Phillip Johnson’s credentials as a professor of law at Berkeley are doubly important. First, he is a recognized scholar at a prestigious institution who, clothed and in his right mind, does not think Darwinism is true. No one will confuse Berkeley with Bob Jones West, and his case cannot be dismissed by caricaturing the writer. Second, he teaches law, not science, and this is an advantage. Thinkers from literary critic C. S. Lewis to philosopher Thomas Kuhn have taught us that people outside a discipline can have the vantage point necessary to criticize a field’s dominant paradigm.

Johnson’s main thesis is this: Darwinism (which includes gradualism and punctuated equilibrium theory) is an untestable expression of dogmatic naturalism, not a real scientific hypothesis. Scientists have forced the facts to fit this Procrustean bed by using ad hoc hypotheses, circular arguments, and the like. But these practices have made evolutionary theory unfalsifiable. If Darwinism were a scientific hypothesis based on a fair assessment of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago.

Johnson’s concern is to get a fair hearing for “creationism” understood as the belief “that a supernatural Creator not only initiated this process but in some meaningful sense controls it in furtherance of a purpose.” He also criticizes the complementary view (science tells what happened and how; theology tells who did it and why), correctly in my view, because it inadvertently contributes to scientism and leaves no clear room for God to be involved in the process of creation.

This is an important book with a crucial message clearly unpopular in polite academic circles.

By J. P. Moreland, professor of philosophy of religion, Talbot School of Theology, La Mirada, California, and author of Christianity and the Nature of Science (Baker).

In his opening chapter, Johnson emphasizes the importance of defining terms and using them correctly. He affirms that his primary concern is not Darwin but Darwinism, and yet, unaccountably, he fails to define the latter, which is the single most-important word in his argument. Examination of the context and usage of Darwinism in chapter 1 shows that the first three occurrences refer to the scientific theory of Darwinian evolution. Three more represent the philosophical belief of naturalistic evolutionism. Several other references to Darwinism do not indicate which of the two meanings is meant. In the following chapters, both often occur (without identification) on the same page and at times even in the same paragraph.

Johnson successfully prosecutes philosophical Darwinism for misusing a scientific theory to support its claims. He also concludes that there is little if any evidence to support the theory of macroevolution (the belief that all living forms have arisen from a single source, which itself came from an inorganic form), and which he consistently tars with the brush of naturalistic Darwinism (better termed evolutionism), as if the two necessarily stand or fall together. An argument that attempts to kill two semantic birds with one stone often finds itself to be one of the birds, crippling communication.

Johnson also does an injustice to hundreds of evangelical Christian scholars in the life sciences who accept macroevolution as a working scientific theory to correlate current data and guide future research. Unfortunately, he deprecates the leadership of the 2,200-member American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) as “theistic evolutionists” who, he charges, embrace a “compatibilism” to accommodate the Darwinist establishment. In fact, ASA members uncompromisingly affirm both a thoroughly biblical theology and modern scientific explanation as complementary perspectives on the natural world.

Any attempt to wed a scientific theory to a specific philosophy (or theology) for either mutual support or rejection reverses the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton, who freed science from such partnerships.

By Charles E. Hummel, author of The Galileo Connection (InterVarsity) and past president of the American Scientific Affiliation executive council.

On a September afternoon in 1988, something extraordinary began to unfold in a faculty lounge on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. A group of 20 professors gathered to respond to an 83-page critique of Darwinism by their colleague in the School of Law, Phillip E. Johnson.

Professor Johnson’s paper attacked the problem of the evolution controversy along a broad front; it included a sophisticated analysis of scientific evidence and probed philosophical and legal issues as well. Yet these lines of argument converged on a central thesis: Darwinian evolution is grounded not on scientific fact, but on a philosophical doctrine called naturalism.

Says Johnson, “My argument was that, although most people believe that an enormous amount of empirical evidence supports the general theory of evolution, this is in fact an illusion.” On the contrary, Johnson continues, many kinds of hostile scientific evidence have accumulated; but Darwinists do not question their doctrine of common ancestry since it is a “deductive certainty” derived from their philosophical system, not a conclusion they were driven to by the weight of evidence. In short, Johnson was claiming that Darwinism is as much the product of religious bias as is “creation science.”

Since one does not often hear Darwinian evolution labeled an “illusion” in polite meetings of Berkeley faculty members, it is not surprising that Johnson’s thesis seized the attention not only of his campus, but also of ever-widening circles of American academia over the past three years. In the course of Johnson’s many lectures around the country, and in meetings with distinguished scientists, theologians, and legal scholars, it has become clear that Johnson is creating something new, giving a fresh insight on the interplay of science, philosophy, and religion as they confront the question of origins. Anticipation has been steadily building for the appearance of the “Johnson critique” in book form so that the public can enter the dialogue.

Now, at last, we have Darwin on Trial (copublished by Regnery Gateway and InterVarsity Press). It is a lean volume, with 154 pages of text, followed by 33 pages of research notes. Michael Denton, the most prominent nonreligious skeptic of Darwinism of the 1980s, calls Johnson’s book “unquestionably the best critique of Darwinism I have ever read.”

In fact, it was Johnson’s reading of Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis while on sabbatical in England in 1987 that helped spark the whole project. Johnson discovered and read simultaneously both Denton’s critique of evolution and Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, a best seller that vigorously defended Darwinian evolution. Johnson found Dawkins’s book “a brilliantly written polemic, and notable for the absence of supporting evidence,” and he was fascinated with Denton’s more skeptical outlook.

Darwin on Trial defies the comfortable stereotypes about creationism and evolutionism. For example, despite his deep surgery on Darwinism, Johnson has made it clear that he is not defending the teaching of “creation science” in schools, if the label is defined in legal terms as including such concepts as the recent, sudden creation of the universe and life, and Noah’s flood as the explanation for fossils.

This issue arose in the Berkeley faculty meeting. Some questioned Johnson’s purpose in critiquing Darwinism. Was there a hidden agenda—perhaps renewed legal challenges to suppress the teaching of evolution in schools or to include creationist material?

Johnson has responded by clearly identifying his own bias. He calls himself a “Christian and a creationist” but “not a Biblical literalist.” He defines creationist broadly as “anyone who believes in a God who creates.” Thus he is open to the possibility that evidence would show that God performed that work gradually over billions of years. To Johnson, the issue of the timing and speed of Creation are “side issues,” to which he pays little or no attention.

In The Dock

The title, Darwin on Trial, is perhaps inevitable, given Johnson’s vocation. As a professor of law, Johnson feels that he brings special tools of analysis to Darwin’s theory. He specializes in analyzing the logic that is used in arguments and in identifying the hidden assumptions that lie behind those arguments. Those tools have been honed in a distinguished law career.

Yet the title is a bit misleading, since Johnson spends little time discussing Charles Darwin himself. His target is Darwinism, the vast system of modern thought that has evolved since the Darwinian revolution of the 1800s. Darwinism is defined as “fully naturalistic evolution—meaning evolution that is not directed or controlled by any purposeful intelligence.”

Having identified the target, Johnson attacks it first from a scientific angle, with seven chapters surveying the alleged confirming evidence for the claims of Darwinism. Here, Johnson takes direct and deadly aim on the apologetics of Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, who has repeatedly argued that evolution (“common ancestry”) is a fact, while Darwin’s theory about how that happens (“natural selection”) is open to discussion. Gould’s three chief evidences for evolution (microevolution, imperfections, and key fossil transitions) are evaluated rigorously, and his arguments are found to be seriously flawed.

After concluding that scientific evidence offers no convincing basis for Darwinian claims, Johnson turns to the overlapping areas of philosophy, education, religion, and law. He lays bare the evasive word games that Darwinists often play, such as changing the meaning of the word evolution frequently to serve their purposes. He also outlines the rich paradox of Darwinist religion, showing how readily Darwinists will integrate religious ideas with Darwinist principles—as long as the religion in question does not include a “pre-existing intelligence” that could act meaningfully to create.

Perhaps the most important chapter is the last one, which takes the reader on an exhilarating tour of the thought of the late philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper. Popper’s “falsification” principle is clearly explained and ruthlessly applied to Darwin’s theory. Johnson challenges the scientific community truly to test the common-ancestry hypothesis, which he feels has not yet had its day in “court.”

Biological Thought Police

It remains to be seen whether that “falsification program” will be initiated by the scientific community—especially by those biologists who make their living teaching and studying evolution. Dissidents within science who support Johnson’s critique have described a system of “thought control” under which it is professional suicide to question the basic assumptions under which evolutionary science operates. Those who dominate this area of science see themselves as besieged by religious fundamentalists, a category that, to these scientists, seems to include anyone who believes in a God who takes an active role in the world.

The public got a rare glimpse into how this system operates when science writer Forrest Mims III lost a position with Scientific American magazine after admitting he does not believe Darwin’s theory (CT, Nov. 19, 1990, p. 56). The editor explained that, even if Mims’s admittedly impeccable science writing dealt entirely with other subjects, the magazine could not afford to offend its readers by employing a creationist.

The Mims incident helps explain why a critique of the basic Darwinist assumptions could only be written by a nonscientist, someone not dependent on research grants and peer approval and who has academic tenure protecting his job. Johnson regards the personal attacks he has received from critics as only to be expected, considering what is at stake.

“Darwinist scientists have claimed that they know how biological creation occurred,” Johnson commented recently, “and that it was a mindless, purposeless process. If they have to defend that claim in a public debate on fair terms, they are going to be seriously embarrassed.”

Ultimately, Johnson’s goal is to place the reconsideration of Darwinism on the table at the highest intellectual levels of academia. For that to happen, there must be a concerted effort to “arouse from dogmatic slumber” those who control the terms of public intellectual discourse. Darwin on Trial may be the first wake-up call.

Boring! It’s the final condemnation, the complete put-down. Parents hear it after a concert or on a family vacation or in church. Actually, it’s pronounced, “Boooriing!” and it seems to emerge from the depths of disgust. It should be a four-letter word. The epithet never loses its power to terrify. Children, with blunt honesty, hurl the accusation like a hand grenade toward anything they consider undeserving of their presence, but adults, though perhaps more politely circumspect, fear it and feel it and flee it just as much.

In 1958 the American writer Barnaby Conrad was badly gored in a bullfight in Spain. Eva Gabor and Noel Coward were overheard talking about the incident in a New York restaurant. “Noel, dahling,” said Eva, “have you heard the news about poor Bahnaby? He vas terribly gored in Spain.”

“He was what?” asked Coward in alarm.

“He vas gored!”

“Thank heavens. I thought you said he was bored.”

The Boredom We Are Given

Since we all experience boredom, it’s worth thinking about. Like the gender of those who suffer it, boredom comes in two basic kinds—the boredom we choose and the boredom we are given.

What can you say about a person who is bored standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or bored in the presence of close friends, or bored listening to the music of Bach or Ellington, or bored watching Joe Montana complete a 30-yard pass? I suppose few would be interested in all these things. But if nothing penetrates the wall of indifference, something has died deep within. One can slumber through life without ever really waking up. Through lazy neglect, the ground of the soul can get too hardened to receive the common showers of blessings that fill a good and marvelous creation.

Such boredom results from turning our backs on what life has to offer; it is the ultimate lewd gesture of contempt. The church has called this one of the “seven deadly sins”—the sin of acedia, the sin Frederick Buechner describes as “a form of suicide.” It is a choice for death, a willing separation from the joys of life.

But another boredom afflicts us, and the church has rarely acknowledged it: the sort inherent in life itself. We do not choose it. It comes from being made for something more than we now experience. If the first type of boredom has to do with an inner dullness to worldly joys, this second type has to do with an inner glory that can never find fulfillment within worldly limitations.

We were made in God’s image, and this means we were made for something more than an existence torn apart by self-centeredness and limited by death. We were made for the Promised Land, we could say, but we’re not there yet and the wilderness can be pretty boring. This boredom isn’t sin. In fact, it’s a witness to our greatness. Being bored with a five-bedroom house at the beach, for example, may reveal a need for nothing less than the spaciousness and splendor of the kingdom of God. Being bored with a loved one may show hunger for an ecstasy for love that can be satisfied only through intimate communion with God.

Whatever the cause, boredom is not pleasant. It is like coming home from the dentist with a mouth deadened by anesthetic: You don’t feel anything, but the very lack of feeling hurts. You cannot wait for the numbness to wear off. So boredom cries out for relief.

There are two possible ways of escape: sin or holiness.

Bertrand Russell said that “boredom is a vital problem of the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.” I’m not sure how we could verify this, but I think he was accurate. A woman does not wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, it’s a perfect day to commit adultery.” No, she wakes up to another day where nothing much seems to be happening in her marriage and she finds relief from the wilderness in the oasis of another man’s attention; taking one little step after another, she eventually finds herself in a situation she could never before have imagined. Or a man does not set out to be greedy. But to relieve the boredom of business-as-usual at the office, he enters the game, struggles for tangible victories, and before long he is imprisoned in a pattern of grasping for more and more to prove his worth.

I imagine boredom was the chief reason the prodigal son left home. Life on the farm has its dreary routines; there are chores to do, day in and day out. And that insufferable brother—boring beyond belief! No wonder he ran off to the far country to squander his substance in riotous living.

Diana Humphries, a pretty 16-year-old from Houston, Texas, felt the routine of life was getting too monotonous. So to “escape from the boredom,” she ambushed and killed her 14-year-old brother Robert with a .22 rifle. Why? “Because nothing ever happens around here,” she sobbed.

Her problems went far beyond boredom. But don’t we have to admit that when we have given in to temptations, when we have done what we know we should not do, it has often been because “nothing much ever happens around here,” because we want some surge of adrenaline to energize us? Is it simply coincidence that Jesus, at the start of his ministry, was tempted in the wilderness? When gray washes over us, covering feeling and perceptions, we are far more likely to try things that promise some color.

Noticing What Really Happens

And yet there is another way. The only lasting relief from boredom comes not from sin but from holiness.

I know: The word conjures up images of dull, pale piety with all lifeblood drained out of it. But I am referring to authentic holiness, not the caricature. The term holy refers to God, to the Wholly Other One who infinitely transcends this world in perfection, in beauty and joy, the One the Bible defines as love. Holiness, therefore, has the glory of God about it, the dimension of eternity. It makes all earthly joys pale by comparison.

Why did the people follow Jesus with such interest? Why would thousands listen to his teaching, putting off as long as possible their journey home? What did they see in this carpenter from Nazareth? Whatever it was, it is safe to say it was not dull. There was something provocative about him; people could not be neutral about him. Whether they knew it or not, they encountered holiness, the presence of God.

The advent of Jesus, the babe of Bethlehem, was the great intrusion of holiness into this world’s inevitable boredom. Christmas celebrates the appearing of the Promised Land in the midst of the wilderness, the coming to us of that One who alone can set our restless hearts at peace.

But not everyone sees this. The desperate attempt to escape boredom can keep us so busy that we overlook the relief when it is standing in front of us.

From our earliest years in Sunday school we have heard how there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the Bethlehem inn and how Jesus was born in a stable. But did you ever think about the others at the inn, the ones who got there early enough to stake out a bed and a place at the bar? While the Son of God came into the world, they carried on with their usual pursuits—the innkeeper darting about to keep his guests happy as they knocked back drinks, played games, told stories, took their pleasure, and rested in beds.

But some noticed what really happened that evening. The gospel stories tell us the shepherds were the first to know the good news. They were what we would call blue-collar workers. Their culture did not respect them; it despised them. No court of law would accept their testimony as fact. You would not have run into them at the Bethlehem Country Club—unless it was to find them cleaning restrooms during their off-hours.

Why would God send angels announcing the birth of the Christ to such as these? Diogenes Allen, in a fine book called Temptation, has suggested that because they were close to the harsh realities of life they might have been more receptive to the news. Herding sheep was not especially difficult, but the hours were long and the tedium great. Their boredom must have made them ready for something more.

The shepherds were not unique in their boredom. Even the most exciting pursuits cannot protect from it. Doctors grow weary of complaining patients; attorneys get tired of arguing; professors wonder what good will come from the writing of one more book. But perhaps the shepherds, cut off from the ordinary means of escape, were in a boredom so unrelenting that they were able to see what others cannot see.

Angels And Misspelled Words

The most promising strategy for dealing with boredom is to accept it as an inevitable consequence of being made for more than this life has to offer. Rather than running from it and seeking relief in all sorts of diversions, we ought to embrace it, open ourselves to it. The pursuit of distracting pleasures can leave precious little time for the inner quietness necessary to hear the whispering of God in the ordinary.

Moses spent many years out in the desert tending sheep before God appeared in the burning bush. Perhaps it took that much tedium to prepare him for the encounter. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a poem about Moses, raising the issue of human sensitivity:

Earth is crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

A woman attends my church who has learned to quiet herself before God in unusual ways. I can see it in her face during worship services. She seems present but not present, somewhere else. Or maybe she is more intensely present. One thing certain is that she sees things no one else sees: angels, doorways opening into regions of intense light, stairways coming down from heaven.

My natural instincts make me think she needs psychiatric counseling, but there is nothing at all about her to confirm that. Between Sundays she is a competent professional, “normal” in every other way. She maintains that angels are always present, surrounding everyone, if only people would open their eyes to them.

Well, I don’t know. But I do know that while she is utterly open, quiet before God, I am worried about the misspelled word in the Order of Worship, the perversities of the sound system, the crying baby in the third row, and how well my sermon will be received. She is noticing the flame in the bush, and I am busy picking blackberries.

When we grow tired of the blackberries, we just might be ready to see the consuming fire that burns in the common things around us. That, I think, is boredom’s great gift to us. It forces us to see the ultimate emptiness of life in this world; it enables us to let go of diversions that distract us from being attentive to the presence of the Holy. “Vanity of vanity,” said the Old Testament apostle of boredom, “all is vanities.” Yes, and thus we pray, not as an empty ritual but as the cry of our hearts, “Thy kindgom come!”

NO Educational choice made headlines like never before when Polly Williams, a black Wisconsin state legislator from Milwaukee’s inner city, sponsored a bill in the spring of 1990 that would allow one thousand low-income children to attend one of eight private, nonsectarian schools. The state would provide $2,500 in tuition per child, the amount normally granted the Milwaukee public-school system for each child. After the plan was ruled constitutional by a circuit court that August, 391 students switched from public schools to the eight private schools.

Milwaukee is seldom a trend setter. But when its parental-choice plan was passed by the state legislature, the bill made national and international news. The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, and the Economist all published articles on the controversial plan that allowed parents to choose. So extensive was reader interest that the Wall Street Journal published over two-dozen articles and several opinion pieces on parental choice.

Legal challenges, however, did not rest. The Wisconsin Education Association and others appealed the lower court’s decision, and in early November of last year the Fourth District State Appeals Court ruled unanimously that the Milwaukee program was unconstitutional on a technicality. The court did not specifically rule on the merit or legality of choice itself, however. Program supporters have appealed to the state supreme court to overturn the appeals court’s decision.

Whatever the fate of Milwaukee’s plan, President Bush’s recently unveiled education proposal will guarantee that the issue stays alive in public debate. His proposal committed both the federal government’s money and moral support to the idea that parents should be able to use tax dollars to send their children to the public, private, or parochial school of their choice.

For all the seeming promise of the Milwaukee experiment and Bush’s new educational plan, evangelicals must face up to the serious problems parental choice can create. Educational choice measures are not sound—not practically, not theoretically.

The economist Milton Friedman first introduced the “free market” concept of education in 1953 through a seminal article, “The Role of Government in Education.” Friedman suggested that parents receive vouchers that would permit them to select the school best suited for their children.

Friedman’s use of terms like voucher and choice may have sounded new, but parental choice has long roots in the history of American education. Before Horace Mann led the Common School movement of the midnineteenth century, “private venture” schools dotted the landscape. And America’s middle-class families have always exercised a form of choice by having the economic means to move to areas with good schools.

Choice options also appeal to people concerned about moral values. Evangelicals generally support choice, believing it consonant with individual initiative and free-market thinking, values with roots in our Puritan heritage.

Therefore, many evangelicals reason, if public schools are failing to educate—as they surely are, particularly in our large cities—why not try parental choice? There are a number of sound reasons why school choice is not good educational policy and will not improve public education.

First, proponents have given relatively little thought to the planning necessary for choice plans to succeed. Take facilities. Of the estimated 46 million students enrolled in elementary and secondary schools in the fall of 1989, about 12 percent were in private schools. The cost of building and equipping high-quality private schools for the remainder would be enormous. If the $4,000 to $5,000 now granted to local school districts for the education of a student were given to private schools, it would be insufficient to construct facilities.

Nor would the inadequate funds allow for smooth transition, which is the second problem. The chaos and instability that would result during a transition period could produce serious psychological and social problems for children.

A third problem has to do with the unwarranted claims for the values of competition. In their recent book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe of the Brookings Institution conclude that competition would improve education as it has improved the quality of consumer goods of other types. But is education a commodity to be sold like detergent, shoes, or cars?

The best schools will enroll the most students and make the most money, the argument runs. With added resources, these competitive schools will generate all the funds they need. The result, say choice advocates, is that public schools will have to improve.

But this kind of economic thinking fails to take into account the type of student who studies to become a teacher. I have found that students going into teaching today have lost much of the idealism of 20 years ago. They are much less tolerant of minorities; this is especially true of students from blue-collar backgrounds who feel they miss out on the breaks and educational funding received by racial minorities. Although education students have rarely thought through the implications of their beliefs, they generally hold to a relativism that downplays commitment to moral and religious values.

The free-market approach to education is based on the notion that competition will make schools better, that in the heat of the race for higher salaries and better positions, teaching will improve. But what the advocates of choice fail to understand is that teachers are not really motivated by money, or at least the kind of money that can be made in the private economic sector. About half of the students in my Introduction to Teaching classes are dropouts—from schools of business or jobs in business. They tell me the reason for leaving business is because they dislike the competitive environment. Clearly, these are not people who will make educational competition work.

Furthermore, current education classes often leave future teachers with a distaste for academic testing and tracking. They train students to teach with what is called “cooperative learning.” Education professors who do not know much about John Dewey’s philosophy still follow Dewey’s stress on cooperation rather than competition.

Perhaps choice advocates have another source from which to get teachers for “market-driven” schools, but they have not told us where these teachers will come from. Bright, young people motivated by money alone will not last long in teaching. The task demands hard work, especially in tough, inner-city schools.

A fourth problem concerns the needs of ethnic minorities. Will parental-choice schools help black children? These children need teachers of their own race as role models, yet there is an acute shortage of black teachers, a shortage that will only get worse. In 1990, the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduated, out of a class of 149, one black male student and two black females. More blacks went into teaching 15 years ago. The situation in Milwaukee is by no means unique; it exists across the country. If anything, private schools tend to show less interest in the needs of minorities, not more.

Fifth, school-choice advocates have failed to address what they intend to do with children and youth who are difficult to teach. They seem to forget that private-school teachers and administrators evidence little interest in the aggressive black-male student, the cocaine, AIDS, or handicapped child, or children from troubled homes. Choice schools will want to admit the best and the brightest, the outstanding athletes—the kind of students that will make these schools successful. Although the advocates of choice will never admit it, choice has an air of Social Darwinism about it.

Choice as an educational alternative will have run its course—as most innovations in American education do—in a decade or so. American public education in the early decades of the twenty-first century will be forced to take firm action to improve the system. Whether as a nation we can arrive at a consensus on how to save our schools remains to be seen, especially in a society so enamored with “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” Interestingly, it was Milton Friedman’s fear in the early 1950s that vouchers might create schools so diverse that some of them might not teach a common set of values so essential in a democracy.

But I have always been impressed with the great educators of the past who resisted the temptation to put skill development and the acquisition of knowledge first, as we do today. John Locke said that “right living,” “wisdom,” and “civility” all must come before “book learning.” For American society to survive, there must come a renewed societal commitment to the importance of character development and time-tested values in our public schools. That can happen only if we make public schools a high priority.

Recently, juries have found “artistic value” in pornographic museum art exhibits and obscene rap music protected by the First Amendment. This is deeply disturbing to many evangelicals. As important as it is to oppose what is clearly degrading, the principal battleground is still in the nation’s public schools, where the struggle goes on for the minds and hearts of Americans.

Christians are the salt and light of the world (Matt. 5:12–14). Their arena of witness must include the halls of public education. Evangelicals should stop chasing choice. We should instead use every means possible to influence public education in a direction that is in the best interest of all Americans.

YES It was Measure 11 on the Oregon ballot. If passed, it would have removed barriers between school districts, giving parents access to schools unavailable to them. It would have provided a $2,500 tax credit to parents who felt their children’s needs could best be met by a private school. The educational innovators behind the measure believed that introducing competition and diversity would allow parents of all income levels access to different schools and approaches to learning. Oregon’s Educational Choice Initiative was a simple idea—even a revolutionary idea—and it was defeated at the polls.

While Oregon’s initiative was defeated, support for educational choice is spreading across the nation and crossing traditional ideological lines. Support ranges from the Brookings Institution (a liberal think tank) to William Bennett (a conservative and former U.S. secretary of education), to say nothing of President Bush.

Parents, many of them poor and from minority groups, are attracted to the plan. They are tired of high dropout rates, widely varying achievement scores between schools or school districts, and poor showings when American students are compared to those from other developed countries.

Others see school choice offering new possibilities for dealing with cultural diversity. Every year we ask our public schools to do more. We expect them to recognize each child’s unique learning style, identify individual strengths and weaknesses, be sensitive to each child’s cultural heritage and ethnic background, provide instruction that meets these needs, and simultaneously build the child’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth.

Schools also feel increasing pressure to shape our children in socially “correct” ways, and better represent America’s diverse ethnic backgrounds. Current efforts to better represent minority groups in our history and social studies classes are understandable—but as we teach more of these classes, it also means that we must teach less of something else. The addition of gun education, sex education, AIDS education, and drug education means less of something else. Less math? Less spelling? Less science?

Educational choice is a realistic solution to the problem of schools trying to be all things to all children. While educational choice will not solve all problems, it has the potential to address many of them, and it brings the following benefits.

1. It returns control of education to parents. This may be at the heart of the parental-choice movement. Parents are not just dissatisfied with the content and outcome of public education, they are also frustrated at their inability to affect the educational establishment. Policy is made by state agencies strongly influenced by professional administrators and teachers’ unions. And the quality of public education has taken a back seat to job security for many professional educators. Choice once again makes public education responsive to the people who are paying for it. Good teachers, good administrators, and good schools will thrive under a choice system.

2. Educational choice recognizes cultural diversity. This fall, Milwaukee adds an additional offering to its public-school options: Two schools will be devoted to educating black males. The schools will immerse their male students in black culture in an attempt to build self-esteem and promote responsible behavior. They will target the specific needs of black males who are not succeeding in traditional schools. Fewer than 20 percent of black-male students in Milwaukee public schools have a C average or better, and black males account for 50 percent of all school suspensions. Other students will not be excluded from the school, and may choose to attend the schools if they wish; but the curriculum will be designed to make school more relevant to black males. It may or may not work, but it is an effort that must be applauded. Meeting the needs of all our students is what educational choice is all about.

3. Educational choice respects value differences. Christians have long been sensitive to the beliefs and values conveyed through public education. Concern about the way schools handle Creation and evolution, abortion, sex education, and secular values leads some Christian parents to place their children in private schools, even though they must shoulder the financial burden. And value conflicts are not limited to Christian parents. Educational choice supports the right of all parents to pass their values on to their children.

4. Educational choice takes the pressure off of schools to be all things to all people. Principals and other administrators spend much time dealing with parents and community organizations unhappy with the content of the curriculum. Why the theory of evolution and not Creation? Why are certain books in the school library? A choice approach that makes private schools more feasible options takes the pressure off of the public schools; parents who have concerns find it financially acceptable to make the move to a private school. The schools become less of an ideological battleground.

5. Educational choice is cost-effective. Choice programs are typically described as “draining the resources of the public-school system.” But the figures do not bear that out. Oregon, for example, spends over $4,700 on each public-school pupil (making the state thirteenth in the nation). An elementary school enrolling 500 students would receive over $2.3 million. If 10 percent of the students at the school took advantage of a $2,500 tax credit to attend a private school, the school would lose $125,000. But each departing student would leave behind $2,200. That money could then be used to improve the education of the students remaining in the public schools.

Only in the event of wholesale flight from the public schools would a choice plan significantly drain the schools’ resources. Such flight is unlikely, however, and, if it did occur, would that not tell us something? If students flock to certain schools, could we not learn from those schools?

6. Educational choice actually lowers the cost of education. The Oregon system would have allowed a $2,500 tax credit to parents who chose to send their child to a private school. The Milwaukee plan would send a $2,500 voucher with a student to a private school. Wisconsin spends about the same as Oregon does per pupil for education. If the states can purchase an education that is comparable or better for their children at half the cost, why not? Many states, including Oregon, have been doing the same thing at the college level for years.

7. Educational choice could improve the quality of education. One reason poor and minority parents are becoming interested in educational choice is dissatisfaction with the education their children receive. Private schools generally have more academic success than public schools. A voucher system makes these schooling options more accessible to families from all income levels and encourages public schools to improve.

School choice promises to return control of children’s education to the parents, a prospect attractive to many.

8. Voucher systems allow parents to fit the school to the learning style of their child. All schools cannot be all things to all children. Some children are reflective, contemplative, and develop best in a slower-paced atmosphere. Other children flourish in a fast-paced program. An educational-choice system has the potential to allow both types of children to have their specific needs met.

Similarly, parents differ in their preferences for their children. Some parents prefer a structured environment where there are clear rules and expectations and the children learn self-control and discipline. Other parents prefer an atmosphere where children are free to express themselves and develop their creativity. Educational choice allows the parents to match their parenting style with the school atmosphere of their choice.

But don’t choice options favor the well-to-do? Milwaukee addressed the concern by limiting the voucher option to those making less than $22,180 per year. Concern that the $2,500 would not be sufficient to cover the tuition, thereby leaving out poor parents, was addressed by specifying that the private school could not charge more than that amount (six private schools signed up to participate). The concern that choice schools would be elitist and select only the best and the brightest was addressed by requiring random selection when space was available. The Milwaukee plan was supported by the poor and urban minorities, yet the opposition continues to fight such plans.

The make-up of the opposition to the Milwaukee plan illustrates the first obstacle to educational choice. It includes the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers (the state’s largest teachers’ union), the Administrators and Supervisors Council of Milwaukee, and the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators. A large segment of our society is invested in the public-school system. They make their living from it, and their interests are inseparable from the interests of public education. When you tamper with public education you are tampering with people’s lifestyles.

A second major obstacle to educational choice comes from those who want to use schools for social engineering. To many, the schools, as well as the courts, are seen as arenas in which to pursue their ideological goals. For example, the Portland Rainbow Coalition wrote in the Oregon voters’ pamphlet of the need to “heal society in multi-cultural public schools.” Groups with social or political agendas tend to see the schools for what they can do for society rather than what they can do for the children. Educational choice could reduce the access of social engineers to children.

Educational choice is no cure-all for the ills of the public education system, but it has untested potential. If we can overcome the inertia of the educational bureaucracy and put our children’s needs ahead of our own, we may yet be able to test that potential fully.

At a recent United Church of Christ conference titled “Health and Spirituality: The Abundant Life,” the “creation spirituality” theologian Matthew Fox led participants in a song and ritual dance drawn from native-American tribal traditions. More than 400 people danced around their tables, singing, “I walk with beauty before me, behind me, above me, below me, all around me.” Speakers told of finding inner healing through meditation techniques, or through repeating a word, phrase, or muscular activity while blithely disregarding all thoughts. They argued that “anyone can have mystical experiences by using the tools of ritual and gratitude.”

M. Scott Peck, noted psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Traveled, assured the conferees, “We have the technology to welcome God into our organizations. There is nothing magical about this technology. It follows the rules of love.”

The conference, one of many that might be mentioned, illustrates a striking phenomenon in both conservative and liberal Protestantism: Interest in spirituality is burgeoning. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have always made a prominent place for the cultivation of the spiritual life, but they too are being affected by the new emphasis.

What makes the current fascination with spirituality significant is that much of it reflects the largely secular flavor of our time rather than the Bible or church traditions. The renaissance in spirituality shows that established religion has been unable to assuage the anxieties that cripple people today. But the situation is akin to the breakdown of conventional morality and religion in the last phase of the Roman Empire, when people retreated into an introspective spirituality.

Spirituality has become for many a technique for tapping into the “reservoir” of unlimited power within us. We hear about centering—focusing attention on the inner core of the self in order to make contact with the “infinite ground of being.” Others tell us to rise above words and images until we are lost in an abyss of silence.

Many of these techniques and emphases are found in the mystical heritage of the church. What makes the current practice different is that climbing the ladder to heaven (a traditional mystical theme) is replaced by sinking into the pulsating depths of existence (Matthew Fox), a far cry from the biblical accent on prayer and supplication.

When Seminaries Go Spiritual

A sure sign of the change in theological climate is the high priority given to spiritual formation in theological seminaries—both liberal and conservative. Some seminaries are trying to reappropriate the spiritual wisdom of the fathers and doctors of the church, but there is also a disturbing tendency to accommodate culture’s demands for personal integration and fulfillment.

While spiritual classics such as Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God are still used in some schools—especially conservative ones—more attention is now given such texts as Jay McDaniel’s Earth, Sky, Gods & Mortals: Developing an Ecological Spirituality, Ernest Larkin’s Silent Presence: Discernment as Process and Problem, Eg McGaa’s Mother Earth Spirituality, Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing, and Morton Kelsey’s The Other Side of Silence.

These works stress divine immanence and religious inclusivity. McDaniel writes, for example, that “as long as the fruits of silence are a love of life and a commitment to shalom, there is no reason for Christians to insist that one type of spirituality is higher, deeper, or more revelatory than another.” Affirming Christ as the only way is condemned as a form of ethnocentrism, “arrogant and uncompassionate in a world of pluralism, a world in which there are many worthwhile religious ways.”

A growing interest in interfaith dialogue has also contributed to the current spiritual climate. While dogma allegedly divides, religious experience is said to allow various faith traditions to explore what they have in common. The symbols and rituals undergirding each faith are welcomed as aids by which we make contact with the depth of our own being, a crucial factor in the new spirituality’s subjectivism—or, to put it more bluntly, gross egocentricity. “To be in touch with ourselves,” we are told, “is to be in touch with the word of God that is ourselves.”

Earth Mother Mysticism

The much-publicized New Age movement is only one manifestation of the new spirituality, which is wider and deeper than any single group or movement. The roots of the new spirituality lie in the Renaissance and Enlightenment and even more in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Its mentors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Paul Tillich, Teilhard de Chardin, Nikos Kazantzakis (author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ), and Joseph Campbell (interviewed with much deference on public television by Bill Moyers).

The new spirituality represents a kind of naturalistic mysticism, a re-emergence of the ancient religion of the Earth Mother. In this view, all nature is seen to be alive, filled with divine energy. It is not simply the handiwork of God, but the very body of God. Reality is pictured as a verb rather than a noun, a process of becoming rather than a state of being.

The new mysticism does not emphasize self-denial, but self-affirmation and self-esteem. It prizes growth and change more than repentance and service. What matters more than the powerlessness of love is the power of creative imagination. Emerson expressed it well: “Man is weak to the extent that he looks outside himself for help. It is only as he throws himself unhesitatingly upon the God within himself that he learns his own power and works miracles.”

Our vocation is no longer to be pilgrims in a vale of tears, nor witnesses to what God has done for us in history. Instead, we are to be gods on earth. Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno candidly admitted, “My longing is not to be submerged in the vast All … or in God” but “to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself.” Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck likewise insists that “we are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination.”

New mystics commonly refer to God as “the Life Force,” “the Power of Creative Transformation,” “the Pool of Unlimited Power,” “the Divine Eros,” “the Womb of Being,” “the Creative Surge,” “the Cosmic Energy,” and “the Infinite Abyss.” Such descriptions patently conflict with the traditional mystical portrayal of God as “Absolute Being,” “the Self-Same,” “Being-Itself,” and “the Eternal Silence.” They are an even further cry from the biblical depiction of God as sovereign Lord and Creator, a living personal Subject who confronts us in an I-Thou encounter.

Further contrasts between the new spirituality, classical mysticism, and biblical spirituality abound. The new secular spirituality represents a descent into worldliness under the guise of holiness. Classical mysticism is an ascent to a holiness beyond this world. Biblical or evangelical spirituality, by contrast, is a response to a holiness won for us by a divine incursion into this world.

Prayer in the new spirituality is a reflection on life and the world, culminating in creative action. Or it is reaching out to the possibilities of an unknown future. In classical mystical religion, prayer in its fullness is contemplative adoration. Although the more avowedly Christian mystics make a place for petitionary prayer in the beginning stages of the Christian life, in the highest stage petition is left behind. In biblical religion, on the other hand, the essence of prayer is humble supplication, pouring out our souls before God, crying out to God for help from the depths of our being (see Pss. 42:4; 57:1–2; 62:8; Isa. 26:16; Lam. 2:19). For biblical Christians, there are indeed other kinds of prayer besides petition—such as thanksgiving, confession, and praise—but the element of petition remains in all of these; we come before God as suppliants—even when we thank him for his kindnesses. We ask God to accept our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, and even when we do not do this verbally, the attitude of petition is nevertheless present.

Grounded In The Promises Of God

The word spirituality refers to living out our lives in relation to the Eternal, appropriating redeeming grace in trust and obedience. If revelation involved only objective truths, the religious affections would be quenched and the religious yearning suppressed. Christians are spiritual, as well as rational, beings, and this means being in contact with the Spirit of God as well as with truths revealed by God.

A true spirituality, however, will be grounded in the promises of God in holy Scripture. It will celebrate the glory of God, not the self-aggrandizement of the creature. In the midst of a rising tide of paganism and pseudo-spirituality, we need to recover the biblical pattern. This means not only immersing ourselves in the Bible itself, but also learning from the ongoing commentary on Scripture in the life of the church. It is especially important for us to rediscover the abiding insights of the sixteenth-century Reformers as well as of the Pietists and Puritans.

Peter T. Forsyth, who drew on all of these, is a worthy mentor for the age in which we live. In contrast to the activist, do-it-yourself mentality of our culture (which has also infiltrated much of today’s evangelicalism), Forsyth declared, “Christianity is not the sacrifice we make, but the sacrifice we trust; not the victory we win, but the victory we inherit.”

Another spiritual master we should heed is Jonathan Edwards. In this day when experientialism is in vogue, when signs and wonders figure more prominently than the redeeming mercy of God in Jesus Christ, Edwards sagaciously reminds us that “saints are ‘taken’ with the beauty of God, other religionists with ‘the beauty of their experiences of God.’ ”

Both John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola can help us in this respect. They are both associated with the motto Soli Deo Gloria (glory to God alone), which points to a God-centered spirituality that places serving God over cultivating self-esteem and “finding our true selves.”

We can surely also learn from Martin Luther, who rediscovered the New Testament understanding of love as agap—the readiness to serve unconditionally as opposed to the Hellenistic eros—the desire to possess the highest good and thus to perfect the self. Luther saw that the point of departure in our spiritual quest must be the gospel itself, as did the New Testament writer: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10, NRSV).

Evangelicals must reaffirm with Luther and Calvin the apostolic message that our hope and righteousness lie outside ourselves in the living Christ. Evangelical piety is extrinsic rather than intrinsic. Our doctrine is certain, said Luther, because “it carrieth us out of ourselves, that we should not lean to our own strength, our own conscience, our own feeling, our own person, and our own works, but to that which is without us, that is to say, the promise and truth of God which cannot deceive us.”

In evangelical understanding, fellowship with God is based not on personal progress toward holiness but on the forgiveness of sins. The desire for a holy life is a fruit and evidence of our justification before a holy God. We are justified, moreover, on the basis of a righteousness not in any way our own, the righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to all who believe. We cannot earn or merit God’s forgiveness, but we can proclaim and demonstrate it through deeds of self-giving love and discipleship under the Cross.

What Mysticism Can Teach Us

But can we also profit from a study of the great mystics of the church? We must not neglect this tradition; indeed, for the Reformers themselves drew upon the spiritual wisdom of the church fathers. Yet we must be cautious, for the mystics of Christian tradition synthesized biblical insights with classical or Hellenistic wisdom. Their spirituality proved to be not only God-centered, but also man-centered. They saw union with God as the pathway to human happiness, which sometimes became their overriding concern. At the same time, many key figures of Catholic mysticism—Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Teresa of Ávila, for example—emphasized scriptural authority and salvation by free grace. We can also mention Thérèse of Lisieux, who in modern times substituted for the mystical ladder to heaven the elevator—the lift of free grace in which God descends to us in order to raise us up to him. The only thing required of us is an act of simple faith.

While faith contains a mystical dimension, it cannot be reduced to a mystical experience. Faith in the biblical sense means entering into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Faith is not a mere feeling of dependence on God, but an awakening and empowering by the Spirit for commitment and service under the Cross.

In a time when the gospel is being reinterpreted to mean the availability of power to gain the goods of the world, we desperately need to recover the New Testament understanding that the gospel is the good news of grace through the vicarious, atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the sin of the world. We also need to recover the imperative that accompanies the gospel—the call to take up our own cross and follow Christ into the dereliction and pain of the world. We are summoned to reclaim our holy vocation to be witnesses and heralds—not of our own works and accomplishments—but of Christ’s great work of reconciliation and redemption on our behalf.

Our mission is not to elevate ourselves or perfect ourselves, but to elevate him who died and rose again so we might live. With John the Baptist, our motto should be, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). When this attitude once again becomes rooted in the life and thought of the church, we will indeed witness the dawning of a true spirituality.

What do tuna fish, bleach, green grapes, candy bars, deodorant, and gasoline have in common? They have all, under specific brand names, been the targets of consumer boycotts. Take tuna, for example. Consumers became outraged when they learned that methods used to net tuna for commercial processing were also netting and killing dolphins. Activists targeted three major brands of canned tuna, representing 70 percent of the tuna sold in the United States. In early 1990, all three companies agreed to purchase and process only “dolphin safe” tuna. The strategy had worked.

The case with deodorant was somewhat different. It represented an effort to influence the standards of television programming by exerting pressure on a company that advertised on objectionable shows. In 1989, CLeaR-TV (Christian Leaders for Responsible Television), which represents Christian organizations and Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, urged its supporters not to buy Mennen products for a year. The real target was the programs. CLeaR-TV argued that Mennen bought advertising during television shows that contained excessive violence, sexual explicitness, profanity, and anti-Christian stereotyping. While Mennen pulled its advertising from one objectionable show, it resisted taking any further action.

What motivates involvement in such boycotts? Two major reasons, heeding conscience and changing society, led evangelical Christians to support many nineteenth-century “boycotts” (refusing to buy slave-grown cotton and sugar, for instance). When conscience motivates a boycott, we simply avoid buying products from companies whose policies violate our values. These values include standards of morality, human dignity, or social and environmental well-being.

Using a boycott to bring about social change is more complex, and lies at the root of many recent boycotts that target the entertainment industry. Boycotting in this instance involves organizing the collective action of as many consumers as possible. They pool their economic power in order to achieve a specific moral goal by refusing to purchase the products or services of an offending company or individual. The goal of the boycott might be to redress an injustice or to urge compliance with higher ethical standards.

When Boycotts Are Bad

While a boycott is attractive because it employs nonviolent means, and can engage many people without placing cumbersome burdens upon them, there are drawbacks.

Theologian and ethicist John Macquarrie has called the boycott an “indiscriminate weapon” that is “bound to hurt a good many people other than those at whom it is aimed.” He counsels, “The Christian must consider each case very carefully and decide whether the harm that will be inflicted on innocent people will be outweighed by the eventual righting of wrongs through the pressure exerted.”

Innocent people who might be harmed by a boycott include the employees of a targeted company. The vast majority of them probably have no say about the offending policy or practice, yet their livelihood depends upon the economic performance of the company in question. If a boycott is successful in drastically cutting the sales of a company’s products, it may also hurt the company’s employees and suppliers.

In order to minimize this negative impact upon innocent people, Macquarrie urges organizers of a potential boycott to calculate the probability that it will be swift and successful. If the outlook is poor, Macquarrie suggests using a token boycott—lasting one day or one week, for instance—to draw public attention to the injustice without hurting innocent parties.

But a boycott is a form of coercion, nonetheless, and therefore represents serious moral action. Before considering a boycott, a group should make sure it is seeking a just and reasonable action from the offending party. Further, a boycott should be enacted only after all other lesser means of persuasion have been exhausted. A group’s concerns should first be expressed directly and privately to the offending party, allowing opportunity for response without public pressure or coercion. If it fails to respond or refuses to negotiate in a satisfactory manner, then a stronger and more public appeal may be made. If the offending party continues to remain intransigent, then a boycott may be called to pressure it for a satisfactory response.

Boycotts, however, are notoriously hard to start and even harder to end. Starting a boycott depends upon getting information out to as many potential supporters as possible. Often this is done through a variety of means, from newsletters to speeches. When a company finally makes a satisfactory response, organizers let supporters know and call off the boycott. In reality, however, boycott organizers often do this with less urgency and through fewer avenues than they use to launch the boycott. An organized and ongoing group such as CLeaR-TV runs this risk less, because it has an established mailing list and sends regular updates to supporters.

The Limits Of Boycotting

Can the boycott be overused as a tool for social change? As boycotts have become a more frequent phenomenon (there were more than 200 under way in 1990), some observers are starting to ask if the practice is being overdone. Because boycotts give clout to concerned groups outside decision-making structures, the tendency to resort to boycotts—and to do so as an intervention of first rather than last resort—is growing.

Problems can result: Targeted organizations may perceive that they are in a no-win situation—that increasingly diverse groups will boycott them for increasingly narrow reasons, no matter how hard they try to be sensitive to moral and social concerns. These organizations may decide, therefore, to chart their own courses without worrying about the clamors of public opinion.

This reaction may be especially tempting when one boycott provokes a counter boycott—as happened, for instance, when national prolife and prochoice factions targeted retail giant Dayton Hudson on the issue of contributions to Planned Parenthood.

Boycotts have also been known to provoke “buycotts,” in which persons who oppose the goals of a boycott are urged to increase their buying from the targeted company. Responding to such trends, a recent article in The Economist warned, “As boycotts become more widespread, more shrill, and more bullying, their biggest victim may not be corporate misbehavior, but reason.”

The proliferation of boycotts could also lead to bewilderment and the paralysis of consumer conscience. Even those who favor boycotts, properly used, feel that the attempt to support so many worthy boycotts is becoming a new form of legalistic self-righteousness. Nearly every day, it seems, organizers ask the public to adhere to ever-new laws of consumer purity.

This can have several detrimental effects. Michael Kinsley of The New Republic observes that “politicizing every economic decision down to which brand of cereal to buy can gum up the gears of commerce, poison social relations, reduce toleration, and strain the national sense of humor.” Some see the increased emphasis on boycotts as evidence of a dangerous factionalism that could threaten to rend the fabric of society.

In order to preserve the moral power of the boycott as a tool of social change in the face of trends toward overuse and trivialization, current observers are adding new guidelines to the traditional ones discussed above. Kinsley suggests the following:

Rule 1: “Don’t use a boycott to deny other people their rights … [or] to discourage purely political activities. (Corporate contributions to activist groups are different. Corporations justify this use of shareholders’ money as a way to improve their image. They can’t complain if the image backfires.)”

Rule 2: Think carefully about boycotts that target one group through action against another group. In this regard, Kinsley notes the distinction in labor law between primary and secondary boycotts. “A secondary boycott is aimed at someone you have no dispute with, in an attempt to get the target to boycott your real nemesis.… Secondary boycotts are frowned upon under the general principle that there’s got to be a limit.”

Rule 3: “A boycott is more compelling if it is aimed at the item [not just the company] that actually causes the offense.”

Rule 4: A boycott should not be a shakedown. Kinsley suggests that Operation PUSH’S attempted boycott of Nike falls into this category.

When Boycotts Work And Why

How effective are boycotts? It depends. Several factors determine the outcome. The broader and more dedicated the group of participants mobilized, the better the chance of success. If a company believes that mainstream consumers have been mobilized (especially those previously loyal to its product), and not just a narrowly focused vocal minority, it will more likely respond positively to the boycott’s goals.

Yet individuals making sound arguments have also been known to influence major companies. Take the example of Terry Rakolta. The Michigan mother wrote letters to companies such as Coca-Cola, Kimberly Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Tambrands urging them to withdraw sponsorship from Fox Broadcasting’s “Married … With Children.” She effectively argued that the show denigrated women and family values and featured gratuitous sex. Continuing to advertise on such a show, she argued, could make the companies unpopular with family-oriented viewers. Rakolta’s efforts met with stunning success. Several advertisers withdrew their ads from the show; others promised to monitor the episodes more closely before puchasing time.

While an individual rarely has such an impact, Rakolta’s story nonetheless reveals that a boycott’s success depends upon more than actual losses in sales. It also depends upon the perceived legitimacy of the complaint, and the company’s sensitivity to public-relations concerns.

A company’s fear of controversy will more often motivate response than fear of declining sales. According to Mark de Bernardo, director of labor law for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Boycotts create a public-relations problem, not a sales problem.” This applies to boycotts protesting advertising practices, as well. As New York Times writer N. R. Kleinfeld points out, “When you pay $100,000 or $200,000 for 30 seconds on the air, you prefer not to offend anybody.”

Boycotts offer an avenue for effecting change as people grow impatient because lawmakers and regulators are not serving the public’s needs. “People don’t have a lot of faith in legislators and public institutions, so they see boycotts as an effective way to express their views,” observed Todd Putnam, editor of National Boycott News.

Viewer efforts to influence television programming bear this out. More provocative shows came out after the Federal Communications Commission, under the Reagan administration, began deregulating the television industry in the early 1980s. Cost-cutting measures at the networks heightened the problems created by deregulation as the three major networks cut back on staff in their “standards and practices” divisions (responsible for censoring programs).

Grassroots groups of viewers began protesting the resulting vacuum of values. These groups, and others like them, use at least three approaches to express their concerns: communicating views to the Federal Communications Commission, contacting the networks directly, and boycotting companies that advertise on objectionable programs. The last method has seemed to provide the most powerful leverage.

Indeed, companies may be growing more skittish about the content of programs on which they advertise, and the networks are beginning to get the message that the public is not thrilled with their offerings. Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, noted tersely, “Trash television got in. The viewers revolted.” Meanwhile, according to a Forbes magazine report entitled “Crude Doesn’t Sell,” shows that are both popular and clean are drawing higher rates for ads than smutty shows.

The public widely supports the social-change tactic of boycotts. An independent study, which was conducted in 1989 by Oxtoby-Smith, Inc., a consumer-research firm, found that 68 percent of television viewers believed it was “a good idea for advertisers to stop advertising in programs some viewers found objectionable.” An even larger proportion, 72 percent, believed it was “a good idea for consumers not to buy products of advertisers in programs they found objectionable.”

“Those who advocate a consumer boycott have apparently touched a sensitive, pervasive, and perhaps festering public concern,” observed Oxtoby-Smith president Joseph Smith.

Why Some Still Object

Boycotts are still controversial. Most opponents of viewer boycotts assert that they represent attempts to narrow the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. They argue that boycotters are seeking to impose the standards of certain segments of society upon all television viewers.

Boycotters counter that not only are they not infringing on free speech, they are making use of such freedoms, in a manner open to all Americans. They understand their critics’ sensitivity about imposed standards, because they feel that regrettably low entertainment standards have been imposed upon the viewing public by a handful of network decision makers.

Furthermore, advocates of boycotts argue that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech does not apply without restriction to the entertainment industry. Regulation is therefore appropriate, just as it is with print and film pornography, in order to reflect and maintain community standards of decency and human dignity.

Nonetheless, most boycotters are seeking to obtain industry cooperation through market rather than legislative avenues. They do not aspire to be dictatorial arbiters of public standards, but rather communicators of standards they feel are being ignored in the quest for ratings and profits. They are using acceptable democratic means that have been used by many other groups.

New York Times television critic Walter Goodman believes defenders of the First Amendment have offered relatively little resistance to viewer boycotts because they realize television is different from books and movies. “Television,” Goodman asserts, “is recognized to be too powerful a social force and too entwined with commercial interests outside the medium itself to be treated like movies or theater or books. In such a forum, pressures are as natural and as justified as they are in a political campaign.”

Most persons who are concerned about the effects of the boycotts, however, hope that advertisers and the viewing public will make a distinction between shows that are objectionable because of prurient content and shows that take on controversial topics. If abortion, for example, could not be dealt with openly on commercial television, First Amendment guarantees would be compromised and the viewing public would come out the losers.

Despite what appears to be an encouraging turn toward acceptance of viewer input, some viewers appear to be more equal than others. New York Times writer Bill Carter observes that “the religious groups’ complaints of the 1980’s were largely dismissed as coming from outside of mainstream American opinion.”

There may be more than a hint of religious and social-class bigotry, then, in the opposition to efforts of groups such as CLeaR-TV and Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association. Evangelicals are labeled as a power-hungry group at the fringes of the establishment, which may explain the sneers and distrust evangelicals’ efforts sometimes elicit. It also explains why Christians resort to boycotts and regard the task as so vital: They do not inhabit the decision-making offices and halls of power, and they must therefore avail themselves of other means offered by a democratic society.

We are entering a period when television viewers are finding a voice to which advertisers, writers, and network executives are beginning to listen. Most of us would like them, at the minimum, to hear the message of Terry Rakolta: “I just want to be able to turn on my TV with a degree of safety about what my children are going to see.”

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

To start with the stereotypes: No, he does not slick back his hair, tremble, or shout. That is the other famous person to come from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Presley. Yes, the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon does talk in a rural Southern accent thick enough to spread on pancakes, but he generally does so in a quiet, reasonable voice. With his balding head, his slight, paunchy build, and his steel-rim glasses, he looks more like a pharmacist than a demagogue.

Many think of him as a sweat-streaked, ignorant fundamentalist preacher—a caricature Wildmon rather enjoys. “I’m from Mississippi, which means I don’t wear shoes,” he says with grim irony from his cluttered, windowless, undecorated office. “I’m a preacher, which means me and Elmer Gantry are first cousins.”

He does not preach much these days, nor often go on TV or talk to reporters; most of his time is spent talking to corporate advertisers or cooking up strategy with his allies. Nonetheless, television executives know who he is.

Two years ago Wildmon published an account of his work under the title The Man the Networks Love to Hate—and nobody has accused him of exaggerating. A single article in Playboy compared him to both the Ayatollah Khomeini and Joseph McCarthy. Barry Lynn, legislative counsel of the ACLU, calls him a “catalyst for cowardice” who will lead our nation to lose its direction, “if not its national soul.”

Wildmon returns the favor. He says he does not like to fight; he would rather go fishing. But that is hard to imagine. He consistently portrays those who oppose him as intolerant and untrustworthy. Images of war come readily to his lips. As his son, Tim, associate director of Wildmon’s American Family Association (AFA), says, “We’re the marines.”

“I like the guy a lot,” says Tom Minnery, who heads public policy for the evangelical organization Focus on the Family. “Jim Dobson likes him a lot.” But Minnery, who has witnessed some of Wildmon’s negotiations, acknowledges, “He’s very tough, not a conciliator. His style is more confrontational than ours.”

Donald Wildmon has picked a wide range of fights in the 14 years he has been battling: boycotts and picketing of 7-Eleven stores for selling Playboy and Penthouse; protests against the National Endowment for the Arts over their sponsorship of profane art; a boycott of Holiday Inns for offering pornographic movies to their guests; marches and boycotts against the film The Last Temptation of Christ. Now, through a newly established legal center, his AFA has taken on a California public-school curriculum and is defending Operation Rescue protesters. They define their target as broadly as “anything affecting the traditional American family.” Abuses of the media, however—particularly television—remain at the heart of their work. “Television is the most destructive instrument in our society,” Wildmon says.

A Born Fighter

“He was a really determined child,” Wildmon’s mother told Tupelo’s Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. “If he wanted to do something, it usually turned out that he got to do it.” Sometimes his competitiveness led him into trouble. When he was 15 he was selected for a six-week training course at the Boy Scouts’ Philmont ranch; at the end, when the boys themselves voted on who had passed, he was among 3 out of 35 voted down—because, he says, of his obnoxiousness, not his ability.

The youngest of five children, he was born in a northeast Mississippi farmhouse with no telephone, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. His father raised cotton, plowing with mules. When Wildmon was two, the family had to sell their 100-acre farm after three consecutive bad crops. His father got a job with the state board of health; his mother went back to school to gain a teacher’s certificate, even though her son Allen had to drive her back and forth to classes. The family moved several times in the vicinity of the small town of Ripley, where Wildmon went to high school.

Despite the poverty, Wildmon has idyllic memories of his youth. He recalls driving his car to the town square on a Saturday night and leaving windows rolled down, keys in the ignition. “My only worry was whether it would rain and get the seat covers wet.” When Wildmon is asked what kind of America he wants, he harks back to that safe, close-knit society.

The family was Methodist, and Mrs. Wildmon was convinced that one of her boys would be a preacher. When he was nine, Donald rededicated his life to God, convinced that “the Lord had something special for me to do.” But he struggled to keep that sense of direction, studying journalism for a time in college and spending a miserable stint in the army.

Finally, convinced that he was meant to be a minister, he applied for seminary training at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He was turned down because of an uneven collegiate record (at well-regarded Millsaps in Jackson, Miss.). In what has become a life pattern, Wildmon did not spiritualize the rejection; he fought. “I found out who had influence,” he says, and got them to contact the seminary on his behalf. When he applied again, the seminary took him. He finished a three-year program in two years.

Still restless, he spent several years on a circuit of small churches and then was assigned a new church in Tupelo. After eight years, Lee Acres Methodist had 76 members. He says he was trying to build a unique church, one with high commitment. “I wasn’t interested in getting people on the church roll, seeing them at Christmas and Easter. That’s not my cup of tea.”

Wildmon poured his excess energy into a small book-publishing venture, writing, publishing, and marketing 17 inspirational gift books, with titles such as Stepping Stones and Treasured Thoughts. He organized and led tours of Europe and the Holy Land. And he launched reformist ventures in the Methodist church, taking on the power structures over pensions and administrative reorganization. Once he tried to interest the denomination in buying two radio stations, but found no one willing to support the venture.

In 1976 he left Tupelo—“I thought I was a detriment to the church”—and was assigned a larger, more affluent church in Southhaven, Mississippi, outside Memphis. He went in June. In December he sat down for a family evening, turned on the TV at the suggestion of one of his four children, and was dismayed as, flipping from one channel to the next, he encountered violence, profanity, and sexual titillation. He turned off the TV and thought about it, then decided to ask his church to sponsor a “Turn the TV Off” week in which members would pledge not to watch TV for one week.

Wildmon knew something about media. He had worked part-time as a sports reporter since he was 16, had done local radio shows, and for some time had written a weekly syndicated newspaper column. To publicize the special week, he put out press releases, feeling sure he would gain some local coverage. He was surprised when his effort gained national attention. For weeks he took calls from journalists all over the country. More, he heard from a surprising number of people who shared his feelings.

“At 38 years old, that little spark [planted when he was nine] was just about burned out,” Wildmon recalls. “I remember lying in bed, thinking, ‘Is this what the Lord wants me to do?’ ” He asked that question for a month and became convinced that it was. In August, he moved back to Tupelo to get started. His mother took it hard: she thought he was giving up the ministry.

With $5,000 in savings (mainly from his publishing business), his wife substitute teaching, and his office in their dining room, Wildmon launched an organization called the National Federation for Decency. He had no affluent backers and hardly any mailing list. His brother Allen was startled when, at the launching press conference, he heard “national” in the name.

What A Man Has Gotta Do

“When I started this in 1977, I thought I was dealing with sex and violence on TV. I’ve discovered we are dealing with a war between the Christian view of man, and a secular, or humanistic or materialistic, view of man.”

Wildmon is speaking to perhaps 15 retirees who gather regularly at Priceville Baptist, a rural church set atop a hill in the pine trees outside Tupelo. He speaks quietly, not trying to convert anybody, only to mobilize those already convinced. Wildmon is just the opposite of his stereotype: he does not trade in emotion, but in information. It shows in the way he addresses this gathering, and it shows in the AFA Journal, which, boasts editor Randall Murfree, packs more words into 24 pages than most magazines get into 100.

“You may think that Billy Graham is the leading evangelist in America, but he’s not,” Wildmon tells the Priceville retirees. “The leading evangelists in America are those people who make the TV programs.”

The theme has grown in Wildmon’s mind over the years. A narrow struggle over TV programming has widened to become, for him, a battle between gods.

He makes no time for small talk and gets no thrill even from pressing the flesh with his allies. What he seems to enjoy is the challenge of the battle. AFA comptroller Forest Ann Daniels, who has been with Wildmon virtually from the beginning, says she would meet him at a softball game, and even then all he would talk about was work. Editor Murfree says he looks forward to times when Wildmon’s car has broken down, because by driving him home, Murfree gets his only chance at ten uninterrupted personal minutes.

Wildmon acknowledges that there is a cost to leading a confrontational movement. “I went through a period where I lost my emotional connection to my faith. I didn’t lose my intellectual commitment. You know in your mind it all makes sense. But here is something that the church ought to care about, and the church just goes on its merry way. A few of your fellow preachers write you letters about love, and hate is just oozing off the page. Nobody is coming to your defense. I’m not entirely out of that period. I don’t know if I will ever regain my emotions.”

People tell Wildmon that the battle for an America undergirded by Christian ethics is already lost. He does not argue. “It’s difficult to explain without sounding trite,” he says. (Wildmon seems genuinely to dislike answering questions in a way that might sound conventionally pious.) “The Lord didn’t call me to be successful. He only called me to be faithful.”

That, when it comes down to it, is at the heart of Donald Wildmon. To use a cliche from movies that Wildmon would probably approve, he is like the Wild West sheriff who has to go out alone to face the desperadoes taking over the town. Wildmon sees something plainly evil in the living rooms of America, and he has to fight it. He knows he is outnumbered. He knows he will need every trick in the book to win. But, as they say in Hollywood, a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do.

Showdown With Sears

When Wildmon launched his movement, he began by visiting network executives, who welcomed him warmly and expressed their heartfelt concern for family values. It seems to have been in this period that he gained his deep mistrust for the creators of television. It was also during this period that he discovered how to get their attention. “I learned when I used a dollar bill, they used the same language I did.”

For decades, Christians have been expressing concerns about the morality of TV, and before that, of movies, and before that, of novels. But Wildmon was probably the first to express those concerns by playing economic hardball.

He recruited volunteers to monitor prime-time shows for their sex and profanity and to keep track of who sponsored the worst shows. Sears turned up on the list, in the number-three spot. Sears was vulnerable, because of their high visibility and all-American image.

He wrote to them. He wrote again and met with Sears executives. When they did not respond adequately, he called a boycott and a day of picketing. He had a mailing list of fewer than 2,000 names, but Sears did not know that. On the day he began picketing, Sears announced they were dropping out of some of the most dubious shows. Wildmon declared victory.

He had found a strategy that he would employ, with variations, time and again. First, gather facts about what is really being done and who is behind it. Second, locate the economic weak spot. Third, mobilize your volunteers to protest. It is a strategy particularly suited to firms selling products to the masses, since they fear controversy.

Wildmon is not troubled by the element of coercion involved in a boycott. He compares it to talking to a man who is trying to bum down your house. “If you keep on appealing to his moral conscience, and just to his moral conscience, you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to succeed in burning your house down and killing your children.” Regarding advertisers, he says, “They may be converted to my way of thinking, they may not. The bottom line is, Are you going to keep putting things on TV?”

Does Economic War Work?

How effective boycotts have been is debatable. Advertisers do not like to admit that Wildmon has swayed them, and some have made a point of saying they had their best year ever while Wildmon was boycotting their products. Even if a boycott does not make any impact on sales, however, letters and calls by the thousand can make a point. Companies that spend millions on their image do not like having people mad at them.

In several highly publicized cases, companies were not very convincing when they shrugged off Wildmon’s significance. For example, last year Pepsi dropped its corporate link to rock-video star Madonna, citing “confusion” between its television ads and the MTV video Wildmon had protested. Pepsi said Wildmon had little to do with the decision. Wildmon said he did not care what they said, so long as they pulled the ads. Few in the press thought Pepsi dropped its $5 million sponsorship over mere “confusion.”

Wildmon also claims to have ousted Playboy from 7-Eleven stores, to have prevented The Last Temptation of Christ from playing in first-run theaters, to have convinced Burger King, among others, to change their sponsorship of TV shows. The networks have dropped at least a few shows because of Wildmon’s protests, and the threat of a protest probably keeps some material from ever reaching the scripting stage.

On the other hand, Wildmon has not succeeded in getting pornographic movies out of Holiday Inns, nor has he succeeded to date in convincing K-mart to stop its Waldenbooks subsidiary from selling pornographic books and magazines. CLeaR-TV (Christian Leaders for Responsible Television), the Wildmon-led coalition of Christian leaders, recently began a boycott of S. C. Johnson and Pfizer for their sponsorship of TV sex, violence, and profanity. It remains to be seen whether a boycott can work when the target is so diffused. (CLeaR-TV suggests activists carry a card listing the 50 products these companies sell.)

When asked about his success rate, Wildmon makes no extravagant claims. He admits that TV has not improved; he suspects, however, that without his efforts it would be a lot worse. Wildmon has made clear progress in gaining recruits. His mailing list has consistently grown, up to 400,000. So has his budget, more than tripling in the last three years to reach $6 million dollars. When he started, Christian leaders would not give him the time of day. Now he finds many coming around to his way of thinking. CLeaR-TV comprises, he says, more than 1,600 leaders and the heads of more than 70 denominations.

Live-And-Let-Live Pluralism

Wildmon is not prone to philosophical statements—he is more fascinated by strategy than by goals—but he is quite clear that he is not trying to build a theocracy. When asked what his work had to do with the kingdom of God, he answers, “Not much.”

But he sees two connections. First, he believes Christians are naturally activists who should express their faith by opposing evil. While disgusted with the liberal bent of his Methodist denomination, he does not criticize their social-action agenda, except to say that other issues like TV and pornography should not be ignored.

Second, he believes a more moral society makes it easier for the gospel to spread. “I’m rubbing a little bit of salt in the right places. I see it helping make conditions in society conducive to the message that a Charles Colson or Billy Graham or somebody else brings.”

Wildmon favors a live-and-let-live pluralism—in fact, that is what he thinks he grew up in—but he does not believe pluralism can work without a core commitment to Christian values. He parts company from conservatives who merely want a free market. “Capitalism without Christian ethics is destructive.”

He says Christians should fight for their beliefs not because they are a majority—that he doubts—but because they know what is right. “No significant change has ever been brought about by a majority,” he says. “It’s always been started by a committed minority.” He cites gays and radical feminists as modern minorities that have shaped the climate of opinion. Christian activists, too, can make a decisive difference. “You give me one million radicals, and I’ll change America.”

The National Censor?

His enemies describe Donald Wildmon as a censor who would like to impose fundamentalist views on the entire nation. Censor apparently provokes the same spine-tingling reaction among certain liberals that Communist once provoked among Republicans. It is used, similarly, as an all-purpose condemnation. If parents protest when schools require their children to read The Handmaid’s Tale, the parents are censors. If Wildmon asks his supporters to write the sponsors of “L.A. Law” regarding a lesbian episode, that makes him a censor. Never mind that crying “censorship” can work to repress speech, silencing parents who want a say in their children’s education, stigmatizing TV viewers who want to press for another kind of TV. According to Bill Swindell, who oversees the AFA’S 600 nationwide chapters, “People say, ‘You can’t impose your values on everybody else.’ They’re really saying, ‘We want to disenfranchise you.’ ”

Wildmon and his staff are culturally very conservative—they do not have much of a sense of humor about religious jokes on “Saturday Night Live”—but the prospect of their becoming national censors from their office in Tupelo seems remote. For one thing, they do not seek governmental influence. The exception is their recent crusade against National Endowment for the Arts’ subsidies to artists, but Wildmon says Andres Serrano (whose photo of a crucifix immersed in urine set off the controversy) can take any kind of pictures he likes, so long as he does not expect the government to support him. Wildmon would not, he says, support a constitutional amendment making it possible to outlaw Playboy.

When asked what would prevent a domino effect, where Playboy and “Saturday Night Live” get eliminated first and then People magazine and “L.A. Law,” so that pretty soon nothing is left but “Leave it to Beaver” and the Reader’s Digest, Wildmon says, “People. People are not going to let it happen. The people who support me, if I go too far, they’re not going to support me. They’ll back off.” Wildmon knows that his power is limited by his ability to persuade a mass of people, and he does not believe America would ever tolerate a genuinely censorial regime.

Actually, Wildmon would like to change America in a way far beyond censorship. He wants to create—or recreate—an American climate of opinion like what he grew up in. He wants an America where Playboy goes broke because people will not support it—will not sell it in drugstores, will not advertise Chevrolets in it, because too many people consider it offensive. You can define that as censorship if you wish, but do not expect to make American spines tingle over it. Wildmon wants to create an environment where people will not stand for the junk they are now being fed.

That would be a remarkable goal to launch from New York or Washington, let alone Tupelo. But Wildmon is a scrapper, the type who is not “reasonable” about the fights he picks. He fights to win, and when he does not win he fights anyway. Win or lose, do not look for Donald Wildmon to go fishing.

The scene was the Chicago Bulls’ locker room. Michael Jordan and crew had just won the National Basketball Association championship. Jubilant players and coaches hugged and high-fived. But before the champagne showers began, the team knelt in a huddle, and under the eye of live TV recited the Lord’s Prayer.

As Dan Rather said, the camera never blinks. But it seems the rest of the news media does—with regularity—when it comes to religion. Indeed, if not for the live broadcast of the Bulls’ postgame prayer, we might not know it ever happened. If the sports pages mentioned the prayer at all, it was in a passing phrase, buried in the flood of postgame analysis.

Why the blackout on belief? No doubt hostility toward religion exists in some journalistic circles. But perhaps a more common reason is that journalists, like most Americans, believe religion is “a personal thing.”

Writing in Sports Illustrated last February, columnist Rick Reilly complained about athletes making their faith public. While willing to “put up with” the occasional “thank the Lord,” Reilly was offended by the sight of professional football players from opposing teams gathering after the game to pray. “Athletes are entitled to freedom of religion like anyone else,” he wrote, “but let them exercise it on their own time.” He suggested that the National Football League “curtail” the midfield meetings or that television ignore them.

Obviously, faith in Jesus Christ is a personal thing. But personal isn’t the same as private. Christian faith was not meant to be limited to believers’ “own time.” It should overflow into every area of life.

One recitation of the Lord’s Prayer may not qualify the Bulls as a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But it does show that at least some of the team’s players value something loftier than wins and losses, as do scores of other professional athletes.

That’s a story that belongs in the sports section.

By Ken Sidey.