the church, says noted New York pastor Suzan Johnson Cook, a member of President Clinton's Racial Advisory Board. "Martin Luther King proved that our faith and our struggle should never be separate. Faith and struggle—when coupled—make us more effective leaders."
"Dr. King taught us that Christianity could be a vigorous voice for conscience in this nation," adds Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, an ecumenical coalition of mostly African-American seminaries in Atlanta. "He showed us that the church did not have to marginalize itself. That it could play a major and necessary role in the public square."
In August 1963, King's movement organized its massive March on Washington, the event that begat the legendary "I Have a Dream" speech and represented the pinnacle of his fame. A Nobel Peace Prize came in 1964. And there were rousing legislative victories as well, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
King's political efforts received criticism from white religious leaders from both conservative and liberal circles. His famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was actually a passionate response to eight "moderate" clergymen in Alabama who saw King's continued use of nonviolent resistance as "unwise" and encouraged him to let the fight for integration continue in the local and federal courts. Unlike those clergymen, King could not fathom a separation between his faith and politics. He wrote:
In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.
THE PRICE OF PROTESTOn a steamy July evening in 1967, James Earl Massey's plane touched down at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Massey, then the senior pastor of Detroit's Metropolitan Church of God, had been attending a clergy convention when one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history erupted in the Motor City. Incessant gunfire filled the evenings, rocks and bricks bashed downtown windows, storefronts were looted of their goods, flames consumed entire city blocks. When it was over, 43 lives and $50 million in property damage had been the cost.
To get home, Massey had to drive through the riot zone. He made it safely, but the biggest challenge still lay ahead for Massey and other leading Detroit ministers who began working to restore peace to their tortured city. "Our church became an outpost for reaching out to people who had lost their homes to fires or had no food because stores had been destroyed." And Detroit was not alone. Racial uprisings had recently erupted in other cities as well—Los Angeles, Harlem, Cincinnati, and several others.
The urban riots were an ugly symptom of the growing spirit of despair that had gripped the Negroes of many northern cities. "There was a lack of jobs and a growing social dissatisfaction," remembers Massey. "With the rise in automation at factories, there were a lot of layoffs, and blacks were feeling the severity of the pinch far more than others."
Although King's civil-rights endeavors had made strides against racism and Jim Crow in the South, issues like poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination were raging out of control in the North. As a result, younger members of the broader civil-rights movement grew impatient. Leaders of groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) tossed aside King's "ineffective" nonviolent strategies in favor of more radical "black power" tactics. Malcolm X had been killed in 1965, but the Black Muslim movement continued to win converts in the inner cities. In 1966, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael vowed never again to "take a beating without hitting back." King, though troubled, understood what drove the militant factions. "The Black Power slogan did not spring full grown from the head of some philosophical Zeus," he said. "It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment." Nevertheless, black power did not understand King. Massey observes, "King was being looked upon by black militants as an 'Uncle Tom.' "
Massey, now 68, is dean emeritus and professor at large of the Anderson University School of Theology (Ind.) and interim dean of the chapel at Tuskegee University in Alabama. With his neatly trimmed mustache and stately demeanor, Massey was sometimes said to resemble his friend Martin King. He often spent time with King during his trips to Detroit and was aware of his distress and self-doubt over the fragmenting civil-rights scene. Massey points out that, although King remained committed to methods of nonviolence, he was making a clear shift in his rhetoric. "He had moved on to speaking out strongly against poverty and America's participation in the Vietnam War," recalls Massey. "He was, in fact, sounding quite radical."
He wrote in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: "Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a mass effort to re-educate themselves out of their racial ignorance. … It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn."
Despite his personal struggles, in early 1968 King was working to organize a massive Poor People's Campaign in Washington for both Negroes and whites. In late March, he arrived in Memphis to support a Negro sanitation workers' strike. His popularity had long since waned. fbi director J. Edgar Hoover (and others) fancied him a "Communist," and for many white Americans, Martin Luther King and urban unrest had become synonymous. The anger and hostility he had been encountering at different protest events, particularly in the large cities, began visibly to erode King's spirit. Says Massey, "In the pictures of him marching in Memphis, you can see the grimmest look on his face. He was very tense. And the speech he gave the night before his death reveals how much he was expecting hostility to rise against him."
Dr. King taught us that Christianity could be a vigorous voice for conscience in this nation.
On the night of April 3, a violent thunderstorm drenched Memphis as a somber-looking Martin Luther King took the stage at the Mason Temple (denominational headquarters of the Church of God in Christ). Despite the furious storm, an enthusiastic crowd of 2,000 people had gathered to hear King deliver what would become his final speech. After an impassioned appeal to the audience to continue the work the movement had begun, King's address concluded on an eerie note. "We've got some difficult days ahead," he preached. "But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop . …Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. … But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
The next evening the 39-year-old preacher was shot down as he stood on the second-floor balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel.
Massey remembers being at a Detroit television studio that night with his church choir to record a local broadcast for the following Sunday. "While we were preparing to tape, the studio announcer called me aside and told me the news. My heart sank. I didn't tell the choir until after the taping, because I knew they'd be too upset to sing. After King's death, something in me just died."
Something died within the Negro community as well. King's assassination sparked riots in 125 cities, which led to 21,270 arrests and 46 deaths.
JUST NOT GETTING ITIn September 1968, five months later, Glen Kehrein, a white senior from Moody Bible Institute, was on a student retreat at the Green Lake Assembly Grounds, an American Baptist camping and convention in central Wisconsin.
Sharing the huge convention grounds with Moody that year were Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and other leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC had been turned upside-down since the murder of King, and it was time to pause and take account of the organization's future.
Kehrein was familiar with a few of the SCLC's surviving leaders, but King had intrigued him the most. He had heard about King's reputation as a "Communist" and troublemaker, and Christian leaders had warned him about the dangerous theology contained in King's "social gospel." Kehrein didn't know what to believe. After King's murder, the streets of Chicago had turned into a war zone. The sounds, sights, and aromas of sniper fire, burning buildings, and armed National Guardsmen were fresh in his mind. Even the relationships between black and white students at Moody seemed to carry some underlying strain. "I saw the racial divide vividly in the dorm when King's shooting was announced," Kehrein recalls. "There was a completely different reaction between the blacks and whites. It was not that dissimilar from the conflicting reactions that came after the O. J. Simpson verdict. We definitely were not on the same page."
In Wisconsin, Kehrein wanted to put those disturbing memories out of his head. But he somehow knew they were matters he needed to confront. He was hopeful when his professor announced that Ralph Abernathy had agreed to share a few words with the Moody students, that perhaps King's closest colleague would be able to put some context to his confusion about race in America. "Dr. Abernathy completed his talk and entertained questions from my class. But with all that history in the room, and all that had transpired in the civil-rights movement over the last 10 years, the majority of questions we ended up asking him were about his personal salvation and his understanding of the conservative tenets of evangelical doctrine." Kehrein was stupefied. "Dr. Abernathy was gracious and attempted to accommodate all our questions, but we were clueless. I think our narrow focus said a lot about the evangelical mindset during that era."
Thirty years after the incident at Green Lake, Glen Kehrein is the executive director of Circle Urban Ministries on Chicago's West Side. Through years of ministry in the inner city and committed relationships across racial lines, Kehrein has worked out much of the angst he felt as a Moody student. "I now understand the black community's huge public catharsis of anger and frustration and hopelessness that followed King's assassination," he says. "While I knew the white community's response to King was not a good measure of the man, back then I wasn't astute enough to fully grasp what was going on among African Americans. And I think many white evangelicals have been on a similar journey since King's death."
"White evangelicals were, for the most part, absent during the civil-rights struggle," admits National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Don Argue. Since assuming the NAE helm three years ago, Argue, a white Assemblies of God minister, has worked hard to forge relationships between black and white Christians, spearheading joint meetings between his group and the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA), and assigning blacks to key positions in his organization. But he realizes the road to strong relationships will be a long and delicate one. According to Argue, white evangelicals missed their golden opportunity the first time. "When African Americans had their Moses in the person of Martin Luther King, we were either indifferent or, in some cases, critical and hostile toward what was happening."
Congressman J. C. Watts agrees. "We should have had more evangelical churches willing to be involved in the civil-rights movement during its heyday," says Watts. "Evangelicals should have been involved simply because it was the right thing to do. If there's an injustice against my fellow man, I have an obligation to say it's wrong, not as a politician but as a Christian."
Watts, the only black Republican in Congress (R-Okla.) and an ordained Baptist minister, speaks freely of his affinity for King, which is indicative of the evolution of King's legacy since his death. Today, conservatives from both the political and religious realms talk unashamedly of the positive contributions of the slain civil-rights leader. However, in King's day, his nonviolent resistance and ambiguous theology were considered suspect. Even evangelist Billy Graham, who since 1953 had worked to desegregate his crusades and had recruited Negro evangelist Howard O. Jones to his team in 1957, was reticent to cast his wholehearted support to King's movement. "Some extreme Negro leaders are going too far and too fast," Graham wrote in 1960. "Only the supernatural love of God through changed men can solve this burning question."
But King saw his "social gospel" as a natural outworking of God's "supernatural love." He told Playboy magazine in 1965, "The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. … The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion."
In today's hostile climate of clashing ideologies, King would be considered "politically incorrect," says Congressman Watts. "Today people would say to Dr. King, 'No, no, keep your religious beliefs out of politics—remember the separation of church and state.' But everything Dr. King stood for was because of his faith. His faith transcended race and politics."
On the other hand, at least a few Christian thinkers are not convinced of the religious purity of King's public message. According to the late Spencer Perkins, King's theme of nonviolence and love was probably more a matter of pragmatism than faith. "Like Gandhi, King used it as a strategy to win a battle when the power and numbers were not on his side," said Perkins. "King talked about love overcoming hate. But in my own experience, when we were taking part in marches and demonstrations, it was not love that was making us do it; it was our desire to win."
Eugene Rivers, pastor of inner-city Boston's Azusa Christian Community and an outspoken black voice on matters of race in America, believes King's nonviolent methods were outcroppings of the man's political savvy. "King understood that you could not successfully win the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act by appealing to the historical grievances of black people," he says. "So the moral pageantry of the 'beloved community' was tactically the only way to secure those victories."
Dolphus Weary is less cynical about King's motives. For Weary, Martin Luther King was precisely the kind of preacher southern blacks needed. "I used to see many preachers being exploitative of the black community," he says. "They would say stuff like, 'It's OK that you're going into the back door of restaurants. It's OK that you're going to second-class schools. It's OK that you're the last hired and the first fired. Because one day you're going to heaven, and everything will be all right.' But then King came along and said, 'No! You're not a second-class citizen. God is concerned about you right now. Go vote. Go stand up for your rights.' It was what we needed to hear."
White evangelicals should have borne witness to the truth of the gospel by standing with their black brothers and sisters and opposing racist terrorism against black churches, observes Rivers. He adds that conservative evangelicalism can only blame itself for the liberalism in King's theology since in his day blacks were not welcomed at evangelical colleges and seminaries. "White evangelicals blew an opportunity to shape the intellectual and moral development of King and an entire generation of church-based civil-rights leaders," says Rivers.
Despite their tardiness, Kehrein knows evangelicals have matured in their view of King. "For the most part, evangelicals today no longer have the 'social gospel' concern. They have come to see that the gospel must have social implications and have recognized the great contributions of King and other civil-rights pioneers."
Clearly it is a new day among white evangelicals. This decade alone has witnessed groups as diverse as Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and the Promise Keepers offering public repentance for past racial transgressions. Nonetheless, NAE's Argue believes there remains a persistent inability among white evangelicals to comprehend the race issue.
"Whenever I go to a black Christian gathering, I find that the subject of racism is always on the agenda, and it's near the top. They're not whining or complaining, but they are deeply concerned," explains Argue. "On the other hand, you go to a white meeting and very rarely, if ever, is racism on the agenda. I've come to the conclusion that it's because African Americans deal with racism on an ongoing basis. They have to justify who they are when they cash a check more often than a white person does."
WHAT OF THE DREAM?In 1963 on a jetliner zooming from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Martin Luther King sat quietly, peering outside from his window seat. He was drinking in the view of the serene Appalachian Mountains below when the plane suddenly bounced and jerked in a fit of turbulence. King looked up from his pillow, flashed a smile at the Time magazine reporter seated beside him and said, "I guess that's Birmingham down below."
Birmingham was turbulent territory then. King called the city the greatest stronghold of Jim Crow in the South.
Today, if King were to fly over Birmingham, he would experience friendlier skies. In a city once governed by white supremacists, there is now an African-American mayor. In the downtown district, not far from where attack dogs and fire hoses once assailed nonviolent protesters, there stands the Civil Rights Institute. Inside this sobering memorial of a not-so-distant America, visitors can review the artifacts of the Birmingham revolution and actually explore the jail cell that housed King during his famous imprisonment.
A few miles northeast of downtown, in a low-income neighborhood near the Birmingham airport, stands a small church building, surrounded by rows of public-housing projects. The sign out front reads: DOERS OF THE WORD CHURCH. And the members of the interracial congregation of 150, on any given day, can be seen side-by-side serving the hungry and homeless from their church-run soup kitchen. On Sunday mornings, the half-black, half-white body of believers celebrates their common bond in Christ during an exuberant, cross-cultural worship service. The little church seems a million protest marches away from the Jim Crow spirit that stifled the community in Martin Luther King's day. According to Arthur Johnson, the African-American senior pastor of Doers of the Word, his church is a testament to the enduring power of King's vision.
"Dr. King's dream of his children 'not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character'—we're living that out every day," says Johnson. "Eleven o'clock Sunday morning at Doers of the Word is definitely not 'the most segregated hour in America.' "
So if Martin Luther King's Dream of an integrated and benevolent society is the ideal by which Christians and the nation should measure their progress in race relations, how are we doing?
Johnson's congregation seems to be an exception. Though an increasing number of U.S. congregations have become intentionally cross-cultural, in many ways local churches are America's final frontier of segregated institutions. "The church is segregated now because that's what we like," said Perkins. "In King's era, churches were segregated because whites didn't want to be around blacks. Now it's two-sided. Today we both choose to be separate."
But Rivers doesn't think that is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Rivers, who regularly raises eyebrows with his unsympathetic views regarding King, argues that King's perspective on integration was too idealistic. He explains: "King's theological and racial liberalism gave inadequate attention to the primacy of culture, tradition, and history. The truth is, both blacks and whites identify with their particular traditions—and that's not wrong. It only becomes wrong when it promotes injustice." For Rivers, the "remarkable irony" is that King never sought to desegregate black churches. "How is it that the apostle of integration never did this?" Rivers asks. "My sense is that he understood that it was not in the best interest of black preachers to surrender their power by desegregating black churches."
Perkins, late son of racial-reconciliation pioneer John Perkins, disagreed with Rivers. "Being segregated is a weakness of the church. Everybody is comfortable being around their own kind. But that type of thinking puts comfort and culture over Christ."
Robert Franklin, of the Interdenominational Theological Center, says he is "cautiously optimistic." However, Franklin thinks the most pressing racial matters lie in the "institutional" domain. "When one looks at the expansion of the black middle class and the ongoing dismantling of racist legislation and customs throughout the culture, we have to acknowledge that we've come a long way in a short period of time," he says. "But when one looks at the disparate economic culture between blacks and whites and at corporate boardrooms where there is a relatively small number of people of color and women, it's clear that we're still lagging."
Rivers is less generous: "Much of the current race-relations discourse, like what happens at Promise Keepers, substitutes fundamentalist hugfests for the kind of deep, substantive dialogue that has a genuine impact on institutional decisions and public policy. Too much of the reconciliation rhetoric of white evangelicals focuses on interpersonal piety without any radically biblical conception of racial justice."
Oberlin College religion professor Albert G. Miller believes the church has a watered-down understanding of King's vision. "I think we are stuck in our image of King at the 1963 March on Washington," he says. "The 'I Have a Dream' King was a kinder, gentler King. There was a more complicated man that evolved after that point who was very frustrated with what he saw with the limited progress of blacks. In his latter days, King was not just protesting for blacks to eat at the lunch counter, but for blacks to have employment at the lunch counter and to own it."
Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian Ethics at Howard University and senior pastor of Washington's Third Street Church of God, concurs. "The problem with the Dream language is that it draws attention away from the reality of what King was speaking about throughout his life. There's a danger of only seeing him as a dreamer, and if we only see him as a dreamer, we too easily let ourselves off the hook from dealing with the realities that he was dealing with."
Toward the end of his life, King returned to his Baptist theological roots, "stripping himself … of Protestant liberalism's pieties," writes Willy Jennings in (March/April 1998), emphasizing the words of Jesus and the coming judgment.
Denver Seminary's Malcolm Newton adds: "King and the other Christians of the civil-rights movement put their lives on the line. Protesting, marching, getting bombed and lynched and thrown into jail hundreds of times for the sake of biblical justice. That's a legacy that King left for us, and the church hasn't grabbed on to it yet."
Still, others are guardedly encouraged. "Compared to where we were, I think we've done very well," says Mission Mississippi's Weary. "People are talking today who haven't talked in a long time. There's still a long way to go, but at least we're talking about it."
In the meantime, away from the din of philosophical debates and unfulfilled hopes, the everyday business of coexisting together must go on. And one senses there might be something to learn from unheralded efforts like Arthur Johnson's Birmingham contingent. Says Johnson: "I know we've still got a lot of issues to work through, but as long as we're pursuing the Dream, I believe God is pleased."
Edward Gilbreath is associate editor of New Man magazine.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromEdward Gilbreath
- More fromMartin Luther King Jr.
- Christian History
- Civil Rights Movement
- Edward Gilbreath
- Evangelicalism
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Racism
- Reconciliation
- Segregation
- Social Justice
- U.S. History
Jesse Miranda and William Pannell discuss the next step in racial reconciliation.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
Jesse Miranda and William Pannell often find themselves the lone representatives of their ethnic groups on evangelical boards and on speakers’ platforms. Perhaps, they suggest, it represents the current state of race relations: different ethnic groups and the majority white community have made contact with each other, but as mere aliens visiting one another from far-off planets. What does it take to transform these encouraging but often facile alien encounters into true Christian relationship? The answers are complex. But because Miranda and Pannell have lived in both the white evangelical world as well as the Hispanic and African-American evangelical worlds respectively, their insights are especially worth hearing.
Jesse Miranda is head of the Alianza de Ministerios Evangelicos Nacionales, a national alliance of Hispanic evangelical ministries best known as AMEN, and is associate dean for urban and multicultural affairs for the Haggard Graduate School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University. He also serves on the board of Promise Keepers and is an executive presbyter for the Assemblies of God. Bill Pannell is professor of preaching and dean of the chapel at Fuller Theological Seminary and serves on the Taylor University board. He is also the author of a number of books, including The Coming Race Wars? (Zondervan). They met in Pasadena for this discussion, moderated by CT‘s Kevin D. Miller.
How would you evaluate the current state of racial reconciliation in the church?Miranda: I was watching a cable television station that was carrying a meeting of evangelicals on racial reconciliation. I was excited to see this demonstration of Christian unity. But then my phone rang, and a Hispanic leader on the other end asked if I was watching this. When I told him I was, he asked, “Is your TV in black and white? Because mine is; it looks like a rerun from the 1960s. Why aren’t we part of this discussion?”
As it turns out, there have been five national high-profile meetings on racial reconciliation since 1994, conducted by evangelical, Pentecostal, and mainline groups. All have been between black and white participants. Another meeting, between the National Black Evangelical Association and the National Association of Evangelicals, is scheduled for 1999. This makes me think of what David Atencio, a Hispanic minister and educator, has said: “If this is as far as reconciliation meetings go in the American church in terms of inclusivity, then the effort toward reconciliation will not only be limited, but limiting as well.” One of the reasons we began AMEN is to provide a point of contact for dialogue on this and other issues.
But isn’t there a priority to the black/white reconciliation effort given the history of slavery? In your book Race Wars, Bill, you write, “For white American Christians, this issue at gut level and historically is still primarily an issue between African Americans and Euro Americans.” How so?Pannell: For one, the history of whites enslaving blacks does give their conversation a special place in the dialogue on reconciliation, making it something of a family feud. I also think the racial issue became focused as a black-and-white issue because the most objectionable thing in white society from early days on was blackness—not ethnicity, not culture—but color. That still prevails. For example, if darker complexioned Puerto Ricans come to the United States, they face greater discrimination than do lighter complexioned Puerto Ricans, even though they are of the same ethnicity. Ours is a society that talks of democracy while behaving as if were a pigment-ocracy.
Miranda: Yes, it is a “family feud,” but you must remember we are part of that family. What today is the southwestern United States was Mexico. This means that my Mexican-American father’s ancestors were here before Texas or California were even states. And my mother’s ancestors, who go back to the Spanish Conquistadors, have a history here that precedes both Anglo and African presence on the continent.
Pannell: But even in the Hispanic community this pigment-ocracy can be seen in the fact that only in recent years have certain Latino professionals of a lighter complexion been willing to finally admit that they are Latinos and begin using Latino names. Black folks never could pass easily as nonblack.
The one group of people who do not like to think of themselves as ethnic are white folks. Here at Fuller Seminary we can talk about multi-ethnics, but the white community, including professors and administrators, don’t think of themselves as ethnic people or as having an ethnic theology. When people from, say, Russia come here, they get off the plane, and it doesn’t take them very long to know that they’re going to survive here in terms of upward mobility and power—not by being Russian Americans, but by being white Americans.
Miranda: I agree that blackness has been a deficit. There are what we call Afro Latinos who purposefully speak Spanish to avoid being thought of as African American. This gives them a leg up on the social ladder.
“The pastors in the civil-rights move-ment saw that the core of the issuetheologically was righteousnessand justice, and that without thosethere would be no reconciliation.”
But isn’t it time we move beyond the superficial definition of color? Even Martin Luther King, Jr., did not stop at blackness. He never denied it, but he pointed to something deeper—the content of character. I’m saying that Christians, at least, should see the issue of racial reconciliation as a question of human dignity and identity. This opens the conversation up to include other ethnic groups that have suffered indignities.
In many ways, African Americans and Mexican Americans have strong reasons to be in direct dialogue because of our shared experiences of discrimination. Mexican Americans experience a double standard of business people pulling them in to do their manual labor while politicians push them away with propositions and laws. Like Native Americans, we live with unresolved land grants and thousands of broken treaties. My wife’s grandfather died believing that he had property because he had a title, but it was never honored. Hispanics are the fruit basket of our nation, and yet others don’t seem to care that we struggle with low wages and die from the environmental hazards that come with these jobs. So all of these things, I think, are matters that need to be reconciled in society and in the church. If the church is serious about reconciling and confessing its sins, it must know the history of all its people, and that can happen when the dialogue is opened up to include all its people.
Pannell: To talk reconciliation among people anywhere in the world forces us to talk about power and the relationship between reconciliation and justice. There is a sense in which the struggles that we can now identify as beginning in the sixties were simply a continuation of struggles that never did get resolved in significant ways as Euro Americans continued moving in conquest across the face of what is now the United States. Wherever they went, these kinds of subjugations and injustices took place—against Native Americans, Hispanics, and later Asian Americans.
It’s not that whites are the only people in the world who do this. But a fact of human nature is that when people have power and decide to use it, it most frequently comes across as oppression. So a common mistake has been to talk about reconciliation in isolation from injustice. The pastors who gave leadership to the civil-rights movement saw that the core of the issue theologically was righteousness and justice, and that without those there would be no reconciliation.
Miranda: Bill, one small example of how easy it is to talk about reconciliation while failing to base it in justice is a story your former student Paul told us. He and his father, both of whom are Hispanic, went to the Atlanta conference of Promise Keepers, which had a strong message on reconciliation. Afterwards, the guys started hugging each other, and a long row of Anglos lined up to hug Paul, but not his father.
Paul wasn’t sure what he was reconciling about, and he was puzzled why they were ignoring his father. Then it dawned on him that it was because his skin was darker than his father’s. What’s ironic is that it was Paul’s father who could have told the stories of riding in the backs of buses and drinking from fountains labeled “Mexicans only.” He was the one carrying the pain, but he was ignored because he wasn’t “visible.” I’m saying that true reconciliation must be more than meets the eye. A focus on skin color is not a focus on the total person.
Jesse, you have said that the Exodus story may have to give way to the Samaritan story. What do you mean by that?Miranda: When Jesus talked with the Samaritan woman at the well, he was bringing his gospel to a mixed race that didn’t fit the traditional Jew/Gentile paradigm. Jesus’ action represents a missiological shift, a reversal in thought categories from a provincial identity to a global community. It is the fulfillment of Jesus’ words in Matthew 12:49 that “obedience is thicker than blood” (The Message). Obedience and empowerment, not ethnic loyalty or domination, are the defining characteristics of God’s people.
Pannell: If we do move from Exodus to Samaria, it becomes even more risky because Samaria is about a woman. It seems to me that what Jesus taught us by going to Samaria was not so much a movement over against the Exodus so much as it was breaking into a new frontier, an extension of the implications of the Exodus experience to be much more inclusive. And the radical breakthrough was the inclusivity in the kingdom.
Miranda: I want to be careful here to say that by suggesting the priority of the Samaritan story I am not negating the relevance of the Exodus story. Latinos, like African Americans, use that image as a lesson on liberation.
Pannell: Almost all oppressed peoples do, which is why I think you are right in suggesting the need for a dialogue between groups like Hispanics and African Americans that hold this in common.
Does the church really care about racial reconciliation?Pannell: Sometimes I feel black people are the only ones who really give a fig about reconciliation. Other ethnic groups have expressed very little interest. The initiative for these sorts of things doesn’t usually come out of the white community, either. Go down to the Christian booksellers convention and look at what people are reading and writing and publishing—the stuff that sells—and you will find there are no bestsellers written by white people on the subject. And so I’m saying, Are we, the black community, nuts?
But then I hear the Holy Spirit say, “Pannell, I didn’t seek your counsel. I didn’t ask you for permission to do anything. You’re not in charge here. This is the agenda. This is the thing for which my Son gave his life. I gave him up for this—for reconciliation. This is not an option. This is not an elective.” And so I get called back to it again.
“If the church is serious about con-fessing its sins, it mus know thehistory of all its people, and thatcan happen when the dialogue isopened up to include all its people.”
One thing that has excited me in this conversation is learning there is a national Hispanic evangelical association. I hadn’t ever heard of AMEN! Now we’ve got a point of reference that I never knew was there. What are the other points of reference out there that we don’t know about? Is there a comparable move among Native Americans? Is there a comparable move among the Asian community? I know, of course, any number of Asians who are evangelicals. But how do we find each other in ways that suggest an evangelical movement beyond where we are now that can demonstrate that the issue of reconciliation is not a fad, doesn’t depend on getting 6 million guys in a stadium some place?
Miranda: I think you are right in saying other ethnic groups typically show little interest in reconciliation, because their interests go beyond what you call pigment-ocracy. This is true of much of the Hispanic community, many of whom are more interested in insulation than reconciliation. However, there is some interest among Latinos from different backgrounds to reconcile the strong ill will that exists among and between them. That is why AMEN came to exist.
But generally speaking, I think many Hispanics wonder what good there is in joining a black/white dialogue that was begun in 1776 and was vigorously resurrected in 1960s—but still is nowhere close to being resolved. Who are we to come in and try to make the issues more complex and probably mix things up? We are better off staying on the sidelines and watching to see if there can be any real resolution or progress. Many wonder what price would be paid to get into that dialogue. Often the result is whites defining blacks, so we’d rather remain free and define ourselves.
Also, I think evangelical Hispanics are reticent to join a dialogue that feels foreign to us in the sense that it is aimed more at truth than at the Latino ideal of relationship. Blacks and whites confront to get to “the bottom of the issue,” while Hispanics tend to avoid the issues if it will save face. Perhaps it’s because we come out of a Latin Catholic ethos as compared to the Protestant ethos that whites and blacks speak from.
And yet, with you, I agree that disengagement is not the Christian way. Hispanics owe a lot to the black community for taking up the baton of human rights and of civil rights. It isn’t the Christian way to take a free ride or to sit back and see how things do or don’t get worked out. Whatever the consequences, we need to get into the dialogue, and perhaps we can bring something to the table that would help us all work through the differences of skin pigmentation, culture, or history.
Pannell: One of the reasons Christian attempts to speak about reconciliation in the broader culture are not taken seriously is because the Christian movement itself has demonstrated such little commitment to it. Before there can be any meaningful reconciliation, evangelicals who are black, white, Korean, or Hispanic must once and for all come to terms with this mandate of our God that this is the core of the curriculum. To be a Christian is to be in the ministry of reconciliation.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Randall Balmer
A visit with Jimmy Swaggart ten years after his fall.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
The Family Life Center lies on the edge of Baton Rouge just down the road from the newly opened Mall of Louisiana. The parking lot for the shopping mall is burgeoning on a Sunday, while the acres of parking for the Family Life Center are nearly vacant. Such a contrast might occasion yet another commentary on spiritual apathy, misplaced priorities, and the false gods of consumerism, until one remembers that the preacher behind the pulpit at the Family Life Center on this Sunday—as well as most Sundays—is a man named Jimmy Swaggart.
To suggest that Swaggart is behind the pulpit, however, is somewhat misleading; he has never submitted easily to the constraints of pulpits—or, for that matter, to any other conventional boundaries. Instead, he bobs and weaves and shouts and cries and spins his own magic. “Preaching is like an orchestra,” Swaggart told me. “You have to be loud one moment and quiet the next. You’ve got to keep the people’s attention. You’ve got to keep the people’s attention.” Throughout a raucous and controversial career now in its fourth decade, Jimmy Swaggart has rarely had trouble keeping people’s attention.
NOT WELCOME HEREDespite the dearth of congregants, my presence at Family Life Center was not entirely welcome. I had made the mistake of chatting with the women at the welcome booth and, in the process, disclosed navely that I was in town to write an article about Jimmy Swaggart Ministries ten years after his celebrated—and very public—downfall. I had just settled into my seat in the sanctuary, already awash in klieg lights, when one of the ushers, dressed in a burgundy sport coat, sat down beside me. “I understand you’re a reporter,” he said. I allowed that he was close enough. “First of all,” he barked, “no pictures in here.”
As I looked around, I understood why. The last time I had seen Swaggart on television, which was several years ago, it had occurred to me that all the camera angles had been rather narrow, suggesting that they were trying to cover up for the fact that the congregation was small. Indeed, the entire wraparound balcony of the octagonal building was closed, shrouded in darkness, and huge sections of the main floor had been cordoned off by dark, burgundy curtains, which matched the carpeting and the blazers worn by the ushers. “And the other thing,” the usher announced brusquely, “I’m pretty sure Don and Jimmy don’t want you here. In fact, I’ll check with Donnie right now.”
Within minutes Donnie Swaggart, Jimmy’s son, a stocky man with an athletic build, dressed nattily in a dark, double-breasted suit, came bounding from the backstage area, almost running toward me. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. When I explained that I was writing an article for CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Donnie Swaggart’s eyes flashed. “I don’t like the press,” he bellowed. “How come you didn’t tell us you were coming?” I explained that I had called the office several times over the preceding weeks to inquire about dates and that I had made no attempt to hide my purpose for visiting. “Well you didn’t talk to me,” he said, his tone softening slightly.
“Listen, I’ve seen characters like you before,” he continued, resuming the bluster and wagging his finger in my direction, “and you know what? It’s the so-called Christians who are the worst.” Ten o’clock was fast approaching, and Donnie had to assume his place on the stage. “Just remember,” he continued, “blood is thicker than water. Do whatever you want to me, just don’t touch my parents or my kids. If you do, I’m coming after you, you understand?”
Although I found these threats more amusing than intimidating—should I expect a knock on the door some night from a couple of thugs with cigarettes dangling from their mouths: “Hey, buster, some preacher fella from Baton Rouge wants to have a little chat with you”?—Donnie Swaggart clearly was paranoid about my presence. Throughout the service he kept stealing glances in my direction. A rather large usher whose name tag read “Bill Wilson” was assigned to follow me, tracking my serpentine movements after the service. Although I managed to lose him a couple of times, he caught up with me, breathing a bit heavily, and resumed his surveillance. When I approached Jimmy Swaggart, who had changed into a turtleneck and was greeting congregants near the stage, Wilson fidgeted nervously but kept his distance.
Swaggart himself couldn’t have been more gracious. He is a kind man who, unlike some other “televangelists,” is not afraid to meet your eyes. Lest there be any confusion or false pretenses, I informed him immediately of my purpose for visiting Baton Rouge and told him of my admiration for his preaching abilities. The mention of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, however, brought a change in his countenance, not so much anger or defiance, as it had with Donnie, but sadness. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you,” he said, shaking his head. “That magazine has said some pretty hurtful things about me.” He shifted his eyes briefly toward the middle distance, then back at me. From the corner of my eye I could see my tail, Bill Wilson, shuffling nervously.
“Listen,” Swaggart said kindly, “I’m not always right about this, of course, but I’m pretty good at judging people, and I detect a good spirit about you. But I don’t want anything to do with that magazine. In fact,” he continued, suddenly laughing, “I don’t even want anything good about me going into that magazine!” He grabbed my hand, shook it warmly, and drove home the point. “I’m sorry. If you were writing for the Washington Post,” he said, “that might be a different matter.”
As I turned away, back toward Bill Wilson, so we could resume meandering around the Family Worship Center, I too was sorry. Jimmy Swaggart is an enormously likable man, and I would have loved to chat for awhile about life and preaching and failure and grace and the many doctrines we held in common, including providence.
MENTORING JIMMYLittle did I know that an affirmation of providence would occur within the hour, but to understand the scale of this theological demonstration I must reveal a mundane personal detail: I rarely eat lunch—once or twice a month, at most, and only when a business or social occasion demands it. As I pulled out of the parking lot at the Family Life Center, however, and drove past the vast array of restaurants on Bluebonnet Avenue, I abruptly decided to pull into a large, well-advertised seafood restaurant. I wanted to look through Swaggart’s autobiography, To Cross a River, which I had just purchased in the bookstore, and, relieved that Bill Wilson and the usher corps had not confiscated my notebook, I wanted to review my notes from the morning.
The hostess seated me at a table next to a fairly large group, headed by none other than a man wearing a gray turtleneck—Jimmy Swaggart. He noticed me almost immediately and, without a moment’s hesitation, invited me to join them. I assured him that I had not followed him to the restaurant, but he was unconcerned and introduced me all around—his wife, Frances, his mother-in-law, and a missionary family from South Africa.
Swaggart was relaxed and expansive. Although he dropped out of high school, he is an exceedingly bright, literate, and articulate man. In the course of our conversation he talked about the preachers who had influenced him, A. N. Trotter and John R. Rice, a fundamentalist with whom Swaggart had formed an improbable friendship. “I’ve preached a lot of his sermons over the years,” Swaggart said, citing one of his favorites in particular, whose theme was “all the Devil’s apples got worms.” He said that he had developed “my own style,” but he very much admired the oratorical abilities of Martin Luther King, Jr., E. V. Hill, and “some white guy with a bald head.” When I ventured the name Tony Campolo, Swaggart recognized it immediately. “Yeah, that’s him! That guy can preach,” he said, slapping the table with evident appreciation.
Swaggart’s autobiography cites a couple of other preachers as influential in his early years. J. M. Cason, a young evangelist, held revival meetings in Swaggart’s hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana. He made an impression on Swaggart as “a highly emotional man who cried and preached at the same time.”
Another young preacher, Cecil Janway, also played the piano. Swaggart remembers that he “brought life” from the church’s ragged upright piano, “life which flowed throughout the church building.”
To this day, Swaggart opens his services at the keyboard, his right leg thumping up and down in time to the beat. As with many Pentecostal services, the opening songs blend seamlessly one to the next. “There is power in the blood” segues into “Alleluia, fill us afresh today.” As the music whips the congregation into a frenzy, Donnie Swaggart claps and hops in time to the beat and then grabs a microphone. “I’m here to serve notice on the Devil today,” he exclaims, “there’s power in the blood. There’s power in the blood of Jesus Christ.” The congregation concurs with shouts and applause. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” Donnie announces. “The Devil has been defeated!” He does a little dance as the music segues back into “Power in the Blood.”
If God forgot Swaggart’stransgression, few others did.
After still more music and an exhortation to “give the Lord a big hand,” the crowd hushed as a woman in the front row spoke in tongues. Someone from the choir offered an immediate interpretation. Donnie once again grabbed the microphone. “I don’t know if you can hear it. The Holy Ghost is saying, ‘I’m about to enlarge your borders here at the Family Worship Center. There’s not going to be an empty seat in the house.’ “
TRUE CONFESSION—SORT OFFor ten years now, there has been a surfeit of empty seats in the Family Worship Center, which has a capacity of 7,500. The last full house, in fact, gathered to witness the famous confession on February 21, 1988. “I do not plan in any way to whitewash my sin,” Swaggart said in the wake of disclosures about having visited a motel room with a prostitute. “I do not call it a mistake, a mendacity. I call it sin.” In a soliloquy that was baroque and eloquent at the same time, Swaggart apologized to his wife, his son, and his daughter-in-law.
He apologized to the Assemblies of God, “which helped to bring the gospel to my little beleaguered town, when my family was lost without Jesus, this movement and fellowship that girdles the globe, that has been more instrumental in bringing this gospel through the stygian night of darkness to the far-flung hundreds of millions than maybe any effort in the annals of history.” He apologized to the “godly” pastors of the Assemblies of God, to its evangelists and missionaries.
Finally, Swaggart apologized to Jesus, “the one who has saved me and washed me and cleansed me.” Swaggart’s jaw quivered; rivulets of tears flowed down his cheeks. His eyes turned toward heaven. “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.”
The performance was vintage Swaggart—complete with anguish and tears and self-flagellation—but if God forgot his transgression, few others did. For Swaggart’s many critics, moreover, he had finally received his comeuppance. Swaggart had earlier criticized “pretty-boy preachers,” a thinly veiled reference to Jim Bakker, his fellow Assemblies of God minister and rival televangelist. Marvin Gorman, a Pentecostal preacher from New Orleans, had also tangled with Swaggart, and Gorman was the one who produced evidence that Swaggart had entered a Louisiana motel room with a prostitute—not for a sexual liaison, it turns out, but to engage in some sort of voyeurism.
Believers shuddered at the toppling of yet another televangelist, and the media, already in a feeding frenzy in the wake of Bakker’s tryst with Jessica Hahn, had a field day. Swaggart became the object of ridicule and derision. He had engaged in something that was portrayed not so much as immoral as it was tawdry. Some commentators made much of the fact that Hahn (after the requisite plastic surgery) appeared in Playboy, while the woman linked with Swaggart appeared in Penthouse.
Swaggart promised to submit to the discipline of the Assemblies of God, with whom he held ordination credentials. He offered what the denomination characterized as a “detailed confession,” which demonstrated “true humility and repentance” on Swaggart’s part. While the Louisiana District of the Assemblies of God imposed a three-month silence, which Swaggart accepted, the denomination extended the discipline to two full years. Swaggart, however, chose to abide by the Louisiana punishment. He resumed preaching on May 22, 1988, Pentecost Sunday, explaining that “Jesus paid the price” for his sins. Swaggart may have had little choice. Put simply, the scale and the reach of his operations in Baton Rouge and around the world demanded a steady infusion of cash. Donnie was not yet ready to step in—he had neither the experience nor the charisma—and Jimmy recognized that he had to go back on the air in an effort to salvage the various components of his empire.
In retrospect, that decision was probably a miscalculation. “He has isolated himself from those who could have helped eventually restore his ministry with integrity,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY opined. “Swaggart was too impatient, too friendly with power, too short-sighted to see beyond his immediate desires and goals.”
The General Presbytery of the Assemblies of God defrocked Swaggart for violating the terms of their suspension; Swaggart had burned his bridges with his own denomination. His basic constituency had already eroded, and Swaggart certainly did not help himself with his own recidivism. In 1991 he was stopped by police in Indio, California, while driving with a woman who claimed to be a prostitute. The result was predictable. More scorn, more ridicule, more empty seats.
FIRE IN HIS VEINSThe compound that straddles Bluebonnet Road has a forlorn look to it. With the huge infusions of cash from his television program—Jimmy Swaggart Ministries pulled in $141.6 million in 1986, the last full year before the scandal—Swaggart had built an impressive empire: the massive Family Worship Center, television production facilities, an administrative center for his worldwide operations, and Jimmy Swaggart Bible College across the street.
Most of the flagpoles, each of which once represented a foreign nation where Swaggart maintained a presence, are empty. The fountains are dry, the landscaping neglected and overgrown. At the Bible college, weeds and a chainlink fence surround the shell of what was to be a high-rise dormitory, its construction abruptly halted after the scandal. Only about 45 students attend the school now, Swaggart told me wistfully, a campus built to accommodate hundreds more. The entire scene resembles a fly trapped in amber, frozen in time.
And yet, a decade after the scandal, Swaggart soldiers on. He leaves the piano, steps onto center stage, removes his glasses, and exclaims, “I don’t know about you, but I’m happy this morning!” He initiates a reprise of “I’ve got the Holy Ghost down in my heart, just like the Bible says,” and then, referring to a recent downturn in the financial markets, remarks: “If you get your joy out of Wall Street, well, you got quite a jolt a couple of weeks ago.” He invites members of the congregation to come forward for healing. As the choir and the congregation sing “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” Swaggart, his son, and several elders pray for each one. Swaggart took particular compassion on a man who was badly deformed. “Lord, touch my brother,” he cried, with his hands on the man’s forehead, “from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.”
Divine healing has always been a central tenet of Swaggart’s ministry. The death of his baby brother, Donnie, when Jimmy was only four made a deep impression on him. While preaching his first revival in Sterlington, Louisiana, Swaggart came down with pneumonia (the same illness that had felled his brother). Swaggart went to the hospital but left after a couple of days, still burning with fever. He fell into a deep depression. “Dark, gloomy thoughts roamed through my mind,” Swaggart recalled. “It seemed as if every demon in hell had crawled out to do battle with me.”
He read a passage from the Book of Joshua, with the admonition to be strong and of good courage. “God’s healing power surged through my body,” Swaggart said. “It was like fire in my veins.” He went on to impart his healing gift to others—as well as to the battered, blue Plymouth he used during the early years of his itinerancy.
DOWN IN THE BAYOUThe quickest route from Baton Rouge to Ferriday, Louisiana, is U.S. 61, also known as the Great River Road. It winds north past refineries along the Mississippi River, past antebellum plantations that have been turned into museums, and past sharecroppers’ cabins sitting next to their modern counterpart, that peculiarly American oxymoron, the mobile home. Baptist churches outnumber gas stations and restaurants and taverns and just about every other sort of establishment in the piney woods of Mississippi. At Natchez the road connects to U.S. 84 west across the kudzu banks of the Mississippi River and back into Louisiana to Ferriday.
When I told Swaggart that I planned to visit Ferriday, he said, “Well, it’s still there.” The large sign on the edge of town, just past Martin’s Auto Shop & Used Tires, reads: Ferriday, La, Visit Our Museum, Home of Jerry Lee Lewis, Howard K. Smith, Mickey Gilley, Peewee Whittaker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ann Boyar Warner.
Ferriday is a town of convenience stores, cinder-block Laundromats, and abandoned houses. Most of the shops along Louisiana Avenue were shuttered years ago, although the hardware store and the pawnshop remain open. Many of the houses in town, not just the mobile homes, sit atop piles of bricks or cinder blocks, testimony to the perils of life on a floodplain. Poverty abounds on both sides of the tracks, although even the tracks themselves were removed some years ago.
After driving around town for half an hour, I still hadn’t located the Assembly of God that had been organized in 1936 by Pentecostal missionaries Mother Sumrall and her daughter Leonia. When I asked for help in a convenience store, one of the customers interjected, “Oh, I can help you. Jimmy’s my cousin.” Carolyn Magoun, who later clarified that she was actually Frances’s cousin, not Jimmy’s, directed me to the First Assembly of God at the end of Texas Avenue. The Swaggart house, she said, had been torn down a long time ago.
When I offered that Jimmy Swaggart has had a rough time in recent years, Magoun agreed. “Yes, he has,” she said, shaking her head, “but people just forget that we’re all human.” She added that when Frances Swaggart grew tired of the media glare during her husband’s troubles, she would often slip away to Ferriday and Wisner, her hometown, just up the road.
The tiny clapboard building at the end of Texas Avenue was sagging somewhat, but it sported a fresh coat of white paint. I pulled into the gravel parking lot where Swaggart’s uncle, Elmo Lewis, Jerry Lee’s father, had pulled his sleek, black Cadillac in the spring of 1958, interrupting a church picnic. Elmo Lewis had just returned from Memphis with the news that Sam Phillips, the producer of Sun Records who had discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, had sent for Swaggart. Phillips had heard Swaggart sing and play the piano and found his keyboard style virtually indistinguishable from that of his cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis; he wanted to start a gospel line at Sun, with Swaggart as his first artist.
Swaggart was at that time, in his words, “a smalltime, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Pentecostal preacher” earning $30 a week—in good weeks. He had a wife and a young son and the battered, blue Plymouth. He preached in a $20 Stein suit and a single pair of shoes, while his cousin, known nationally as “the wild man of rock ‘n’ roll,” was pulling in $20,000 a week.
Uncle Elmo had left the Cadillac running. The contracts were waiting in Memphis, and Swaggart had been scheduled into the recording studio the next morning. Swaggart paused, surveyed the church folk, and said no. “I can’t do it,” he said finally, and the black Cadillac pulled away.
Swaggart believes that God gave him his musical abilities. After the arrival of Cecil Janway, the young preacher-pianist, to the Assemblies of God church in Ferriday, Swaggart prayed for a miracle. ” ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘I want you to give me the gift of playing the piano.’ ” Swaggart was so fervent that he even attached conditions to the request. ” ‘If you give me this talent, I will never use it in the world,’ ” he promised, adding, ” ‘If I ever go back on this promise, you can paralyze my fingers!’ ” The gift came that very evening, a gift that he tried to refine with lessons from the local band director, but Swaggart quit after four lessons, concluding that “playing by the book was a waste of time.”
PLAYING IT BY EARPlaying by the book has never been Swaggart’s forte. His preaching style is inimitable, and he is a consummate showman. (I often tell students that if they want to appreciate fully Swaggart’s artistry, tune him in on television, turn off the sound, and watch his facial expressions and his gesticulations.) At 11:30 on Sunday morning, an hour and a half after the service began, Swaggart announced, “I’m not going to preach long, just enough to get through.” He recited his text from memory: “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Matt. 3:11, NIV). He was already weeping. “I know I’m nothing.”
He recounted the baptism of John along the “reedy banks” of the River Jordan. Swaggart loosened his necktie. “I believe that Jordan rained with shouts that day,” he said. “There’s nothing like people getting saved.” His voiced cracked. “Forgive my emotion,” he said and then launched into a riff: “When people come to God, the drunkard puts down his bottle and the drug addict his drugs!” He recounted how “Jesus came to my house” when Swaggart was five; his parents were converted. “When they got saved,” Swaggart exclaimed, “the fighting ended.” Behind Swaggart, in the pastors’ gallery adjacent to the choir, Donnie Swaggart was sobbing convulsively. “I’m not going to push any more on this message this morning,” Swaggart said, after a pause. “Here’s what the Holy Ghost tells me to say to you right now,” he continued, pacing the stage. “Come to Jesus.”
And they came. Maybe not the hundreds, as in years past, but scores. They filed to the front steps, where boxes of tissues had been placed discreetly around the stage. Swaggart had invited them to come for salvation, for healing, for release from the bondage of sin or addiction.
Playing by the book hasnever been Swaggart’s forte.
As members of the congregation streamed toward the octagonal stage in response to Swaggart’s altar call, a fascinating tableau unfolded. Donnie Swaggart, having dabbed his tears, strode purposefully into the audience, picked out a good-looking young couple, guided them forward, and positioned them in front of one of the television cameras. He began praying fervently and animatedly. The camera’s red light flicked on obligingly, while the couple, especially the man, looked rather bewildered. Midway through the prayer, moreover, Donnie signaled to one of his associates to bring someone else. He moved to another camera and repeated the performance.
Donnie Swaggart clearly is positioning himself for an even greater role in Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. He is the heir apparent, and when his father announced on Sunday morning that Donnie would preach that evening, the son let out a whoop, prompting his father to compare him to a racehorse chomping at the bit.
When I arrived for the six o’clock service, my friend Bill Wilson was waiting for me in the lobby, still eyeing me suspiciously. Jimmy Swaggart again opened the service at the piano, while Donnie tried to imitate his father’s style. “The Devil does not own this town,” he shouted. “He doesn’t own this town. He doesn’t own this state. He doesn’t own this nation.”
In show business terms, Donnie Swaggart was dying out there, so his father stepped from behind the piano and, smooth as butter, came to the rescue. After a few remarks about his early days as a preacher he began spontaneously to sing “The Old Rugged Cross.” A woman near the stage was slain in the Spirit, caught as she fell backward by a man in a burgundy blazer. “Let me tell you,” Swaggart told the congregation, “you’ll make it if you hold to that cross.” The music shifted to “O, Happy Day” and then “Where Could I Go but to the Lord?” “The crippled man can still go to him,” Swaggart declared. “The drunk can still go to him. The lost sinner can still go to him.”
Donnie, wearing (honest to God) blue suede shoes—midnight blue loafers to match his shirt and his pocket square—again came to the microphone and this time rose to the occasion. His father, seated behind him, was his biggest cheerleader, offering hearty amens and applause. Donnie, preaching from Numbers 13, proved that he is a competent, even better-than-average preacher, “reading” his audience in good Pentecostal fashion, trying one theme after another until something clicks. That Sunday night, it was his recounting of an interracial revival he had preached recently in Orlando, Florida. “We don’t need Farrakhan,” he shouted. “We don’t need Jesse. We need Jesus!” The congregation cheered. “Racism is destroying this nation,” he continued, “but Jesus is the cure.”
The soaring rhetoric was a digression, but it worked; he had the attention of the audience. Swaggart then settled back into his theme, that “we are well able” to possess the land. For the younger Swaggart, that meant that the congregation, despite its setbacks in recent years, should move forward in faith. “The Devil took his best shot, but we are well able to go up and possess the land,” he said. “At times it doesn’t seem like there’s many of us, but there’s more for us than there are against us.” He talked about filling the cavernous Family Worship Center once again, and he even talked about resuming construction on the high-rise dormitory across the street. “Doubt says the church is half-empty, but faith says the church is half-full.”
THE FAITHFUL REMNANTIn the course of the service, I had noticed a 30-something woman from afar. She had been one of the most enthusiastic participants in the service, arms outstretched, weaving back and forth with her eyes closed. Her name, I learned, was Vickie Whittenburg, and when I asked her why she attended Swaggart’s church, she replied that it was “the Word, nothing but the Word.” She professed not to be bothered by Swaggart’s past transgressions. “It’s the anointing, regardless of the sin in one’s life,” she explained. “It’s a gift from God, and God doesn’t take it back.”
Ralph Walker, an usher, stopped by to join the conversation. “Nobody can preach like Jimmy Swaggart,” he said. “I’ve never known anyone like him. I started listening to him on the radio. I was a heathen. I was just a rank heathen.” Walker began attending the church when “it was bulging at the seams,” he said, pointing to the empty balcony. “I had to stand at the back of the balcony.”
Both Whittenburg and Walker consider themselves a remnant of the faithful. Whittenburg was drawn to Swaggart, in part, because of her passion for the underdog. “He’s a fighter,” she said. “I’ve never felt that I wanted anyone to make it as much as him, regardless of any error or failing on his part.” Walker ventured that the downfall happened because Jimmy Swaggart Ministries was getting too big.
Lorraine Thomas had moved with her husband, a preacher (now deceased), to Baton Rouge from Arizona in September 1987, just months before the scandal unfolded. “God said, ‘Go there and lift Jimmy up because he’s going to go through a great trial,’ ” she recalled. All three said that they met with ridicule when they told others that they attended Swaggart’s church. “Is he still preaching?” friends ask incredulously.
As the klieg lights dimmed and the conversation drew toward a close, Whittenburg asked, “Do you mind if we pray with you over this article?” A small crowd encircled me and joined hands. “Lord, we pray that you would send your Spirit upon this man as he writes this article,” Walker intoned. “Help him to remember the things he should remember and forget the things he should forget.”
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?In the decade since the televangelist scandals we have forgotten some of the shame that was heaped upon evangelicalism in the 1980s, but evangelicalism itself, the most resilient and influential movement in American history, has managed to survive, even prosper. I wonder, however, if the fixation on the financial shenanigans and the sexual escapades of the scandals has allowed us to dodge some thorny questions. Surely the transgressions of Bakker and Swaggart were not that much more egregious than Pat Robertson accepting Rupert Murdoch’s millions for the sale of the Family Channel, a property that Robertson developed from the tax-deductible contributions of the faithful. A focus on the transgressions of Bakker and Swaggart deflects attention from theological issues surrounding televangelism. The obscene sums of money pouring into the televangelists’ coffers is an invitation to abuse, and we can only speculate on how much of that revenue has been diverted from local congregations.
Evangelicalism, with its relative lack of creedal formulas and the absence of strong ecclesiastical structures, moreover, has always been susceptible to the cult of personality, a weakness only magnified by television. Evangelicals once harbored a healthy—though, at times, excessive—suspicion of worldliness, but they too have been infected by the culture of celebrity. Although evangelicals have always been citational in the expression of their beliefs, the fixation on celebrity in the last couple of decades has produced an important shift. Evangelicals once referred directly to the Bible as the basis for their theology, but now, more often than not, the citation has been filtered through the celebrity preacher: “As Dr. Swindoll says … ,” or “As Dr. Schuller says … ,” or “Dr. Dobson believes that . …”
Finally, while only the most obdurate Luddite would deny that the gospel can be proclaimed over the airwaves, evangelicalism’s worship forms, with the overweening emphasis on the sermon and the relative neglect of the sacraments or the church as the body of Christ, has led some viewers to suppose that a Sunday morning in the easy chair might be the rough equivalent of an hour in the pew. Besides, those televangelists, with their high-tech graphics and their cuddly musicians, sure know how to put on a good show!
But no one, not even Swaggart with his remarkable artistry, has found a way to sustain the community of faith over the airwaves. Worship surely must be something more than watching a preacher trying to project bonhomie and intimacy into a television camera. Shouldn’t the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation mean something? Jesus took on a fleshly form, after all; he didn’t rent satellite time. The gospel itself was flesh and blood, not an image flickering across the television screen, the medium capable of such extraordinary deception. No, the gospel is tactile and visceral, incarnate, the very characteristics we celebrate in Holy Communion. Blessed are the present, Jesus seems to be saying throughout the New Testament. Blessed are the present, for they are here and not absent.
WHY JIMMY MAKES US UNCOMFORABLESwaggart’s sermons and his autobiography are replete with references to the Devil and to darkness. He speaks of being “anointed by the Devil” as a young man, while playing the piano in a competition, and another time when the “darkened, oppressive forces of hell had been unleashed against me.” He wrestled with demons luring him to the movie theater and the temptation to follow his cousins, Lewis and Gilley, into the secular music business. But for every account of slipping into dark waters, Swaggart eventually claimed a victory.
“Jerry Lee can go to Sun Records in Memphis, I’m on my way to heaven with a God who supplies all my needs according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus,” he declared after a bout of envy at his cousin’s wealth. “I didn’t know how to explain it, but I knew I had won a great victory over the powers of darkness.”
While preaching in Ohio on the camp-meeting circuit many years ago, Swaggart was awakened by a flash flood. The raging waters, he said, nearly swept him and his wife away, but God spared them. “The Devil had tried to take our lives, and I realized the struggles would become more intense as I moved forward with God,” Swaggart recalled. “For years to come, I would dream about struggling against that current and almost drowning.”
For more than a decade Jimmy Swaggart has been struggling against the current. But when he responds to his critics by saying that “as many scars as I have, another one doesn’t really matter,” I suspect he’s talking about something more than scorn and ridicule and declining revenues. When Swaggart refers to the “stygian night of darkness,” the reference is internal as well.
Perhaps that’s why Swaggart makes us uncomfortable. All of us wrestle with demons, whether we use that terminology or not. They may or may not be sexual, as with Swaggart, but from time to time we feel ourselves slipping into dark waters, and the undertow seems all too overwhelming. Swaggart, with his tears and his sweat and his tortured confession, seems all too human, and, let’s face it, we evangelicals prefer our heroes to be anodyne and in control, tidy and triumphant. Swaggart makes us uncomfortable by reminding us of ourselves, but rather than facing our faults, our fallenness, our humanity, it’s easier to change the subject and dismiss Swaggart with ridicule. More’s the pity, for it is only by gazing into the mirror of our own wretchedness that we begin to comprehend the magnificence of grace.
A decade ago, groping for an explanation for his transgression, Swaggart remarked, “Maybe Jimmy Swaggart has tried to live his entire life as though he was not human.” We’ve known about Swaggart’s humanity for a decade now, and when in the course of a sermon he segues into “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” some would dismiss that as contrived and disingenuous, just another part of his act.
I think he knows whereof he speaks.
Randall Balmer, professor of American Religion at Columbia University, is the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromRandall Balmer
Art Moore
A bottom-line, cost-efficient mentality obscures the movement’s original Christian vision.
- View Issue
- Subscribe
- Give a Gift
- Archives
In January 1995, a physician diagnosed 50-year-old Cliff Dailey of Atlanta with a rare form of cancer. His doctor offered massive doses of chemotherapy as his only hope. Dailey’s severe heart problems, though, lowered his already meager chances of survival to less than 10 percent.
“We knew going into this that there wasn’t a great deal that medicine could do,” says his widow, Rita. “But it was the only thing we had.”
Finally, Dailey’s doctor determined that continued chemotherapy would lead to a quicker death, and he recommended two different hospice programs.
Rita Dailey recalls that a representative of one of the hospices met her at the door. “She said, ‘We’ll help you all we can, and when he’s dead, you call us. We’ll pick him up.’ “
In America’s death-denying culture, hospice is struggling to overcome the perception that it is a choice to quit. On the contrary, its advocates assert, hospice is an interdisciplinary program that enables the terminally ill to live to their fullest with the time they have left.
Though the number of hospice programs has grown steadily—17 percent annually during the past five years—Yale University Medical School professor Diane Komp believes that a bottom-line mentality, fostered largely by managed care and Medicare, has “hijacked” the original hospice vision of the movement’s Christian founder, Cicely Saunders. Saunders, a London physician, placed the spiritual dimension at the core of an integrated community team of lay volunteers and health-care professionals at Saint Christopher’s hospice (CT, Dec. 17, 1990, p. 22).
“The idea that you can fund something by the government and duplicate what happened in London totally underestimates what Saint Christopher’s hospice was all about,” says Komp.
“The community came together to solve a problem in health care that the health profession, left to our own devices, wasn’t doing a good job with,” says Komp, who serves at the Connecticut Hospice, Inc. in Branford, established in 1974 with the help of Saunders as the first hospice in the United States. “Communities of laypeople, doctors, nurses, clergy—even funeral directors in the large communities—came together with a common vision of doing a better job.”
The more than 3,000 hospice programs in the United States serve 450,000 patients, according to the most recent statistics of the National Hospice Organization (NHO), an advocacy and membership group based in Washington, D.C.
Hospice researcher Joanne Lynn says no conclusive research exists to determine just how well hospice is doing its job and what effect managed care arrangements have had.
“The NHO puts out a survey in which they measure satisfaction in families, so you know that on the whole there is sort of a glow about things,” says Lynn, director of the Center to Improve Care of the Dying at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “But you wouldn’t know if lots of people were getting bad or inadequate treatment, because you’re relying upon the self-report of the family.”
CONTAINING COSTS: Though hospice observers and caregivers believe that on the whole it provides the terminally ill with a welcome alternative to institutionalized medicine, they agree that managed care and Medicare have altered the movement.
The good news is that more people have access to hospice care. The bad news is that bottom-line-oriented management often minimizes spiritual care and other nonmedical aspects of hospice care.
Further, there are signs in Oregon that cost issues may push hospice care toward acceptance of its moral nemesis, physician-assisted suicide.
“I’m happy to say it hasn’t happened here,” says hospice founder Saunders, who at nearly 80 continues to work full-time as Saint Christopher’s chair. “I think the U.S.A. has a lot of restrictions because of your managed care.” Great Britain has much greater freedom, Saunders says, because much of the funding is voluntary.
Saint Christopher’s origins go to 1958, when Saunders worked at a London home for the dying. Her published research on 900 cancer patients challenged conventional medicine’s treatment of the terminally ill. In 1967, Saunders and a group of other London doctors and nurses opened the world’s first residential hospice.
COMPETITIVE BUSINESS: For Rita Dailey and her husband, Cliff, the abrupt response to her initial question caused them to seek out an openly Christian alternative. At Southwest Christian Hospice, established in 1983 on the Saint Christopher’s model, Dailey’s husband died what the Union City, Georgia, hospice workers called a “good death” in August 1995. “I still go out and talk with their counselor when I’ve got to have somebody to talk to,” Dailey says. “They always take time for me.”
About 28 percent of hospice programs are independent community-based organizations, according to University of Chicago researcher Nicholas Christakis. Southwest Christian, fully financed by churches and corporate donations, is unusual because it does not charge its patients.
Another 28 percent of hospices are divisions of hospitals, 19 percent are divisions of home health agencies, 6 percent divisions of hospice corporations, 1 percent divisions of nursing homes, and 18 percent are “other” or not identified.
“There’s more and more competition now in hospice care,” says Southwest Christian Hospice director Michael Sorrow. “Once Medicare and Medicaid came out with the benefit, every Tom, Dick, and Harry jumped into the hospice business to make money on it.” He believes that some of the newer hospice programs are not as concerned with overall quality.
Jack Gordon, president of the Hospice Foundation of America, says hospice programs are providing good care, but he notes, “The problem with HMOs and insurance companies is that they’re very much into a fee-for-service mode, and so they try to buy pieces of hospice care that they think are important. They would limit the nurse visits. They’re appalled at the notion of bereavement care—because after the patient’s dead, they don’t want to have to spend any money.”
About 68 percent of hospices are nonprofit, 4 percent are government organizations, 17 percent are for-profit, and 11 percent are “other” or unidentified.
“Hospice has become kind of the medical management of a person’s pain and symptoms,” says Janice Kampbell, hospice community liaison nurse for the Franciscan Health System in Tacoma, a member of Catholic Health Initiatives West. “Hospice programs and doctors and other therapists can easily slip into looking at just the medical aspects of an individual, which aren’t all of the aspects by any means.”
Researcher Lynn believes that Medicare has played a large part in the hijacking of hospice, though its impact is not completely negative. “It converts hospice to much more of a business,” Lynn says. “On the other hand, it made hospice available to a whole lot of people that were never going to get it on a volunteer basis.”
The number of Medicare-certified hospices has grown from 31 in 1984, when the benefit began, to 2,154. Eighty percent of hospices are Medicare-certified. In 1997, Medicare paid a per-day rate of $94 for home care and $419 for general inpatient care.
DYING AT HOME: More than 90 percent of hospice care hours are provided in patients’ homes.
Dana Pias, director of Hospice Managed Care of Shreveport, Louisiana, says that Medicare’s flat benefit actually gives her more freedom in her program.
“I don’t have to justify every piece of equipment, every piece of medication, every time a nurse goes out,” she says.
But Pias and many others in the industry acknowledge that spiritual care often has a lower priority with managed-care organizations and insurance providers.
“They say,” Gordon relates, ” ‘Well, we don’t need the social worker, and the clergy ought to do it for nothing’—whatever they can do to cut down the cost below the Medicare reimbursement rate so they can make [a profit on] the difference.”
In 1995, the Offices of the Inspector General and the Health Care Financing Administration issued the findings of Operation Restore Trust, which targeted abuse of the Medicare hospice benefit. It found that the flat daily rate, which is paid irrespective of the amount of services, created an incentive to provide fewer services.
ELEMENTS OF FAITH: For the Daileys, the spiritual dimension was essential to the care of Rita’s husband, who she says was not a professing Christian when he entered hospice care. “They offered him life beyond this life,” Dailey says. “It was led by God’s hand.”
During hospice care, Cliff Dailey met a man in his 80s whom he called “Mr. Christian.” The elderly believer asked Dailey to pray before his meal. For the first time in half a century, Dailey prayed.
Researcher Christakis estimates that about 5 to 10 percent of hospice patients are cared for by church-run hospices.
Lynn believes that the health-care system should recognize the spiritual significance of the end of life as much as it does life’s beginning. “In childbirth, you have to give the family a special room to bond with the infant,” Lynn says. “In the same way, we need to learn some kind of language that allows us to make something very special at the end of life.”
She says the challenge is striking a balance between professional commitment and moral commitment, and the will-ingness to serve the sick and financial inducements.
David Schneider, director of membership services for the NHO, says his organization views the spiritual dimension as of equal importance to the physical and psycho-social aspects of hospice care. “But it also is going to vary from patient to patient depending on their own level of spirituality,” he says.
Cost restrictions limit the spiritual dimension of care at many hospices, says Pias, who worked for two other programs before coming to Hospice Managed Care of Shreveport, which she notes is a free-standing, for-profit hospice not affiliated with an HMO.
“That’s a very strong part of our program,” she says, “but most hospices do not employ full-time chaplains. They look at that as an additional service, not a core service.”
Camille Dierksen-Gamble, the founder of the Shreveport hospice, started it after her husband died in a hospice that did not include a spiritual dimension.
“The regulations do not say that you have to employ a full-time chaplain,” Pias says. “All they say [is that] you have to meet the spiritual needs of the patient. That leaves it open to a huge interpretation.”
Many hospice workers across the country agree that spiritual care is lacking, says Fay Davis, director of the hospice program of Tri-Cities Chaplaincy in Kennewick, Washington.
“We have a lot more spiritual emphasis here than a lot of other hospices have,” Davis says. “When I go out to meetings, they’re just amazed at the amount of focus we have and what we have available on the spiritual side.”
Chaplains are not the only hospice workers who give spiritual care, and some patients find they relate better to nurses, dishwashers, or cooks than to trained clergy.
“Absolutely everyone here is involved in pastoral care,” says 15-year hospice worker Jane Quirk, a volunteer at Evergreen Hospice of Kirkland, Washington.
DIFFERENT BELIEF SYSTEMS: Though Southwest Christian may have been founded on the original hospice model, it takes a decidedly more evangelical stance on spiritual care than even Saint Christopher’s.
“I have seen how the Judeo-Christian ethic is transferable to other cultures, other religions, and to the agnostic and secular world,” Saunders says. “And I think that is right.”
Yet, Saunders handles spiritual care the same way many hospice chaplains and workers do in the United States, approaching people from their own religious perspective.
“I wouldn’t ever try to proselytize,” she says. “We are here not to make people think as we do, but to make them think as deeply as they can in their own way.”
However, Sorrow says that Southwest’s founders had evangelism in mind from the outset: “They felt that they could not charge the families from that vantage point, because it creates a unique opportunity for our people, our volunteers and our staff, to share the message of Christ—even with people who had never set foot in a church.”
Sorrow finds New Age thinking commonplace in the hospice movement.
“When they talk about spirituality they talk about it in a totally different light than we would,” he says. “They have to rely on a very broad brush to [discuss] the spiritual side.”
Many have become Christians through the ministry, Sorrow says. “We don’t browbeat people with the Bible when they walk in the door, but our mission statement focuses on the fact that it’s the love of Christ that provides the dignity and quality, even up to the end,” he says.
ASSISTED DEATH? Though hospice workers almost unanimously express a disdain for physician-assisted suicide, there are already indications that it may become an element of hospice care in Oregon, which in November became the first state to affirm physician-assisted suicide in a voter referendum (CT, Dec. 8, 1997, p. 64). A member of the Health Services Commission of the Oregon Health Plan, Amy Klare, says she expects assisted suicide to be covered by the plan as “comfort care.”
“Much to my dismay, I think that we will probably see most hospices allow assisted suicide on their premises,” says Gayle Atteberry, director of Oregon Right to Life, which led the opposition to the assisted-suicide measure.
Atteberry says that since the law passed, many hospices that spoke out against assisted suicide are now hesitant to express their position.
“They feel—and I think with a lot of validity—that even if a person thinks, Yes, at some point I might want assisted suicide, once they get into a hospice program they will have their needs met and then they would not want assisted suicide,” Atteberry says. “So this puts hospices in a touchy situation.”
Rita Marker, director of the Anti-Euthanasia Task Force in Steubenville, Ohio, fears that HMOs and insurance agencies may favor hospices that allow assisted suicide because it is more cost-effective.
“Obviously they’re not going to come out and say, ‘We have a policy now that we’re only going to contract with those agencies that provide assisted suicide, because it’s cheaper,’ ” Marker says. “But we’ve seen it happening with physicians who have lost what is euphemistically called ‘economic credentialing.’ ” When the patients are doing well, it costs the HMO more than the HMO wants to pay, so they will not contract with that particular physician to provide services any more, she says.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST? Marker points out that many backers of the assisted-suicide measure are associated with HMOs.
“My worry in this country is not the slippery slope of a dictator who would begin to do these things, but the sweet seduction of the marketplace,” says Southern Methodist University ethics professor William F. May, author of Testing the Medical Covenant: Active Euthanasia & Health Care Reform (Eerdmans, 1996). “It’s cheaper; get ’em out of here. And we spare ourselves expensive care.”
George Washinton University’s Lynn maintains that society must be taught to provide high quality end-of-life care. “Physician-assisted suicide cannot be debated and resolved except in the context of how we will choose to support one another at the end of life,” she says.
“After all of this time, [hospice] is not as integrated into the whole scheme of things as it might have been,” says Rosemary Johnson Hurzeler, director of the Connecticut Hospice, Inc. More grassroots involvement in hospice care is also a necessary ingredient for better integration with the health-care system.
Last September, Evergreen Hospice in Kirkland, Washington, launched its Faith in Action program to “raise awareness on end-of-life issues and help the faith community enhance their care-giving skills” through seminars and presentations in churches.
“First let’s take this subject out of the closet, then show people how to do it,” says Faith in Action director Karen Modell, who has become known around the community as the “death-friendly one.”
Volunteers at Evergreen must pass a rigorous training program. “If it’s not in the marrow of their soul, they don’t stay,” says Modell. “This is not easy work. Everyone at every level gets emotionally involved.” Integration also requires that Americans change the way they deal with death and dying.
“With the continued expansion of medical care and the ability to keep people alive, with no quality, it’s hard for some families to make determinations, particularly ones who have no faith,” says Fay Davis. “If they are out there with no faith, they’re going to stay in that medical model to the end.”
The irony is that while a minority of the terminally ill die under hospice care, most Americans when surveyed say that they want the kind of care that hospice was originally intended to provide. The Connecticut Hospice, which for seven years owned the word hospice, required any program that took that name to adhere to its ten principles of hospice care.
Those principles form the basis for a recent initiative of the Connecticut attorney general’s office called Physician Assisted Living (PAL)—a counterpoint to assisted suicide that gives patients and health-care providers the opportunity to establish their choice of the hospice option in advance.
“If you have to anticipate death, and you’re not ready to do that, then we’ve lost the opportunity, if you will, to help the people who really need it the most,” Hurzeler says.
As one of PAL’s originators, she hopes to see the initiative spread across the nation. “The ten principles are part of a whole value system that is couched in the sacredness of life,” she says.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromArt Moore
Stephen E. Saint
Christianity TodayMarch 2, 1998
Forty years ago my father, Nate Saint, and four other young missionaries (Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCulley, and Roger Youderian) were speared to death while trying to reach the “Auca” Indians in the Amazon jungles of South America. Today, I have a home among these people—properly called Huaorani—and some of the very men who speared my father have become substitute grandfathers to my children.
For various reasons, the Huaorani story has become a favorite missionary tale among evangelicals. But there is more to the story than the death of five fine young missionaries and the evangelization of the tribe by the sister of one of the martyrs. While it doesn’t lend itself to the happily-ever-after tone that makes the simple version so attractive, it should be told since North American Christians continue to send missionaries into other cultures.
If the primary purpose of missionary effort is to plant indigenous Christian churches, our specific goal as missionaries should be to help these emerging churches become (to use the missiologists’ terminology) self-propagating, self-governing, and self-supporting. I would like to examine here to what extent we have helped the Huaorani to achieve these goals after four decades of mission work among them. My hope is that a realistic appraisal of the Huaorani’s present spiritual and social condition will serve as a case study from which to evaluate our mission strategies today.
First, let me say that there is unmistakable evidence among certain Huaorani Christians today of a strong desire not only to follow Christ but to share the gospel with others (self-propagation). I remember an encounter I witnessed between some Huaorani Christians and members of a secular North American tour group who were visiting a Huaorani camp.
There were 34 students in this group, all from the University of Washington and Western Washington University. To reach the Huaorani encampment, the students were transported by jungle bus to the end of a graveled path laid down by an oil company. From there, three Huaorani men led them through the eastern flanks of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador and down into the virgin Amazon basin. Their trek included 14 hours by foot on a jungle trail as well as paddling downriver in large dugout canoes to reach the campsite.
As the students unloaded their bags, I could see they had come to truly respect and enjoy their Huaorani guides. So much so, in fact, that as we settled around a campfire that evening, a student asked me where the “savage Huaorani” were that they had read about in preparation for the trip. Sitting on logs under a star-studded sky and with a chorus of jungle insects singing in the background, I explained that the very people they had been traveling, eating, sleeping, and hunting with were, in fact, these “savages.”
Seeing the students’ looks of disbelief, I suggested they ask some of the Huaorani who were middle-aged or older where their fathers were. One student, taking up the challenge, nodded toward a Huaorani woman. I translated.
“Boto maempo doobae wendapa,” she replied—”He is already dead a long time ago. Having been speared, he died.” Her tone of voice suggested any other cause would have been unusual.
Four more Huaorani around the circle gave similar answers, graphically showing on their own bodies where each victim had been impaled.
“Ask Ompodae,” one student urged another. Several of the young ladies had taken a liking to Ompodae, an unusually warm and affectionate woman who was a wife and a mother of ten.
“My father, too,” she said, the pain of the memory showing in her expression. Then, holding out her arm, she pointed at old Dabo, who was listening to our conversation a couple of feet away. “He killed my father and almost all of the rest of my family, too. Living angry, he speared them all.”
“My God, I was just sitting next to him,” exclaimed one of the young men from the tour group. Another added, “I’ve heard enough about killing.”
But one more Huaorani woman, Dawa, who normally left the conversation to others, spoke up. Pointing to her aging and gentle husband, Kimo, who was sitting by me, she stated, “Hating us, he speared my father, my brothers, and my mother and baby sister whom my mother was nursing in her hammock. He took me and made me his wife.”
Our visitors looked genuinely stunned. “How could she live with the man who murdered her family?” one of the young ladies asked. The students began whispering among themselves, and suddenly I pictured the setting from their perspective. They had gotten themselves in a situation where they couldn’t travel without a guide. They were utterly dependent for their survival on a group of primitive people that had just admitted to being habitual killers.
It occurred to me that they didn’t yet know my relationship to the Huaorani. Dawa had just finished telling how Kimo had killed her family and made her his wife. Now I put my arm around Kimo’s shoulders and informed them, “He killed my father, too.”
Silence. At last, the question on everyone’s mind found a voice: “What changed these people?”
I interpreted the question, and Dawa, Kimo, and other Huaorani began to describe a life where everyone did as they willed. They explained how they threw babies away when they weren’t convenient to care for. They talked about how people begged to be buried alive when they knew they were dying so their spirits wouldn’t wander without solace when freed from their decomposing and unburied bodies.
One of the Huaorani, a gentle and happy woman, told the group how she had strangled her daughter with her own hands to meet the demands of her speared and dying husband, who wanted his children to be buried with him to keep him company. The one son she had refused to kill was the students’ lead guide.
Then they explained to our 34 highly educated young people from the most technologically advanced society in history how they learned from the missionaries that the Man Maker sent his Son to die for people full of hate, fear, and desire for revenge.
“Badly, badly we lived back then,” Dawa said. “Now, walking God’s trail which he has marked for us on paper [the Bible], we live well. All people still die, but if living you follow God’s trail, then dying will lead you to heaven. But only one trail leads there. All other trails lead to where God will never be after death.”
Dawa’s clear explanation had left her audience spellbound. Now she had a question for her listeners.
“Have you heard me well? Which one of you wants to follow God’s trail, living well?”
There was silence again. Then the seed of Dawa’s message landed in the fertile soil of at least one heart as a lone hand raised into the night air. Dawa understood the American student’s gesture and joyously clapped her hands. “Now I see you well,” she said. “Leaving, we will still see each other in God’s place some day.” Then she looked around at the others. “Dying, I will never see you again if you don’t follow God’s trail. Think well on what I have spoken, so that dying, we will live happily together in heaven.”
As I flew out of the jungle a few days later with the tour leader, I asked him what the students had said they liked best about the tour. “Living with the Huaorani and helping in the tasks of their Stone Age lives,” he replied. Then he added: “What made the biggest impression on them, I think, was the realization that Christianity has the ability to change people’s lives. I am not a Christian myself, but I would say this was a radical realization for most of these young people. Until this trip, they saw Christianity as just another code of conduct.”
Looking back, I see I had been privy to a unique event. I had witnessed the twentieth century coming face to face with the Stone Age—and coming up short. In a fleeting but eternal moment, I had seen God’s Great Commission coming full circle. Dawa’s Spirit-led witness to the gospel was living proof that my father’s blood and Aunt Rachel’s lifetime of service had not been given in vain.
Dawa’s story rightfully warms the heart. But how many of the Huaorani today are like Dawa? To what extent is the Huaorani church self-propagating? Self-supporting? Self-governing?
In 1995, at the request of the Huaorani, I returned to live with these people of my youth. This followed the burial of my father’s sister Rachel, who had lived with them from the first peaceful contact in 1958 until she died of cancer in 1994. The harsh reality I encountered as I returned was that the Huaorani church of the midnineties was less functional than it had been in the early sixties when I lived with Aunt Rachel and the tribe as a young teenager.
The root of the problem, I eventually realized, was that insidious disease that has sucked the life out of many Native American tribes and continues to devastate many ethnic communities within North and South America today—dependency. The Huaorani have become dependent on outsiders—especially North American Christians—for education, for medical and dental services, and for radio communications to relay information between their many villages.
Some of the dependency, of course, had been created by oil companies, government agencies, and other special-interest groups that stand to benefit directly from that dependency—the Huaorani can’t very well tell companies to quit exploring for oil while at the same time asking for outboard motors and cash gifts.
Unlike oil companies, however, the church has a great deal to lose from creating dependency. While most missionaries would not consciously foster dependency, I believe the Devil deceives us into creating this state by prompting us to mix into our legitimate desire to help others a small measure of pride and a dose of cultural arrogance.
It happens almost undiscernibly. Those who have worked with the Huaorani know how very difficult it is for sophisticated, hi-tech North Americans to believe that “primitive” people can take over where we leave off in the process of establishing their church. Take medicine, for example. Health care is one of the most effective means of creating credibility and gaining acceptance in frontier areas. Medical work requires communication links between outposts and a clinic site. Patients must be transported to the clinic by airplane in many remote areas. Electrical power must be generated, clean efficient buildings must be built, and the list goes on and on.
Unlike an oil company, thechurch has a great deal tolose from creating dependency.
Educated and sophisticated outsiders like ourselves find it hard to imagine—much less trust—people like the Huaorani with building clinics, doing dental work, and flying airplanes. Historically, the Huaorani have been hunter-gatherers who lived in thatched-roof houses with dirt floors, hunting wild pigs, turkeys, tapirs, and deer with spears or nine-foot-long blowguns. Most Huaorani maintained houses and gardens in three or more locations, moving among them as dictated by game depletion or the threat of attack from enemies. They had no chiefs, council, or other means of organizing defense of their territory against outsiders or negotiating peace with each other. In fact, outsiders were not their greatest concern; killing within the tribe was so rampant that they were on the verge of annihilating themselves.
The gospel and the people who brought it gave the Huaorani reason to quit killing outsiders and each other, and in 40 years the tribe has nearly tripled in size (today there are around 1,500). From the beginning, there were signs the Huaorani had accepted for themselves the task of evangelism, and many from the older generation were converted by the witness of their peers. But the younger generation has not understood the perpetual fear and hate that dominated their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. Today only a handful of the younger generation demonstrates an abiding faith in the God and message of peace that so radically changed their parents’ lives.
What has blunted this initial Huaorani desire for winning and discipling their own? I believe it was a failure as missionaries to help the Huaorani church become self-governing. Here, too, the Huaorani had demonstrated early signs of leadership, in spite of the fact that “organizing” and “governing” are totally new concepts to their culture. When I was a teenager, one of the Huaorani friends that I was baptized with led some other young boys in killing a witch doctor’s son. The believers knew that this was wrong and that Inihua needed to be punished. One of the older believers and the father of one of Inihua’s accomplices suggested that the guilty ones should be killed. Others said that, as Christians, they shouldn’t kill anymore, even for punishment.
At last they decided they would pray and ask God himself to punish Inihua. Within days, Inihua, a healthy young man, fell on the ground in front of witnesses, convulsed, and died. While not a typical North American leadership approach (or result), it demonstrated a kind of leadership that was both culturally and spiritually fitting for the Huaorani church.
One of the specific mistakes that we have made, I believe, has been to allow believers from the outside, who have never lived with the Huaorani and who don’t understand their culture, to exert a great deal of influence over the Huaorani church. As innocuous as special Bible conferences and classes may sound, the presence of the outside leaders and teachers who conducted these conferences over the years (and still do) served to undermine the fragile belief among the Huaorani believers that they could govern their own church and teach their own people. (I’ve seen even the smallest gestures of kindness undermine responsible leadership. A Huaorani father and lifelong friend of mine asked me why outsiders give his kids sweets at the school. “Now my children won’t drink their banana drink at home. Scolding their mother, they just say, we want cookies like they give us at school.”)
Lacking self-leadership and facing the loss of their old way of life, the Huaorani have been left poor both materially and spiritually. And sadly, virtually no effort was made by the missionaries over the last four decades to help the Huaorani establish a viable economy from which they could financially support their church, their families, or God’s commission to reach their own people.
The Huaorani believers are now in the midst of an experiment at becoming self-supporting. In just two-and-a-half years they have built and are running their own dental clinic, pharmacy, trading post, and school. As they drill and fill their own people’s teeth, they share God’s message with them. They are hosting tours of outsiders (hence, the college students from Washington), who pay to visit these “Stone Age” people. Recently, the Huaorani have asked me to help them build and learn to operate their own aircraft, which they see as critical to their long-term independence as a church and as a people.
My contribution has been to cheer them on and to convince them from the Bible that this is God’s will. I have also played the thankless task of challenging foreigners who seem bent on perpetuating “missions” here.
Will it work in the long run? I am convinced it can. So are the Huaorani. I believe that this is the tribe’s only spiritual and economic hope. Outsiders will never get the job done. Nor should they, for we have no business doing what the Huaorani are capable of doing themselves. We must limit our involvement to helping them in the areas they are not yet able to oversee, making every effort to help them become self-sufficient in those areas as quickly as possible.
Christ said that we should “make disciples of all men, teaching them to observe all” that he had commanded us to observe. Faithful missionaries such as Cathy Peek, Rosie Jung, Pat Kelly, and Aunt Rachel gave the Huaorani the New Testament in their own language. This is a fundamental building block for establishing any church. I am excited that the Huaorani have begun to see themselves as true participants in this Great Commission. I pray that we North American Christians, too, will learn to view them—and the others we are reaching out to—in the same way. It is, after all, the gospel way.
Steve Saint and his family maintain a state-side base in Ocala, Florida. For information on tours to the Huaorani, call (352) 694-1998.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromStephen E. Saint
Christianity TodayMarch 2, 1998
F ormer President Jimmy Carter is the most famous Sunday-school teacher in America—a task he's been at since age 18. Even during his tenure as President, he taught Sunday school occasionally at the First Baptist Church of Washington. Today he continues teaching at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. After the surprising success of his religious autobiography, Living Faith (Times Books, 1996), Carter worked on a sequel: Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith, a selection of 52 out of the 1,600 Sunday-school lessons he has taught over the years. In a telephone interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, associate editor Richard A. Kauffman talked to Carter about everything from Sunday school and personal faith to the Southern Baptist Convention and world politics.
In 1957 Life magazine said that Sunday school was the most wasted hour of the week. You must disagree.We have hundreds of people who come to Maranatha Baptist for the Sunday-school experience. One Sunday we had folks from 28 different nations. I realize that a lot of them come just to meet a former President. But a lot tell me afterwards, “This is the first time I’ve ever been in a church.” Some say they would like to pursue religion more. So this book, I hope, will reach out to these people.
In Living Faith, you write that as a young person you had doubts about your faith. How do you deal with doubts now?One of the facets of a sound Christian faith is to level with God about your doubts or disbelief, your lack of wisdom or strength. God can withstand tough, honest prayers. I try to face my doubts and fears forcefully with confidence that God will forgive me.
When Paul was asked what are the things that never change and are important, he replied: the things you cannot see. These things that you can-not see epitomize the life of Christ—justice, truth, peace, forgiveness, compassion, love, humility, service. These are the focus of the Christian faith.
How do you view the division between moderates and conservatives within your own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention?I would like very much to see this rift healed. This past week we had twenty-some leading conservative and moderate Baptists come to the Carter Center in Atlanta for a private session just to talk about where we can go from here, how we can heal the wounds that exist. I presided over the group. I asked everyone present not to make a single negative comment about any other Baptists, and we didn’t. We just explored future directions in a positive fashion. We’re going to follow up with some other private meetings, just exploring possible things on which we all can agree.
A lot of Christians, not just Baptists, have been alienated from active participation in the church—including some of my children—by the highly publicized disharmony that exists among Christians.
In Sources of Strength you mention your daughter Amy’s reaction in particular.Her participation in the church has been adversely affected by the Southern Baptist Convention’s stance against the equal role of women in the church. Within our seminaries, a professor who espouses equality of women in the church is denied the right to teach. We have about 3,500 Baptist churches in Georgia; only one has a woman pastor. I believe that women should be treated equally with men in affairs of the church.
If you were invited to speak to a national gathering of the Christian Coalition, what would you say to them?Last year I was on Pat Robertson’s show, and we discussed our basic Christian faith. I disagree pretty strongly on some facets of their faith. For instance, separation of church and state. It’s contrary to my beliefs to try to exalt Christianity as having some sort of preferential status in the United States. That violates the Constitution. I’m not in favor of mandatory prayer in school or of using public funds to finance religious education.
I don’t, however, see anything wrong with Christians, Muslims, and Jews exhibiting their own faith in the political arena. Christ tried to change the society within which he lived. He didn’t hold public office and wouldn't have. But you don’t have to hold public office to try to change the basic policies of a country.
How can Christians help bring about what you call “a social reformation” in our country?The obvious answer is to follow the standards and the priorities that were established so clearly by the words and actions of Jesus Christ, who was dedicated to justice, peace, humility, service, compassion, and love. I would put an emphasis at this moment among Christians on forgiveness and accommodation.
We have a very harsh society now. It’s almost totally devoted to punishment. In Living Faith I pointed out the dramatic difference in attitudes now toward criminals from what it was when I was governor of Georgia over 20 years ago. We governors then were competing with each other over who could have the fewest people in prison and the most aggressive program rehabilitating the lives of inmates. Now the governors brag about how many new prison cells they’re building.
What do you think the United States ought to be doing about persecution of Christians in places like China?When I normalized relations with China in 1979, China did not permit any religious worship or distribution of Bibles. Deng Xiaoping promised me he would change the constitution of China to guarantee freedom of religion, which he did in 1982. And he also promised to permit the free distribution of Bibles, which they have done and still are doing. China has made a great deal of progress but still has a long way to go. There are still restraints on worship in China. Each congregation has to register with the government, and a lot of people disagree with that.
Our government ought to publicize abuses, although I’m not sure that our government should single out Christians. I imposed human-rights standards for all people, not just for one faith.
Should Most Favored Nation status be used as a carrot or a stick? We shouldn’t link Most Favored Nation status with China’s attitude toward religious freedom. The best way to keep China increasingly open to worship—and trade, commerce, and political change—is by them being in relationship with the outside world. The same with Cuba: we shouldn't isolate Cuba but allow free trade, commerce, and visitation back and forth. That's the best way to break down totalitarianism.
What are your thoughts on U.S. policy toward the Middle East peace process and Iraq?Concerning the Middle East, the U.S. has changed its policies dramatically. I and all my predecessors in the White House since 1948 characterized Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as both illegal and an obstacle to peace. Nowadays, U.S. policy is that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are neither illegal nor an obstacle to peace if they’re somewhat restrained. The United States government has got to play a much more forceful role in putting forward acceptable solutions and not just stand back and listen to the complaints from the Palestinians and the Israelis.
On Iraq, I was one of the few people who did not think the Gulf War was necessary. The Iraqis were attempting, through the Saudi Arabians, to negotiate their problems peacefully with Kuwait, but by then the United States had already decided to go to war. The massive bombing of Iraq by the U.S. will not be supported by other nations and will result in the deaths of many innocent civilians.
I’m not a pacifist, but I think many wars can be prevented if we as a nation commit ourselves to the enhancement of peace. Possibly two wars were prevented in 1994 as a result of work by the Carter Center: North Korea, as Kim Il Sung was apparently evolving a nuclear capability; and Haiti, when 30,000 American troops were poised to invade the country until we worked out a peace agreement. There are times when our country needs to defend freedom and liberty for ourselves and others, the most brutal case being against Hitler. There are other times when we might avoid a war by more careful diplomacy.
Copyright © 1998 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- Baptists
- Georgia
- Jimmy Carter
- Sunday School