Compromising Positions
On Thin Ice: A Religion Reporter’s Memoir, by Roy Howard Beck (Bristol, 234 pp.; $11.95, paper). Reviewed byFred Barnes, a senior editor of The New Republic.
The first thing to know about Roy Howard Beck, a Washington correspondent for Booth Newspapers, is what he is not. Beck, 39, is not a conservative, a Reaganite, a follower of Pat Robertson, or a covert agent of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Nor is his memoir of six years (1981–87) as associate editor of the United Methodist Reporter—a respected weekly with circulation of 600,000—a right-wing screed. On Thin Ice is an extraordinarily compelling and painfully honest account of how the Christian establishment in America has lost its moral power, and how it reacted when Beck chronicled that loss in article after article.
The problem is not so much that Christian leaders, particularly Methodists, overdosed on left-wing politics, though Beck says conservative critics of the mainline Protestant churches are partially correct about this. The problem is deeper. Most church leaders are decent, fair-minded, and compassionate, Beck says, but they have allowed themselves to be compromised. They have permitted denominational officials—notably those at 475 Riverside Drive in New York, and the National Council of Churches—to pull them in morally questionable directions. Worse, Beck says, many have failed the test of sexual fidelity by indulging in extramarital relations or homosexuality. It is small wonder their flocks have become disillusioned, and thinner.
Loss Of Innocence
Beck was naïve, and innocent, when set loose to cover religious news, and thus he was all the more shocked at what he found. In the book, his tone is not prosecutorial, but his indictment is unequivocal. In fact, his case on sexual infidelity was too explosive for the Reporter. It spiked a story he wrote on the subject.
“Increasingly it was appearing that one couldn’t fully understand the complete measure of critics’ dissatisfaction with national church leadership without knowing a lot about the sexual conduct of the people in whom they had lost trust,” Beck writes. So obsessed were leaders with fighting injustice and feeding the hungry that “the issue of personal sexual morality just hadn’t seemed a high priority.” Yet it must be, Beck says. “The lack of sexual fidelity among some in the church certainly was not the only or main reason for the church’s lack of moral power in American society. But it was one. Without fundamental ingredients of discipleship, such as fidelity in thought, deed, and relationship, how could Christians hope to challenge the frailties of the world’s principalities?”
To buttress his argument, Beck recounts “rumors” and “reports” and “tales,” and uses unnamed sources. But he also cites specific examples, on-the-record comments, and his personal experiences as a reporter. He makes his case persuasively and fairly. Some will question whether he should have written about sexual lifestyles in the first place. But why should this subject be taboo, even if raising it prompts criticism of church leaders? It shouldn’t be.
Critics’ Reaction
Beck takes offense at the Christian Right’s habit of making wild charges. And he says the attack on the National Council of Churches by CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1983, which repeated many of the Christian Right’s charges of leftist dominance at the NCC, was “savage” and “overwrought.” Still, though Beck had written defenses of the NCC, he thought the CBS charges worth checking out. He found some to be true. The NCC excused abuses of left-wing governments and played up those of right-wing governments. Furthermore, its officials sometimes lied, Beck adds.
The result is a critical loss of trust. “Trust is everything when a person puts money into an offering plate,” he says. “People needed credible evidence that they could feel good about the tiny amounts of their money going to the NCC, and they wanted to know that all their offerings were being used well.” They have not gotten that assurance.
Not surprisingly, church officials proved unreceptive to Beck’s brand of investigative reporting. In 1981, he covered a conference on South Africa sponsored by mainline Protestant groups. He was surprised at the calls for violence, and he later discovered that the conference was controlled by identifiable American Communists. After his story appeared, Beck and his colleagues at the Reporter “were accused of stirring up right-wing anxiety and anticommunism, of engaging in guilt-by-association tactics and McCarthyism. Our critics just couldn’t understand how we could run a story that we knew would bring scorn on our church’s agencies and on the justice issue that we said we largely supported.”
Beck encountered still more flak in 1982 when he reported on a campaign to free a black former mayor of a Mississippi town. The campaign was backed by most mainline denominations and the NCC, but not by most blacks and liberals in Mississippi, including the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union. Church officials simply neglected to look into the facts of the case before becoming involved, Beck says. “Many church liberals often seemed like a mirror of the Reagan administration they hated so much. Preference for ideology and casualness with facts were frequent attributes of White House action that most infuriated those church leaders. It certainly infuriated me. Yet religious leaders seemed often to fight back with the same methods.”
Just before he returned to secular journalism in 1987, Beck ran into a friend who told of a crime wave in Ghana. The criminals were mostly Christians. “What a warning for the United States, where fundamental character traits are treated carelessly!” Beck says. There is an “absolute need for intellectual integrity in Christian living.… Without it, dishonesty creeps in under many guises.” If Christian leaders cut moral corners in one aspect of their lives, they undercut everything else they do. And their moral influence dissolves.
Also Reviewd in this section:
Public Schools: An Evangelical Apprasial, by frank C. Nelson
School Based Clinics and Other Crictical Issues in Public Education, edited by Barrett L. Moshacker
Democracy and the Renewal of public Education, edited by Eichared John Neuhaus
Everything to Gain: Making the most Rest of your life. by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
Book Briefss: Tecent Old Testament Commentaries
Many Diagnoses, Few Remedies
Public Schools: An Evangelical Appraisal, by Frank C. Nelsen (Revell, 223 pp.; $13.95, hardcover); School Based Clinics and Other Critical Issues in Public Education, edited by Barrett L. Mosbacker (Crossway, 225pp.; $8.95, paper); Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education, edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Eerdmans, 170 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Raymond Ide, assistant professor of English at Lancaster Bible College in Pennsylvania.
What’s wrong with the public school system? What can be done to cure its ills? Unfortunately, most of the writers of these three new volumes excel at diagnosis rather than remedy. Nevertheless, all are worth consulting.
In Public Schools: An Evangelical Appraisal, Frank Nelsen, an associate professor of education at the University of Wisconsin, laments the fact that “the public school in this country has become a totally secular institution.” Yet he remains optimistic. He believes Christians who teach in public schools can reform the educational system by asserting their views more often and by joining other Christians in a coalition to confront the National Education Association.
Every now and then Nelsen peeks out of his ivory foxhole to take a few shots at the more strident critics of the school system. He criticizes those who advocate opting out of reading classes because of offensive reading materials for their “minor” and “fragmented” objections. As an alternative, he suggests bringing a Christian literary critic into the church youth group to give students a Christian perspective on objectionable books.
Vouchers, which provide government money for parents to use at the educational system of their choice, and tuition tax credits also come under Nelsen’s fire. Those plans, he concludes, will “only further damage an already burdened and fragile public school system … which has been provided by God for the general welfare of all who live in this country.”
In his attempt to give a balanced view, however, Nelsen often undercuts his own argument. He sometimes wanders from the subject of education, particularly in his chapter on moral relativism, in which he devotes most of his time to a critique of relativistic approaches to law and even the new physics. Many of the essayists in the other two books, I suspect, would find Nelsen’s analysis insufficient in light of “the rising tide of mediocrity” in the public school system.
More Than Sex Education
School Based Clinics and Other Critical Issues in Public Education is a worthy volume of essays that tackles the problem of moral education in schools. Historian Allan Carlson, president of the Rockford Institute, asks why the sexual codes of the West, which had remained intact for more than 1,900 years, crumbled so quickly to the moral revolution of the 1960s. R. V. Young, professor of English at North Carolina State University, examines why we have produced a generation of nonreaders and wonders if most elementary reading programs are essentially junk food for the mind. Jacqueline Kasun, professor of economics at Humboldt State, raises the question of whether sex education can be taught in a moral vacuum. And educator Russell Kirk ponders whether modern schooling has been reduced to a trivial pursuit, mindless of wisdom and virtue.
A few solutions are offered. Attorney John Whitehead tells Christians to get their homes in order; church elders should be visiting families and asking parents whether they are instructing their children in the things of the Lord.
But School Based Clinics goes beyond merely analyzing the problems of teenage pregnancies and the lack of moral education in the schools. Its writers give solid solutions to strengthen parental involvement in the schools, so that curriculum in general and sex education courses in particular can be changed.
No Consensus
Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education presents another collection of diagnoses and remedies for public education, offered at a conference sponsored by the Center on Religion and Society in New York. Suggestions range from fine-tuning the system to dismantling it. Richard Baer of Cornell University favors fundamental changes, complaining that the public school system is a government monopoly with a captive audience. People are kidding themselves if they think a secular education can be religiously neutral, he writes. He proposes tuition vouchers as a means to break the monopoly.
Perhaps the most interesting essay is the case made by James Skillen of the Association for Public Justice that the present educational system rests upon contradictory assumptions. The first assumption, Greek and Roman in origin, teaches that the government is responsible for educating its citizens. The second assumption, rooted in biblical tradition, recognizes the primacy of parental authority in the education of children. The parental model held sway until the advent of public schools in the 1840s, when the governmental model took hold.
Also included in this book is a good synopsis of Paul Vitz’s now-famous study on the depiction of religion and traditional values in American school textbooks.
Democracy and Renewal is more suited to the professional educator than the other two books, which are more accessible to lay readers. Nevertheless, its readable last chapter gives a lively and witty synopsis of the conference participants’ discussion, which held controversies as well as agreements. Though they failed to reach a consensus, their diversity of opinion is useful. Readers may benefit from examining this chapter first, prompting a closer reading of the essays themselves and a deeper exploration into this crucial subject of schooling in America.
Life After The White House
Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter (Random House, 198 pp.; $16.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Wesley G. Pippert, who covered the Carter White House and both presidential campaigns for United Press International.
When Jimmy Carter was President, a report was published that said he would become a missionary after leaving the White House. Though he denied the report at the time and did not become a foreign missionary, Carter has indeed committed much of his life after office to serving others. Most notably, he has often donned a carpenter’s apron to help build low-cost housing for the poor.
In Everything to Gain, he and his wife, Rosalynn, share insights on spending one’s later years happily and usefully. Their comments take the form of a practical how-to book. Yet their content is more remarkable than the typical “to-do” list. After all, the authors are far from the typical couple.
The Carters offer details of postpresidential life. They tell how they found the hard work of finishing the attic of their house by themselves to be good therapy; how they seldom watch the evening news on television; and how Jimmy, punctual to a fault, celebrated his wife’s birthday (which he had almost forgotten) by writing her a note promising never again to scold her for being tardy.
Bibles In China
An Excerpt
“During Vice Premier Deng’s visit to Washington in 1979, we had a long discussion about the role of Christian missionaries in his country.… We were sitting at the table during the state dinner, and I finally told him that I had some requests I would like to make. ‘I hope your people will be permitted to have Bibles and that freedom of religion can be guaranteed for them again. And also, there are a lot of missionaries who would like to return to China to work in education, health care, agriculture, or wherever you would prefer.’ Deng thought for a few minutes and then said, ‘I will consider your first two requests, but we will never again permit foreign religious workers to come to China. They interfere, in the daily lives of those they profess to serve, and they also attempt to substitute Western values for those of our people. Even Chinese Christians would not want the foreigners to come back.’
Now, in Shanghai more than two years later, we found four large Protestant churches and one more spacious Catholic cathedral.… Bibles were now plentiful. ‘As a matter of fact,’ said one Chinese Anglican priest, ‘recently when we ran short of the special paper for Bibles, the government helped us to locate and purchase what we needed.”
—from Everything to Gain
by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
Faithatwork
Their most fascinating revelations deal with how the Carters integrated their faith into their lives. Rosalynn writes in a section concerning their handling of defeat in the 1980 election:
“ ‘I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand why God wanted us to lose the election,’ I would say. Jimmy was always more mature in his Christian attitude than I was. He would say, ‘Do you think people are robots that God controls from heaven?’ or ‘You don’t really think God orders things like this, do you? It’s hard for us to accept the fact that our priorities are not the same as God’s. We attach too much importance to things like popularity, wealth, and political success. To Him problems that often seem most important to us at the time are really not very significant. But God trusts us to make the best use of the time we have, to try to live like Jesus and to make our lives meaningful and beneficial to others no matter where we are.’ I did finally learn to live with the results of the 1980 election, but I would never pretend that it came easily.”
As interesting and revealing as this and other examples (see excerpt, “Bibles in China”) may be, however, there remains one book for Jimmy Carter to write, one that he ought to write: a systematic explanation of how he integrated his faith and his presidential policies. That is the Carter book I want to read.
