RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

This month, Christians in the Soviet Union and around the world are marking the one-thousandth anniversary of Christianity in Kievan Rus’ (old Russia). Although millennium celebrations are hailing Christianity’s contributions to Russian culture, art, literature, and language, the prime focus has been religious. And throughout the festivities, the issue of religious liberty within the Soviet Union has come to the forefront of international attention.

Encouraging Signs

In the era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), the Soviet government has acknowledged and, to a degree, is encouraging millennium celebrations. Most notable is this week’s Moscow conference with the state-approved Russian Orthodox Church and Western religious leaders. In addition, permission was granted for a council meeting of Russian Orthodox bishops—only the third such meeting permitted since World War II.

Restorations have been allowed on historic churches and religious artwork, and about 30 Orthodox churches have been granted permission to reopen. The Danilov Monastery, used by the Soviets as a prison for young people, has been returned to the Orthodox Church.

In addition, the Soviets have eased restrictions on importing and printing Bibles and biblical literature. The Russian Orthodox Church is printing 100,000 Bibles, and the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians/Baptists has been granted permission to import 100,000 Bibles. Earlier this year, 5,000 sets of Russian-language commentaries by William Barclay were sent to Soviet Christians. And on a recent trip to Moscow, State Department representatives were told individual churches could control the distribution of religious literature.

Other indications seem to suggest an easing on religion nationwide. More than 150 religious prisoners have been released in the past year, and currently, arrests of believers have virtually stopped. The State Department says about 8,000 Jews and 100 evangelicals were allowed to leave the Soviet Union last year.

“What we see is a gray area [about religion] developing under Gorbachev,” said a high-ranking administration official. “Things are still not allowed, but they’re not being prosecuted.”

At the same time, Soviet officials hint of reforms to come. In a recent meeting with Orthodox leaders in the Kremlin, Gorbachev made an unprecedented admission of “mistakes” in Soviet treatment of religion. According to the official news agency, Tass, Gorbachev said, “Mistakes made with regard to the church and believers in the 1930s and the years that followed are being rectified.”

Tass said the Soviet leader promised that “a new law on the freedom of conscience, now being drafted, will reflect the interests of religious organizations.” The State Department confirms that the Soviets have repeatedly made promises to the Reagan administration of legal revisions in regard to religion.

Western Pressure

Western observers have been using the occasion of the millennium to push for greater freedoms for Soviet believers. In a rare display of ecumenical unity on foreign policy matters, more than 200 Americans from across the religious and political spectrum have signed a petition urging Gorbachev “to demonstrate [his] commitment to peace by assuring all the peoples of the Soviet Union the right of religious freedom.…”

The petition was printed in both English and Russian, and the effort was spearheaded by the Washington-based James Madison Foundation. Among the changes called for:

• Legalization of the Greek Catholic (Ukrainian Catholic)

Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other religious groups banned by Stalin;

• Permission for religious organizations to engage in charitable activities;

• Permission for religious instruction of children, young people, and adults outside the home;

• A general amnesty for all religious prisoners of conscience;

• Full emigration rights for all believers wishing to leave.

“We are asking that religious believers suffer no civil, political, or legal disabilities for the public profession and expression of their faith,” James Madison Foundation President George Weigel told a Washington news conference. Weigel said the petition has been distributed to both American and Soviet officials.

The U.S. government has also been giving high visibility to Soviet religious freedom. A nonbinding congressional resolution signed by the President last month recognizes the millennium and “deplores the Soviet Government’s active persecution of religious believers in Ukraine … The resolution calls on the Soviets to legalize the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches and discourages official U.S. participation in millennium celebrations in the Soviet Union “so long as individuals remain harassed and imprisoned for their religious beliefs.”

The Reagan administration made the topic a high priority on the Moscow summit agenda. At a presummit meeting in the East Room of the White House, former Soviet prisoners and representatives of religious special-interest groups met with U.S. officials to discuss the religious situation in the Soviet Union. President Reagan addressed the group, saying “the most fitting way to mark the millennium of Christianity in Kievan Rus’ would be granting the right of all the peoples and all the creeds of the Soviet Union to worship their God in their own way.”

Reagan spoke hopefully of the “encouraging signs” coming out of the Soviet Union about religious matters. Yet many religious activists in the Soviet Union and the West worry about what will happen when the millennium celebrations are over, and Western attention moves on to other matters.

“Guarded Optimism”

Institute on Religion and Democracy Executive Director Kent Hill said Protestants in the USSR are viewing the current climate with “guarded optimism.” On a recent trip to the Soviet Union, Hill said he found a “general sense of unease” among Protestants who remember times of relaxation in their history that were followed by more intense persecution.

Vladimir Shibayev, an exiled Russian Orthodox priest, is more blunt. “The free and democratic West must not allow itself to be deluded,” he said. He called the Gorbachev era a “tactical pause” while Soviet officials add to their files and make new strategies against the church.

According to Keston College, a group that monitors human rights in the Soviet Union, 162 Christians remain in labor camps because of their faith, and unknown numbers of believers remain in psychiatric hospitals. Although arrests have dropped off, many groups, especially the unregistered Baptist and Pentecostal churches in more remote areas, report continued harassment. The International Representation for the Council of Evangelical Baptist Churches of the Soviet Union reports that in the past several months, numerous worship services have been disrupted, and that the interrogation of Christians—including children—has continued.

No matter what the ultimate outcome of millennium efforts, one irrefutable fact remains: Despite decades of intense oppression, Soviet believers have clung stubbornly and steadfastly to their faith. “The commitment the Soviets had in 1917 and in the years thereafter to teach atheism has gone down the drain,” said a high-ranking administration official, speaking on background. The official said he believes a religious revival is taking place in the Soviet Union, especially among the young people.

“In that spiritual desert, there are people really thirsting for a special message,” he said. “Communism is a dying faith.”

By Kim A. Lawton.

SPECIAL REPORT

It is still too early to appraise the full implications of evangelist Billy Graham’s recent three-week, five-city preaching visit to the People’s Republic of China, say analysts. But a number of Chinese Protestant leaders said in interviews that the visit boosted church-and-state relations to the best level since the Communists came to power in 1949.

Among surprises:

• Graham received nationwide coverage by Chinese television and the press, the first such attention given an American preacher or any evangelist ever. Pastors said the resulting public recognition of the church was a big plus for them.

• Newly chosen premier Li Peng unexpectedly summoned Graham to a 50-minute meeting. The main topic: Christianity and its potential role in China’s future. China needs “moral power” and “spiritual forces” if it is to prosper, Li volunteered. He also admitted candidly: “The Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief, but in the past we didn’t practice it in full. We are trying to correct the past.…” Veteran China hands thought it significant that the acknowledgement was reported in the Chinese press, a sure sign Li wanted it made public.

• Graham met with independent house-church leaders in several cities and spoke at a thriving but unofficial house church in Shanghai—with the knowledge, if not the blessing, of authorities and leaders of the officially sanctioned Protestant body, the China Christian Council (CCC). House-church congregations independent from the ccc have been harassed in some parts of China. But members of independent congregations now number in the millions, and they are multiplying steadily.

• The evangelist also met privately in Shanghai with ailing 86-year-old Wang Mingdao, one of the best-known churchmen in modern Chinese church history. “Be faithful unto death,” admonished Wang, who spent years in prison for his faith and is revered by many independent house-church pastors. The fact that he received Graham—a guest of the CCC—made the evangelist acceptable in the eyes of many house-church leaders and could, analysts theorize, cast the evangelist as a bridge builder between the ccc and the independents.

No Altar Calls

Graham preached to overflow crowds at Beijing Christian Church in the capital’s Chongwenmen district, at Mu-en (“Bathed in Grace”) Church and Pure Heart Church in Shanghai, and at pastor Samuel Lamb’s booming 1,000-member house church in Guangzhou. The Mu-en Church borrowed an elementary school next door to help accommodate the crowd of 3,000. There were no altar calls, but pastors told of persons who had received Christ in the services, and CBS Television aired the account of a university student who visited the Beijing church to hear Graham and said she had become a believer as a result.

The evangelist met with religious and government leaders in all the cities, and he addressed university and other academic gatherings in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai. Faculty and students alike quizzed him about spiritual and moral issues. A department head said Graham’s appearance at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing was the first time Christianity was ever discussed seriously there.

In his meetings with political and academic leaders, the evangelist explained the meaning of the Christian faith. He repeatedly urged his listeners to make room for moral and spiritual renewal in China’s modernization program and to look on believers as assets in that regard. Addressing the question of world peace, he declared it could come only as individuals and nations turn to God.

In Huaiyin, as thousands lined the streets to watch, the Grahams toured the former Presbyterian medical-mission complex where Ruth Graham’s late father, L. Nelson Bell (a founder of CHRISTIANITY TODAY), was a surgeon for 25 years. Both the original hospital building and the house Dr. Bell built for his family are still standing. At a nearby church that Mrs. Graham knew as a child, a pastor, who, when not in prison, has been preaching since 1936, told of rapid Christian growth in the area and said his own church is packed three times on Sunday.

Progress And Problems

In Nanjing, Graham visited Amity Press, a two-year-old facility financed by the United Bible Societies and dedicated primarily to Bible publishing. It has printed and distributed 280,000 Bibles so far, said a spokesman, and was in the midst of another press run of 40,000 during the Graham visit. Many of the Bibles are sold at book tables operated by the churches and at CCC offices.

Ten years ago, every church in China was closed, with most pastors and leaders languishing in prison or labor camps. Since 1979, more than 4,000 Protestant churches have reopened, and there are thousands of “meeting points” (homes or other locations), all under CCC auspices. Official figures place adult baptized believers in CCC congregations at four million, but privately, leaders acknowledge a much greater constituency. Additionally, millions of believers belong to independent house churches. Some researchers in the West, including David Barrett, estimate as many as 40 million Christians in China.

A major problem, say leaders, is the graying of the pastors. There now are 12 Protestant seminaries in China, with 600 students, a third of them women (who are barred from ministry as pastors)—far too few to replace the ranks of the elderly and service the burgeoning church. Fears are expressed privately about the risk of doctrinal error spreading among untrained lay leaders (although observers say 90 percent of CCC clergy are theologically conservative).

In the face of such challenges, the visit of Billy Graham was a timely one, ventured one pastor, who was confident that somehow the evangelist has helped to build a bridge for the church into China’s future.

By Edward E. Plowman in China.

NEWS

NATIONAL ELECTIONS

The ill-fated Pat Robertson run for the White House weakened the notion of a monolithic Christian voting bloc. However, a new CHRISTIANITY TODAY survey suggests that while there is political diversity among Christians, Republicans and Democrats could make political hay of several issues where evangelicals are united. For that reason, Christians will be watching both parties as they set their platforms at their respective conventions later this summer.

In a random survey mailed to 749 CT subscribers, 401 readers responded to a variety of issues likely to come before both parties during the platform process. The 54 percent response rate (indicating a 95 percent confidence level) is the highest ever achieved from a CT survey.

Education

According to the survey, CT subscribers are united on most educational issues. The majority want creationism taught along with evolution in public schools (74 percent), more religion in textbooks (80 percent), and for government to take a stronger hand in improving the quality of public education (90 percent). An overwhelming majority (86 percent) also oppose school-based health clinics that distribute birth control under any circumstance.

Responses are mixed for school prayer and sex education:

• 82 percent support allowing voluntary prayer in schools.

• 49 percent do not want institutionalized prayer in public schools, while 32 percent favor it. (When two percentages are listed it reflects a significant number of undecided responses.)

• 42 percent want to see mandatory sex-education courses ended, and 36 percent would favor keeping them in the schools.

Aids

Respondents are strongly unified on issues surrounding AIDS, with overwhelming majorities supporting more public education on AIDS (86 percent), more federal money allocated to AIDS research (72 percent), more emphasis on abstinence and fidelity as preventative measures (98 percent), and mandatory testing for prison inmates/immigrants/hospital patients (76 percent), and marriage-license applicants (77 percent).

On other AIDS-related issues:

• 63 percent oppose focusing more on the condom to help prevent the spread of AIDS.

• 51 percent support restrictions on homosexual rights as a way to stop the spread of AIDS.

• 47 percent support beginning AIDS education for children in the early school grades; 27 percent oppose it.

Social Issues

A clear consensus emerges around abortion, with strong majorities supporting a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother (76 percent) and favoring a ban on federal funding of abortion and abortion-related activities (77 percent). Strong majorities also support more federal money to clean up the environment (73 percent) and the appointment of conservative judges (79 percent).

Responses to other social issues are not as one-sided:

• 65 percent oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.

• 57 percent oppose including sexual preference in anti-discrimination legislation.

• 35 percent support federal day-care legislation, while 33 percent oppose it.

• 43 percent would like to see the federal government take a stronger role in mediating racial tensions in urban areas; 60 percent want the church to take a stronger role.

Defense

As a group, CT subscribers tend to be less conservative on defense issues than on social issues:

• 61 percent oppose increasing federal spending on defense.

• 44.5 percent oppose making substantial cuts in the overall defense budget; 37.5 percent favor the cuts.

• 42 percent favor pursuing rapid deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), while 27 percent oppose it.

Most subscribers (72 percent) support more nuclear disarmament treaties with the Soviets, and a majority (54 percent) oppose pursuing a U.S. unilateral disarmament proposal. In a theological breakdown, those calling themselves fundamentalists are least likely to support more nuclear disarmament treaties with the Soviets and a unilateral U.S. disarmament.

Economics

While the overwhelming majority (85 percent) of CT subscribers want to see a mandated balanced federal budget, there is little clear-cut consensus on other economic issues:

• 38 percent support and 38 percent oppose raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit.

• 35 percent support and 40 percent oppose reforming social security and Medicare to reduce the federal deficit.

• 26 percent support and 34 percent oppose using foreign trade barriers to reduce the trade deficit.

• 29 percent support and 35 percent oppose having the federal government take a strong role in regulating the stock market.

Half of the respondents oppose cutting defense spending to reduce the deficit, and almost half (48 percent) would like to see the government provide more low-interest loans and more subsidies to farmers.

Foreign Policy

There is somewhat less agreement on foreign policy issues as well. Strong majorities support the U.S. initiating a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians (71 percent) and maintaining a military presence in the Persian Gulf (71 percent). Respondents oppose (41 percent to 22 percent) increased U.S. support for the way Israel is handling tension in the Gaza Strip.

Respondents are more divided on other areas of foreign policy:

• 47 percent support and 25 percent oppose military aid to the Nicaraguan Resistance (contras).

• 57 percent oppose cutting off all aid to the contras. 44 percent do not want the U.S. to take less of an intervening role internationally.

• 55 percent want the U.S. to work harder at fighting communism around the world.

• 39 percent support and 36 percent oppose increasing economic sanctions against South Africa.

• 52 percent oppose lifting all sanctions against South Africa.

Voting Patterns

CT subscribers appear to take their voting responsibilities seriously. The overwhelming majority (92 percent) are registered voters, all of whom voted in the last presidential election. Voter turnout among subscribers in the last presidential primary was about three times the national average. However, few (13 percent) consider themselves to be political activists, and slightly less than one-fourth do not consider themselves to be “single issues voters.”

By Kim A. Lawton.

Illuminating The Old Testament

Jesus said the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (the headings for the major sections of the Hebrew Bible) spoke of him. He was, in effect, saying that the whole Old Testament testified to him.

He also said that we should study these books to learn about him. But for many Christians, the Old Testament is a dark corner of Scripture, far less familiar and understandable than the New Testament. However, some recent studies and commentaries shed light into this corner.

The Law (Pentateuch)

Joyce G. Baldwin, who has written excellent Tyndale commentaries on Esther, Daniel, and Haggai-Malachi (all from the Persian period), turns to the Patriarchs. In The Message of Genesis 12–50, (InterVarsity, $7.95), she makes judicious use of background studies, scholarly research, and archaeology to illumine the text. Writing in clear prose, she keeps supporting details in the footnotes. The exposition will be useful to layperson and pastor alike, especially as a resource for study groups.

Creation and Blessing, by Allen P. Ross (Baker, $29.95), uncovers the inner fabric of Genesis. Outer passages (25:19–34 and 35:1–22), which frame the main narrative of Jacob’s flight from and his return to the land of promise, tell of Rebekah’s and Rachel’s struggles in childbirth. From these edges, the narrative steps down to the central story (30:22–43) of Rachel’s and the flocks’ fertility, which are the fulfillment of God’s promise to bless Jacob. The structure of many of the stories in the Jacob narrative give order and focus interest on the author’s intent. Ross provides a wealth of suggestions and clues that show why this early history has become so imprinted upon the mind of God’s people: Moses’ writing is skillful, unforgettable.

The Prophets

Carol L. and Eric M. Meyers’ volume on Haggai, Zechariah 1–8 in the Anchor Bible (Doubleday, $20.00) uses the archaeological and historical background of the Persian period to good advantage. The authors see unity in these ten chapters, arguing that the similarity of Haggai 1:1 and Zechariah 7:1 provides a frame for the eight sections, each headed by dates between August 520 B.C. and December 518 B.C. Their translation is accompanied by ample notes and comment on each passage (50 pages on Zechariah’s fourth vision in 4:1–14).

For theological perspective, consult Joel & Malachi: A Promise of Hope; A Call to Obedience, by Graham S. Ogden and Richard R. Deutsch (Eerdmans, $7.95), and Habakkuk & Zephaniah: Wrath and Mercy, by Maria Eszenyei Szeles (Eerdmans, $7.95), both in the International Theological Commentary. In an approach typical of this series, Szeles zeros in on Hebrew words that carry the theological freight in expounding Habakkuk’s struggle with God’s use of evil for his glory. Her comments do what more commentaries should do: display God’s character rather than bury it under critical guesswork.

In the work on Jonah in Hosea-Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary (Word, $24.95), author Douglas Stuart highlights the correspondence between God’s control of the sea and Jesus’ control over the storms of Galilee. In the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, by T. Desmond Alexander, Bruce K. Waltke, and David W. Baker (InterVarsity, $14.95), Alexander’s helpful notes point to the structure of Jonah 1, which focuses attention on Jonah’s fear and the sailors’ fear. Both commentators make extensive use of the Hebrew text, yet their work is accessible to lay students.

The Psalms And Writings

The Psalms are skillfully crafted writings, as Mark S. Smith shows in Psalms: The Divine Journey (Paulist, $4.95). Essentially a brief introduction to the psalmist’s language and his world—especially Jerusalem—the book pauses occasionally to look at structural details.

Psalms are for singing, and John Eaton describes their music (instruments, singing, notation, etc.) in The Psalms Come Alive: Capturing the Voice & Art of Israel’s Songs (InterVarsity, $6.95). He shows us music as an offering to God, as communion with God, not as mere “preliminaries” or entertainment. Similar avenues are explored with the other arts: poetry, architecture, dance, and drama. This study will enrich the life of the worshiper and bring greater glory to God, particularly in churches where psalms are the fabric of worship.

John E. Hartley’s Job, New International Commentary of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, $26.95), clarifies the book’s message by highlighting its dramatic framework, including its sharp contrasts, and by summarizing six prominent themes. After commenting on each speech, Hartley summarizes its aim. His effort, however, is marred by his attempt to complete the shortened third cycle of speeches by Job and his friends by rearranging text.

With exegetical and theological expertise, Raymond B. Dillard interacts with the text and the work of other scholars in 2 Chronicles, Word Biblical Commentary (Word, $24.95). A brief introduction reflects Dillard’s high view of Scripture and his view of the writer of Chronicles as “a reliable and trustworthy historian.” He provides four essays to introduce major sections of text in which he outlines the theology, purpose, and compositional techniques of the biblical author. In these Dillard deals with differences between the history reported in the books of Samuel and Kings and that in Chronicles, and concludes, “The Chronicler was not a newspaper journalist. He was a teacher and theologian, a painter rather than a photographer. There are no uninterpreted facts.”

By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Compromising Positions

On Thin Ice: A Religion Reporter’s Memoir, by Roy Howard Beck (Bristol, 234 pp.; $11.95, paper). Reviewed byFred Barnes, a senior editor of The New Republic.

The first thing to know about Roy Howard Beck, a Washington correspondent for Booth Newspapers, is what he is not. Beck, 39, is not a conservative, a Reaganite, a follower of Pat Robertson, or a covert agent of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Nor is his memoir of six years (1981–87) as associate editor of the United Methodist Reporter—a respected weekly with circulation of 600,000—a right-wing screed. On Thin Ice is an extraordinarily compelling and painfully honest account of how the Christian establishment in America has lost its moral power, and how it reacted when Beck chronicled that loss in article after article.

The problem is not so much that Christian leaders, particularly Methodists, overdosed on left-wing politics, though Beck says conservative critics of the mainline Protestant churches are partially correct about this. The problem is deeper. Most church leaders are decent, fair-minded, and compassionate, Beck says, but they have allowed themselves to be compromised. They have permitted denominational officials—notably those at 475 Riverside Drive in New York, and the National Council of Churches—to pull them in morally questionable directions. Worse, Beck says, many have failed the test of sexual fidelity by indulging in extramarital relations or homosexuality. It is small wonder their flocks have become disillusioned, and thinner.

Loss Of Innocence

Beck was naïve, and innocent, when set loose to cover religious news, and thus he was all the more shocked at what he found. In the book, his tone is not prosecutorial, but his indictment is unequivocal. In fact, his case on sexual infidelity was too explosive for the Reporter. It spiked a story he wrote on the subject.

“Increasingly it was appearing that one couldn’t fully understand the complete measure of critics’ dissatisfaction with national church leadership without knowing a lot about the sexual conduct of the people in whom they had lost trust,” Beck writes. So obsessed were leaders with fighting injustice and feeding the hungry that “the issue of personal sexual morality just hadn’t seemed a high priority.” Yet it must be, Beck says. “The lack of sexual fidelity among some in the church certainly was not the only or main reason for the church’s lack of moral power in American society. But it was one. Without fundamental ingredients of discipleship, such as fidelity in thought, deed, and relationship, how could Christians hope to challenge the frailties of the world’s principalities?”

To buttress his argument, Beck recounts “rumors” and “reports” and “tales,” and uses unnamed sources. But he also cites specific examples, on-the-record comments, and his personal experiences as a reporter. He makes his case persuasively and fairly. Some will question whether he should have written about sexual lifestyles in the first place. But why should this subject be taboo, even if raising it prompts criticism of church leaders? It shouldn’t be.

Critics’ Reaction

Beck takes offense at the Christian Right’s habit of making wild charges. And he says the attack on the National Council of Churches by CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1983, which repeated many of the Christian Right’s charges of leftist dominance at the NCC, was “savage” and “overwrought.” Still, though Beck had written defenses of the NCC, he thought the CBS charges worth checking out. He found some to be true. The NCC excused abuses of left-wing governments and played up those of right-wing governments. Furthermore, its officials sometimes lied, Beck adds.

The result is a critical loss of trust. “Trust is everything when a person puts money into an offering plate,” he says. “People needed credible evidence that they could feel good about the tiny amounts of their money going to the NCC, and they wanted to know that all their offerings were being used well.” They have not gotten that assurance.

Not surprisingly, church officials proved unreceptive to Beck’s brand of investigative reporting. In 1981, he covered a conference on South Africa sponsored by mainline Protestant groups. He was surprised at the calls for violence, and he later discovered that the conference was controlled by identifiable American Communists. After his story appeared, Beck and his colleagues at the Reporter “were accused of stirring up right-wing anxiety and anticommunism, of engaging in guilt-by-association tactics and McCarthyism. Our critics just couldn’t understand how we could run a story that we knew would bring scorn on our church’s agencies and on the justice issue that we said we largely supported.”

Beck encountered still more flak in 1982 when he reported on a campaign to free a black former mayor of a Mississippi town. The campaign was backed by most mainline denominations and the NCC, but not by most blacks and liberals in Mississippi, including the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union. Church officials simply neglected to look into the facts of the case before becoming involved, Beck says. “Many church liberals often seemed like a mirror of the Reagan administration they hated so much. Preference for ideology and casualness with facts were frequent attributes of White House action that most infuriated those church leaders. It certainly infuriated me. Yet religious leaders seemed often to fight back with the same methods.”

Just before he returned to secular journalism in 1987, Beck ran into a friend who told of a crime wave in Ghana. The criminals were mostly Christians. “What a warning for the United States, where fundamental character traits are treated carelessly!” Beck says. There is an “absolute need for intellectual integrity in Christian living.… Without it, dishonesty creeps in under many guises.” If Christian leaders cut moral corners in one aspect of their lives, they undercut everything else they do. And their moral influence dissolves.

Also Reviewd in this section:

Public Schools: An Evangelical Apprasial, by frank C. Nelson

School Based Clinics and Other Crictical Issues in Public Education, edited by Barrett L. Moshacker

Democracy and the Renewal of public Education, edited by Eichared John Neuhaus

Everything to Gain: Making the most Rest of your life. by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

Book Briefss: Tecent Old Testament Commentaries

Many Diagnoses, Few Remedies

Public Schools: An Evangelical Appraisal, by Frank C. Nelsen (Revell, 223 pp.; $13.95, hardcover); School Based Clinics and Other Critical Issues in Public Education, edited by Barrett L. Mosbacker (Crossway, 225pp.; $8.95, paper); Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education, edited by Richard John Neuhaus (Eerdmans, 170 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Raymond Ide, assistant professor of English at Lancaster Bible College in Pennsylvania.

What’s wrong with the public school system? What can be done to cure its ills? Unfortunately, most of the writers of these three new volumes excel at diagnosis rather than remedy. Nevertheless, all are worth consulting.

In Public Schools: An Evangelical Appraisal, Frank Nelsen, an associate professor of education at the University of Wisconsin, laments the fact that “the public school in this country has become a totally secular institution.” Yet he remains optimistic. He believes Christians who teach in public schools can reform the educational system by asserting their views more often and by joining other Christians in a coalition to confront the National Education Association.

Every now and then Nelsen peeks out of his ivory foxhole to take a few shots at the more strident critics of the school system. He criticizes those who advocate opting out of reading classes because of offensive reading materials for their “minor” and “fragmented” objections. As an alternative, he suggests bringing a Christian literary critic into the church youth group to give students a Christian perspective on objectionable books.

Vouchers, which provide government money for parents to use at the educational system of their choice, and tuition tax credits also come under Nelsen’s fire. Those plans, he concludes, will “only further damage an already burdened and fragile public school system … which has been provided by God for the general welfare of all who live in this country.”

In his attempt to give a balanced view, however, Nelsen often undercuts his own argument. He sometimes wanders from the subject of education, particularly in his chapter on moral relativism, in which he devotes most of his time to a critique of relativistic approaches to law and even the new physics. Many of the essayists in the other two books, I suspect, would find Nelsen’s analysis insufficient in light of “the rising tide of mediocrity” in the public school system.

More Than Sex Education

School Based Clinics and Other Critical Issues in Public Education is a worthy volume of essays that tackles the problem of moral education in schools. Historian Allan Carlson, president of the Rockford Institute, asks why the sexual codes of the West, which had remained intact for more than 1,900 years, crumbled so quickly to the moral revolution of the 1960s. R. V. Young, professor of English at North Carolina State University, examines why we have produced a generation of nonreaders and wonders if most elementary reading programs are essentially junk food for the mind. Jacqueline Kasun, professor of economics at Humboldt State, raises the question of whether sex education can be taught in a moral vacuum. And educator Russell Kirk ponders whether modern schooling has been reduced to a trivial pursuit, mindless of wisdom and virtue.

A few solutions are offered. Attorney John Whitehead tells Christians to get their homes in order; church elders should be visiting families and asking parents whether they are instructing their children in the things of the Lord.

But School Based Clinics goes beyond merely analyzing the problems of teenage pregnancies and the lack of moral education in the schools. Its writers give solid solutions to strengthen parental involvement in the schools, so that curriculum in general and sex education courses in particular can be changed.

No Consensus

Democracy and the Renewal of Public Education presents another collection of diagnoses and remedies for public education, offered at a conference sponsored by the Center on Religion and Society in New York. Suggestions range from fine-tuning the system to dismantling it. Richard Baer of Cornell University favors fundamental changes, complaining that the public school system is a government monopoly with a captive audience. People are kidding themselves if they think a secular education can be religiously neutral, he writes. He proposes tuition vouchers as a means to break the monopoly.

Perhaps the most interesting essay is the case made by James Skillen of the Association for Public Justice that the present educational system rests upon contradictory assumptions. The first assumption, Greek and Roman in origin, teaches that the government is responsible for educating its citizens. The second assumption, rooted in biblical tradition, recognizes the primacy of parental authority in the education of children. The parental model held sway until the advent of public schools in the 1840s, when the governmental model took hold.

Also included in this book is a good synopsis of Paul Vitz’s now-famous study on the depiction of religion and traditional values in American school textbooks.

Democracy and Renewal is more suited to the professional educator than the other two books, which are more accessible to lay readers. Nevertheless, its readable last chapter gives a lively and witty synopsis of the conference participants’ discussion, which held controversies as well as agreements. Though they failed to reach a consensus, their diversity of opinion is useful. Readers may benefit from examining this chapter first, prompting a closer reading of the essays themselves and a deeper exploration into this crucial subject of schooling in America.

Life After The White House

Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter (Random House, 198 pp.; $16.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Wesley G. Pippert, who covered the Carter White House and both presidential campaigns for United Press International.

When Jimmy Carter was President, a report was published that said he would become a missionary after leaving the White House. Though he denied the report at the time and did not become a foreign missionary, Carter has indeed committed much of his life after office to serving others. Most notably, he has often donned a carpenter’s apron to help build low-cost housing for the poor.

In Everything to Gain, he and his wife, Rosalynn, share insights on spending one’s later years happily and usefully. Their comments take the form of a practical how-to book. Yet their content is more remarkable than the typical “to-do” list. After all, the authors are far from the typical couple.

The Carters offer details of postpresidential life. They tell how they found the hard work of finishing the attic of their house by themselves to be good therapy; how they seldom watch the evening news on television; and how Jimmy, punctual to a fault, celebrated his wife’s birthday (which he had almost forgotten) by writing her a note promising never again to scold her for being tardy.

Bibles In China

An Excerpt

“During Vice Premier Deng’s visit to Washington in 1979, we had a long discussion about the role of Christian missionaries in his country.… We were sitting at the table during the state dinner, and I finally told him that I had some requests I would like to make. ‘I hope your people will be permitted to have Bibles and that freedom of religion can be guaranteed for them again. And also, there are a lot of missionaries who would like to return to China to work in education, health care, agriculture, or wherever you would prefer.’ Deng thought for a few minutes and then said, ‘I will consider your first two requests, but we will never again permit foreign religious workers to come to China. They interfere, in the daily lives of those they profess to serve, and they also attempt to substitute Western values for those of our people. Even Chinese Christians would not want the foreigners to come back.’

Now, in Shanghai more than two years later, we found four large Protestant churches and one more spacious Catholic cathedral.… Bibles were now plentiful. ‘As a matter of fact,’ said one Chinese Anglican priest, ‘recently when we ran short of the special paper for Bibles, the government helped us to locate and purchase what we needed.”

—from Everything to Gain

by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

Faithatwork

Their most fascinating revelations deal with how the Carters integrated their faith into their lives. Rosalynn writes in a section concerning their handling of defeat in the 1980 election:

“ ‘I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand why God wanted us to lose the election,’ I would say. Jimmy was always more mature in his Christian attitude than I was. He would say, ‘Do you think people are robots that God controls from heaven?’ or ‘You don’t really think God orders things like this, do you? It’s hard for us to accept the fact that our priorities are not the same as God’s. We attach too much importance to things like popularity, wealth, and political success. To Him problems that often seem most important to us at the time are really not very significant. But God trusts us to make the best use of the time we have, to try to live like Jesus and to make our lives meaningful and beneficial to others no matter where we are.’ I did finally learn to live with the results of the 1980 election, but I would never pretend that it came easily.”

As interesting and revealing as this and other examples (see excerpt, “Bibles in China”) may be, however, there remains one book for Jimmy Carter to write, one that he ought to write: a systematic explanation of how he integrated his faith and his presidential policies. That is the Carter book I want to read.

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

On the way to self-indulgence?

The quest for freedom is becoming personal rather than political. It is a quest for self-hood, and its outcome is no better. When self-denial goes out of fashion, self-fulfillment takes its place.

—Kitty Muggeridge in Gazing on Truth

Strange bedfellows

In spite of the conflict between them, the two ideologies that officially operate on the two sides of the Iron Curtain have this in common: they are both atheist. The one attempts without success to enforce atheism in the private as well as the public sector. The other permits belief in God as an option for private life but excludes it from any controlling role in public life.

—Lesslie Newbigin in Foolishness to the Greeks

Too much talk

There is danger … in doing too many interviews. Too much talk can make you fatheaded: You get the idea that everything you say is worth being recorded and that you are in some sense a wise man and an interesting person. The more an author thinks of himself in that way, the less attentive he’s going to be to the business of trying to transcribe reality. We really are servants, basically, of reality, aren’t we? We’re trying to get a little piece of it in print.

—John Updike, quoted in U.S. News & World Report (Oct. 20, 1986)

The only stages of faith

Fowler’s excellent work [Stages of Faith] would be more palatable if it had been entitled “stages of the faith experience” or “stages of religious development.” In the Christian view, there are only two stages of faith: “No” and “Yes” in relation to Jesus Christ—not a mode of knowing or feeling, but a mode of believing.

—Arden K. Barden in a paper, “Spiritual Aging”

Like a river inglorious

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream sometimes is filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shooting, and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians and journalists are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

—Linda Ellerbee, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor

Misplaced faith

[Shirley] MacLaine is at least consistent: she argues that if your reality isn’t so great—if you’re poor or unemployed—you have only yourself to blame. You have victimized yourself by not living up to your potential. If a Republican said this, he’d be attacked as cruel and selfish, rationalizing his unwillingness to sacrifice for others. When New Agers say it, they congratulate each other on their openness to new ideas and faith in individual potential.

—Richard Blow in The New Republic (Jan. 25, 1988)

Never been there

Perhaps to be able to explain suffering is the clearest indication of never having suffered. Sin, suffering, and sanctification are not problems of the mind, but facts of life—mysteries that awaken all other mysteries until the heart rests in God.

—Oswald Chambers in Christian Discipline, Vol. 1

Lost language

I really detest political-speak. Words like “the people,” for example, have lost their meaning. We have to fight against fossilized language. Not only in the case of the Marxists who have petrified the language most, but the liberals too. “Democracy” is another such word. The Soviets say they’re democratic; the Americans say they’re democratic; El Salvador does, and Mexico too. Everyone who can organize an election says he’s democratic. “Independence” is another one. These are words that have come to mean very little. They’re disconnected; they don’t describe the reality they represent.

—Latin American novelist Gabriel García Márquez in the New York Times Book Review (Feb. 21, 1988)

Beyond the cocoon

Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much. But consider what one scientist has called “the butterfly effect”: even a butterfly moving its wings has an effect on galaxies thousands of light-years away.

—Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow

“In 25 words or less …” That is the I phrase we heard often on returning to the United States after our sojourn in Egypt. Many colleagues and friends wanted to know about the church there. They were interested in longer, detailed accounts, but they also wanted our dominant impressions about the church and its future.

Talking among ourselves, we realized that the following aspects of church life in Egypt struck us more than any others:

• The age of the Egyptian church. Egyptian Christians look to a heritage that extends behind them nearly 2,000 years. They are conscious of the fact that Moses and the parents of Jesus walked their land. They care about and are strengthened by history. As one Christian told us, “You Americans look up at a rocket and feel secure. I stand beneath a pyramid and feel secure.”

• The surprising residue of colonialism and imperialism. We noted one especially striking aspect about the surrounding Islamic culture. Perhaps responding to centuries of Western (that is, “Christian”) dominance, some Muslims we talked to hardly spoke as if they were part of the country’s majority. They had what seemed to be an undue fear of the power of the Christian minority in their midst. And they credited Christians in the West with much more political influence than we actually possess.

• The fervent interest in the Bible. Egyptian Protestants have long taught and read the Bible assiduously. But we were surprised how much the Bible is now prized in Coptic Orthodox circles, with Bible studies encouraging lay people to read the Bible on their own. Egyptian Christians of all stripes place great trust in Scripture. Bookstores are filled with theologically conservative literature. Liberalism is hard to find.

• The value of monasticism within the church. Western Protestants tend to understand monasticism as a way of life isolated from the church and the wider world, and to see monks as persons worried only about themselves and God. With the Coptic Orthodox church, in which all bishops are monks, we saw a monasticism that clearly feeds and challenges the wider life of that body. Even Orthodox lay spirituality has a distinct contemplative air. And Egyptian Christians as a rule—Protestants and Catholics included—are more mystically oriented than we Westerners.

• The optimism of a church under pressure. Quite frankly, some Christians gave us a discouraging picture of their life in Egypt. We appreciated their candor and realize that their frustrations often present a profound challenge to faith. At the same time, we can only admire their vitality. Many manage to see fundamentalist Islam as an opportunity; they believe it puts off moderate Muslims and ironically opens them to a more serious consideration of religious alternatives such as Christianity.

• The Egyptian Christians do not dichotomize evangelism and social responsibility. The Egyptians we talked to evidenced a marked holism in their theology. We did not see evangelism and social concern pitted against one another as they sometimes are in Western theological conversations. This is probably due to an Oriental penchant for holism rather than dichotomy; the immense and undeniable poverty facing Egyptian Christians; and the fact that social work is one of the few doors of witness wide open to them.

There can be no last word on any church, least of all from outsiders who drop in for three brief weeks. But for the reasons listed above, we came away with a guarded optimism about the future of the church in Egypt. The youth, in Sunday schools and Bible studies, are getting more and better nurture than before. It is stunning to see the caliber of young Christians devoting themselves to low-key, demanding, but unglamorous ministries, especially development work with the indigent. And this is occurring in a culture where educated people are not expected to get their hands dirty.

In the future, then, the Christian witness in Egypt may be smaller in numbers, but it will probably be greater in quality. The intensity and determination to evangelize openly may also increase, and that in turn will probably mean more cultural pressure on Christians. If anything, the church’s life is likely to become harder. But as surely as prayer is effective, these people will not be unprepared.

Confessing Christ in the heart of Islam.

Pressure, oppression, and discrimination may be good for the faith. And total freedom and official blessing may not be good for Christians.

In countries that take a hands-off approach, or where government and church have become cozy, either the gospel is transformed into cheery moralism or the church is consigned to irrelevance.

But put the pressure on—communist, Islamic, racist, or fascist pressures—and prayer revives and faith grows. In Egypt, the keystone of Islamic power politics, Christianity has not had a culturally favorable climate since A.D. 642. Yet the church that traces its roots to a visit from Saint Mark is very much alive.

To learn about Christian life under Islam, the Christianity Today Institute sent two scholars and two staff members to the land of the Pharaohs:

• James K. Hoffmeier is associate professor of Bible, theology, and archaeology at Wheaton College (Ill.). He holds the Ph.D. in Egyptian religion from the University of Toronto, where he also completed an M.A. in Egyptian archaeology. Hoffmeier has participated twice in the East Karnak Expedition.

• J. Dudley Woodberry, assistant professor of Islamic studies, Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Mission, holds the Ph.D. in Islamic studies from Harvard University. Woodberry has lived in the Middle East for 12 years and does consulting work for businesses, orienting people who will be living in the Muslim world.

• Terry C. Muck is executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He holds the Ph.D. in comparative religion from Northwestern University. Muck wrote about the influx into America of Islam and other world religions in “The Mosque Next Door” (CT, Feb. 19, 1988).

• Rodney R. Clapp, the major author of this report, is associate editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He holds degrees in journalism from Oklahoma State University and the Wheaton Graduate School, where he has also studied theology and ethics. A keen observer of religious movements, Clapp is coauthor with Robert Webber of the forthcoming book People of the Truth: The Power of the Worshiping Community in the Modern World (Harper & Row.)

A piano is shoved into a corner, black music stands bunched haphazardly on one side of the room. With 21 students, we sit at small, kidney-shaped desks, listening to the American lecture. Some students have come after working all day at their jobs; others have come after another day of waiting for a government post that has yet to materialize.

Some students are not far beyond their university days; others are approaching middle age. One woman has with her two sons, about ages 10 and 12. Both boys sleep: one with his head against the wall; the other’s head cranes backwards over the top of his chair, with the mouth wide open. He makes a faint sucking sound.

The lecturer is Jack Lorimer, a Presbyterian missionary to Egypt of some 35 years. Lorimer, sixtyish, with a silver mustache, speaks in Arabic. Only a few words are decipherable to an English-speaking listener. But when Lorimer writes on the blackboard, he writes in English rather than Arabic. Names like “Clement” and “Demetrius” appear, and the tempo of the class picks up.

It is no wonder. These students are discussing some pivotal figures in early church history. They are learning about battles against the most pernicious heresies orthodox Christianity confronted, such as Gnosticism and Docetism; and about stupendous intellectual attempts to fit Platonism to Christianity. Most important, they are learning about these things where they happened: in Alexandria of Egypt, their native city.

It is no exaggeration to say that Christianity would be an entirely different religion if Alexandria had never existed. With its famous library, it was a Hellenic intellectual center long before the advent of Christianity. And it was once the premier Jewish center in the world, the site where, more than 150 years before Christ, scholars made the Septuagint, the seminal Greek translation of the Old Testament.

But the strategically situated seaport city was even more crucial to the development of Christian orthodoxy. From it sprung the Alexandrian Catechetical School, guided by the likes of Bishop Demetrius. From it the acidic Clement fought Gnostics and denounced philosophical opponents as “old shoes, worn out except for the tongue.”

The Alexandrian-born Origen followed Demetrius and Clement. His name meant “born of Horus,” but his parents converted to Christianity before or soon after his birth, and Origen grew to be the greatest Christian philosopher before Augustine. Hardly less significant was Athanasius the Great, bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, who stood “against the world” to defend the full divinity and humanity of Jesus.

The Alexandrian Christian heritage is alive in Alexandria. But the world no longer looks to it for theological guidance. Today’s seminaries are mostly small and unassuming, like the one we are visiting. It is an extension of the Cairo Coptic Evangelical Seminary, and Lorimer makes the three-hour drive from Cairo once a week to teach Alexandrians theology, their theology, in the borrowed music room of an American school.

The door stays open at the back of the room. The cool Mediterranean breeze drifts inside. And midway through the class, out of the dark, so does a nearby chanting. The voice is amplified, smooth, clear, and bell-like; it goes on for a minute or two. Lorimer keeps on lecturing. The students keep on taking notes. They are accustomed to the cries of the muezzin, cries calling to prayer the Islamic faithful, at least 90 percent of the people of Alexandria.

Living Christianly In Islamic Egypt

The Middle Eastern resurgence of Islam is one of the most significant religio-political developments of the 1980s. Muslim extremists have been behind several of the major news stories of the decade: the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the successful assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascendence to control of Iran, the continuing Iran-Iraq war, and Colonel Qaddafi’s exploits.

Commenting on the strength of the Islamic resurgence, one scholar has noted, “In no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders command the degree of religious belief and the extent of religious participation that remain common in Muslim lands; more to the point, they do not exercise, nor even claim, the kind of political role that in Muslim lands is not only normal but is widely seen as natural.”

The political involvement of Islam seems “natural” to Muslims because Muhammad bound the successful government of society to the successful practice of religion. He expected government itself to lead people in the good Muslim life and to prepare them for the next world.

It would be unfair not to note that many Muslims around the world (among them a good number of the “secularized” faithful) now insist on a separation of faith and government. But the continuing intimacy between religion and the state among conservative Muslims makes Islam the major force to be reckoned with in the Middle East.

In that ferment, Egypt is central. Although steeped in ancient pharaonic and Christian history, it has been Islamic since Muhammad’s followers invaded in the seventh century—the era of Islam’s birth. Today there are stricter Islamic countries—such as Iran and Saudi Arabia—but none that exerts as much regional influence as Egypt. As scholar Daniel Pipes writes, “Egypt is the most important single country for Islamic political action in the twentieth century.”

That is the case for at least five reasons:

• Egypt’s relatively open society, hospitality, and central location attract foreign scholars and journalists. These qualities make Egypt (85 to 90 percent Muslim) a vital link between the Arab and non-Arab worlds.

• Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president from 1952 to 1970, broke ties with the Western imperialism hated throughout the Arab countries. Nasser also maintained relative independence from his new ally, the Soviet Union. These moves, plus Nasser’s charisma, captured the allegiance of much of the Arab world, until the disastrous 1967 war with Israel stole his magic. Yet the respect for Egypt he established among Arabs lingers to this day.

• Cairo, Egypt’s largest and capital city, is home to Al-Azhar, the international university of Islam and the oldest continuously operating institution of higher learning in the world.

• The first mass fundamentalist Islamic movment, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in Egypt in 1928.

• Egypt’s precarious peace with Israel holds Arab-Israeli power in balance. If Egypt converts to radical Islam, that balance could be destroyed.

Just how much of a threat are radical Muslims to Egypt’s stability, and to the well-being of Christians in that country? A surface survey of recent events might make them appear very threatening. In 1980, the government declared Shari’a, the sacred law of Islam, not merely a main source of civil law, but the main source of civil law. And in 1981, the Institute of Islamic Economics, in line with a strict interpretation of the Qur’an, introduced interest-free banking.

How The Faith Survived

The ubiquitous minarets that dot the skyline of any Egyptian city, coupled with the towering granite obelisks standing in ancient temple precincts, virtually obscure the fact that for many centuries Egypt was a Christian country. Although overshadowed architecturally, that Christian legacy is still alive. How has the Christian faith, so thoroughly extinguished in the rest of North Africa, survived in Egypt? A look at its religious history may help answer this question.

3000–525 B.C. The polytheistic religion of Egypt, with its major deities Ra (the sun), Ptah, Amun, and Osiris, dominates Egypt. Despite several periods in which Egypt is controlled by outsiders (Hyksos 1700–1550, Libyans 945–715, Nubians 715–664, and Assyrians 664), her religious traditions are left intact. In fact, the outsiders for the most part accommodate themselves to Egyptian customs.

525 B.C.–A.D. 395 The Persians, followed by the Greeks and Romans, rule Egypt with little significant change to Egyptian religion—although, as historian Sir Idris Bell has commented, during the Roman era “traditional worship of Egypt was losing some of its vitality.” Into this milieu Christianity is introduced.

A.D. 33 During the feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit comes to inaugurate the church. Peter’s powerful sermon is heard by Egyptians present in Jerusalem (Acts 2:5, 9–11). Perhaps these are the first to take Christianity to Egypt.

A.D. 42 Saint Mark brings the gospel to Egypt, according to the Coptic Orthodox tradition. (This early date seems unlikely in view of Mark’s ambivalence about missionary service in A.D. 46–48, when traveling with Paul in Asia [Acts 13:13]).

A.D. 54 Apollos, the apostle from Alexandria, is found teaching in Ephesus, where he meets Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:24–28). His presence in Asia Minor suggests that the Egyptian church was already established in Alexandria.

A.D. 110–125 Christianity is growing in Egypt (as evidenced by a papyrus fragment dated in the early second century, which contains portions of John 18).

A.D. 190 Pantaenus, who a few decades earlier founded the famous catechetical school of Alexandria, dies. (According to Eusebius, he preached the gospel in India.)

A.D. 155–220 Clement of Alexandria, described as the first “Christian scholar,” becomes head of the Alexandrian school at the death of its founder in 190. A number of his works have survived, including “Exhortations to Conversion,” “Paedagogus,” and “Miscellanies.”

A.D. 202 Emperor Septimius Severus begins his persecution against Christians and Jews in Egypt, and an edict prohibiting proselytizing to Christianity is issued. These developments indicate Christianity is making significant inroads in Egypt.

A.D. 185–254 Origen, perhaps the most important figure in early Egyptian Christianity, succeeds his mentor Clement as principal of the Alexandrian school, a post he will hold for 28 years. This intellectual giant produces a number of significant works, including CONTRA CELSUM, a refutation of Celsus’ attack on Christianity. He is also considered to be the father of textual criticism.

A.D. 249–251 The Roman emperor Gaius Decius aims intense persecution at eradicating Christianity. Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria during this period, describes this persecution and implies that Christianity is “widespread in Egypt.” The consequence of the persecution is the spread of the faith. From 250–300, Christianity is a considerable force in Egypt, though the land remains largely pagan.

A.D. 251–356 Anthony emerges after 20 years as a desert hermit to found Egyptian monasticism.

A.D. 287–346 Pachomius founds communal monasticism. (Egypt’s monastic orders, like those elsewhere, have been largely responsible for preserving the Scriptures. Many of the manuscripts from Egypt’s monastaries were unceremoniously taken to Europe in the past two centuries.)

A.D. 303–305 The persecution of Roman emperor Diocletian is aimed at eradicating the “plague” of Christianity. The suffering is incredible. Nevertheless, Christianity becomes the predominant faith by 330.

A.D. 312 Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity.

A.D. 313 The “Edict of Milan” (issued jointly by Emperors Constantine and Licinius) gives official permission for Christian worship and provides for compensation to Christians for losses incurred in the previous decade.

A.D. 325 Council of Nicea meets to deal with a heresy originating with Alexandrian presbyter Arius, who denies the eternal pre-existence of Christ.

A.D. 296–373 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from 328, is the key figure in the debate against Arianism in Egypt.

A.D. 412–444 Cyril of Alexandria is the chief opponent of the Nestorians, who claim that Christ had two natures. Cyril argues for the unity of Christ’s nature, or monophysitism (the position still held in the Coptic Orthodox church). The fifth-century debate is, to a large extent, politically motivated as the Sees of Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople vie for preeminence. Out of this debate comes the Chalcedonian creed.

A.D. 642 The Arab-Islamic invasion makes Egypt predominantly Islamic. A wealthy, educated minority of Christians survives by paying heavy taxes to their overlords. (There are differing views of the nature of the invasion. Muslims try to play down accounts of brutality, persecution, and forced conversions, while the Coptic Orthodox underscore these.)

There are later periods of persecution under the Caliph el Hakim (996–1021) and by the Turks after 1517. (Our knowledge of Christianity in Egypt until the last century is hazy. It clung to its Coptic—that is, ancient Egyptian—liturgical tradition, while the language of communication was Arabic. Consequently, the church declined in numbers and influence and became ripe for renewal and reformation.)

A.D. 1818 From England come workers of the Church Missionary Society who seek to breathe life into the Coptic Christians, but like Moravian missionaries who preceded them, they have little impact.

A.D. 1854 A few American Presbyterian missionaries come to Egypt. Their success is dramatic, due in large part to their bringing an Arabic translation of the Bible. A kind of Protestant Reformation results. Sunday schools, Bible studies, and biblical preaching attract people from the Orthodox church. (This Protestant denomination, known in Egypt as Ingeli—“gospel” or “evangelical” or Coptic Evangelical—is the largest, having perhaps 130,000 members and adherents.) The efforts of the Presbyterian missionaries lead to an awakening within the Coptic Orthodox church, a counterreformation. The ancient church accepts the “Protestant” Arabic Bible (which it uses to this day) and starts its own Sunday school movement. For this reason, the Coptic Orthodox church becomes far more biblical than other branches of Orthodoxy.

Christianity has survived in Egypt because throughout their history, Egyptian people have been reluctant to change, they have had some of the greatest leaders in church history to guide them, and they remain committed to the Scriptures.

By James K. Hoffmeier

A Radical Islam?

Like so many Third World countries, Egypt is a nation in unrest. With a population of 40 to 50 million persons, Egypt is also the most populous country in the Arab world, and that population is booming—43 percent of all Egyptians are under 15. Its citizens are increasingly crowded off the strip of arable land flanking the Nile, a strip so narrow as to compose less than 3 percent of Egypt’s total land mass. Inevitably, former farmers and fisherfolk migrate to burgeoning cities (Cairo alone is approaching a population of 15 million), which struggle under overburdened economies. The nation’s per capita annual income, as of 1983, was less than $700.

Most Egyptians now consider Nasser’s experiment with socialism a failure. With an open hand of friendship to the United States, Anwar Sadat attempted to restore the economy. He moved toward capitalism and built new political alliances that would take Egypt to a new stage of prosperity. But Sadat’s domestic popularity with conservative Muslims fell disastrously when he initiated peace accords with Israel. He died at the hands of a fringe group, but even upper-class Egyptians bought and repeatedly watched videotapes of the assassination.

Radical Muslims, then, play on the sense that everything except religion has been tried to straighten out Egypt’s political and economic problems. For them, Islam is the answer. Egypt should institute the Shari’a and give its full devotion to the will of Allah as revealed in the Qur’an.

Despite these currents, however, Egypt is far from becoming another Iran. The official political clout of the extremists remains well contained. The National Democratic Party, a non-ideological ruling party, holds 358 of the seats in the People’s Assembly. (Thirty-five others are held by a centrist, business-oriented party, and 65 are divided between socialists and Islamic fundamentalists.) In addition, Shar‘i laws on theft, adultery, usury, apostasy from Islam, and divorce have all been repudiated.

In many ways, observers say, Egypt has come too far into the twentieth century to adopt the fundamentalist agenda. For instance, millions of women now work outside their homes—will they or their husbands want them to return placidly to the narrower roles assigned them by fundamentalists, and lose the income they depend on?

Finally, observers believe the fanatical Muslim threat is lessened because the radicals are divided among themselves. As long as they remain divided they cannot conquer.

The Egyptian religious and political situation, in short, is not moving faster and faster in a single direction, toward monolithic Islam. The dominant current at the moment is a semisecular, semi-Islamic government. The cross current is the radical Islamic movement. Caught in-between are some 8 to 15 million believers in Jesus.

A Day In The Life Of An Egyptian Christian

In Cairo, a drab layer of dust coats everything, from small residential dwellings to 30-story Western-style hotels. In Alexandria, people seem to live on their balconies: some lower baskets on a rope and call to the street grocer for bread, some hang laundry, and some simply chat with their neighbors. In Minya, a city of about 300,000 to the south of Cairo, it is quieter. At the city park the Nile’s currents can be heard lapping at its banks; darkness falls and hungry dogs bark hoarsely in the distance.

But in all these cities, and nearly every other metropolis or burg in Egypt, the muezzin sings out his call to prayer. Five times each day, beginning at 4:30 in the morning, Egyptians hear the words and cadences that become so familiar they seem as eternal as the Nile.

Imagine an Egyptian Christian waking to the sound of the call. It is the first thing in the day, but far from the only thing, to remind him that his faith sets him apart from nine out of ten Egyptians. In his grogginess he wonders if he should prepare for work. But he glances at his calendar and sees that it is Friday, the Islamic holy day. Today is a day of rest. Sunday—his day of worship—is a work day in Egypt.

Sometimes the Christian slips away from his job and into a church, just to worship in the daylight. But he needs his work—high-salaried jobs like his are harder for Christians to procure than their Muslim friends—so most Sunday mornings he stays at his desk, worshiping instead on Saturday nights or Sunday evenings.

At the moment he remembers plans to spend the day with his family. So he sleeps a few more hours, then rises, dresses, and heads out onto the streets. Strict laws limit the building of Christian churches. Presidential permits are required, and some congregations wait years for permission to make small repairs. Churches cannot be built within a specified distance of a mosque, and steeples are not allowed to spear higher than minarets. What the Christian sees, then, at least every few blocks, is a place of prayer for his Islamic neighbors. In contrast, churches are often dwarfed by high-rise apartment buildings, or squeezed inconspicuously between government offices.

As he boards the bus, the Christian must step around Muslim neighbors who have spread prayer rugs on the sidewalk and now kneel, foreheads to the ground, in the direction of Mecca.

Soon he arrives at his parents’ home. He finds his father and younger brothers and sisters in front of the television set. His watch reads 11 A.M., and the day’s programming is just beginning. A bearded sheikh (roughly the Muslim equivalent of a pastor) flashes on the screen. Calmly, he begins to chant, and the corresponding words from the Qur’an appear on the screen. The passage is familiar, one the young Christian studied in his public school.

After visiting his mother in the kitchen, he finds a newspaper and scans the TV listings for the day. His eye catches on an Elvis Presley movie and an intriguing Egyptian serial, “Helmya Nights.” He is too accustomed to notice the five “religious programmes” scheduled on the three national networks through the remainder of the day. When his eye does fall on one of the listed religious programs, he does not have to wonder what religion it will feature.

Except for a few programs at Christmas and Easter, public television is closed to Christian broadcasters, and he wishes, with a returning sense of humiliation and regret, that it was not. A few months ago, he recalls, a Muslim teacher appeared on one of the three stations saying the Christian prophet (Jesus) went to bed with five virgins on one night. Several of his Muslim friends were astonished at Jesus’ immorality. He tried to explain that the parable of ten virgins, though it said the virgins went “into” the bridegroom, did not mean this as the Arabic colloquialism for sexual intercourse. Most of them listened to him, but he thought then about the thousands who saw the broadcast and never heard the correct interpretation of the passage.

He reads the rest of the paper and teases his youngest sister. Appealing odors drift from the kitchen and he realizes his mother is beginning to prepare lunch. It is noon, and another call to prayer sounds outside the window.

Challenges To Faith

Living under such conditions, Egyptian Christians grow hardy; their faith develops tenacious roots. It is not difficult to find examples of men and women who have suffered for what they believe—not martyrdom, but certainly matters worse than inconvenience.

It is a Wednesday night in a town in lower Egypt. Adel Markos (not his real name), an evangelical Christian, is showing us around town. Despite its substantial size, many of the town’s roads are narrow and unpaved. A fine dust, with its pungent odor, fills the air. Donkey-drawn carts jockey with cars and trucks for the right of way. In Cairo, drivers are constantly honking their horns. There pedestrians spill out into the street with a resigned air, giving themselves up to a hurricane of traffic.

But here traffic is thinner, horns are less often employed, and pedestrians are treated as if they have a right to live. Most of them eschew the sidewalks and stride down the streets—true to Egyptian custom, men or women arm in arm with friends of the same sex. The street lamps are a low, incandescent yellow, hollowing out small, warm caves of light for the people who pass beneath them. Vendors, with fires crackling under shish kebabs, wait at various corners.

Adel is a bald-headed, medium-sized man. His deep-set eyes and aquiline nose make him reminiscent of a Hollywood version of Al Capone. But he is soft-spoken, and when he mentions his service in the Egyptian army, he says he was happy he never had to kill a man. Adel’s mission, at the moment, is to take his American visitors to his Coptic Evangelical church.

When Adel arrives at the church, four armed, government guards stand at the gate. Adel explains that there are usually fewer guards, but only a few days before, Muslim fanatics attacked a local Christian organization. Whatever tension lingers does not show on the white-uniformed guards, who languidly smoke and talk.

Just inside the church there is loud, theatrical music. Adel says the children of the church are watching a film. He opens a door: Charlton Heston, his majestic white hair and beard flapping in the wind, is commanding the Red Sea to part as Israel escapes Pharaoh.

We proceed upstairs with Adel, and quickly come across more activity. In a small room, three women sort clothing beneath a dim, uncovered light bulb. (One missionary has earlier told us that many Egyptian Christians regularly go to separate activities at as many as three or four churches. Egyptians have fewer diversions than Americans, he said, and the maintenance of their faith in an unencouraging environment demands Christian community. Adel’s church testifies to the truthfulness of the missionary’s account; it is busy even on a weeknight.)

The church women are volunteers concerned with distributing clothes to the poor. They work standing up, at a simple wooden table. One woman, in a black dress, with black hair and heavy eyelids, appears to be the leader. The others defer to her when questions are asked about their church activities.

Speaking through a translator, she soon warms to her subject. She puts down the garment in her hands and says most of her work with the church is in the education department. She enjoys it because it was her training.

Years ago she was headmistress of a school that housed and taught one thousand girls. But she was accused of shredding the Qur’an, burning it, and then stomping on the ashes in a final fit of contempt. None of this was true, the woman says; she believes she was attacked for being a Christian. Eventually she lost her job. Her story was one others would repeat, with differing details.

The next day, outside town, a friend of Adel’s talks about the difficulty of building or repairing churches in Egypt. “It’s difficult but not impossible,” he says. Often churches ignore or creatively circumvent the Egyptian bureaucracy. He knows of one church that had a broken latrine. After asking permission to repair it and not getting the permission for several weeks, the church simply repaired the latrine.

In another case, Christians were delayed in building a church. Finally they sought permission to build a home. That granted, they began constructing a church. When the walls rose a few yards above the ground, the police realized a church was being built. They posted guards, but only during the day. The church builders continued to work at night, with the police apparently satisfied they were enforcing the letter of the law.

A Church Bright And Strong

The church-building story exemplifies the pluck and determination of Egyptian Christians. Louka Michael (not his real name) is pastor of an urban Coptic Evangelical church. Like many Egyptian pastors, he is strikingly productive. With a church of only 300 regular members, he established a popular ministry to the elderly and a preschool educating 74 students. At a previous church, in a Minya suburb, Louka took notice of the large body of retarded children in Egypt (inbreeding largely accounts for the estimated 3 percent retarded citizens), and started an educational ministry for the mentally handicapped.

Obviously not a man lacking in energy or ambition, Louka nonetheless carries an air of heaviness. His polished coal eyes are soft, tinged by sadness. Wistfully, he speaks of the late 1960s, when Canada and Australia were especially open to Egyptian immigrants, and many Christian friends left the country. “Now we just send them Christmas cards,” he says.

He harbors no illusions about the difficulties of ministry in his homeland. Too many Christians, Louka tells us, are nominally Muslim. They cannot avoid Muslim radio and television. They fast during Ramadan (a central Islamic holiday season) and swear, like Muslims, by invoking the name of the prophet Muhammad. Sometimes, he says, when a Christian dies the family asks a sheikh to read a surah (a chapter from the Qur’an). Louka alludes to estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 Egyptian Christians convert to Islam each year, often for reasons of money or marriage. (Another Egyptian later presented the mordant formula that Christians convert for love and hate—to marry a Muslim lover, or to take advantage of the more liberal Islamic divorce laws.)

The Cross Within The Crescent

Many pharmacies in Egypt identify themselves by a sign bearing a cross within a crescent—emblems of healing in the Christian and Muslim communities. But the sign is also symbolic of how the two faiths are bound together by what they have in common, and of how they must live together despite their radical differences.

Society and politics

The flag of the Egyptian revolution of 1919 against the British colonizers bore the emblem of the cross within the crescent, for both religious communities shared common aspirations and a common destiny in the land. Yet, the alliance has often been an uneasy one, for each has its own vision of what the society should be—a vision best understood by comparing the teachings of Muhammad and Jesus.

Although there are some significant differences between their teachings, both preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” And neither was well received in his home town. But here the similarity ends. Muhammad believed that he must rule rather than suffer; so he escaped from Mecca and accepted a job 275 miles north in Medina, where he could begin to build a power base and rule in God’s name. Jesus, on the other hand, chose to suffer rather than rule. After feeding the five thousand, he turned down the chance to become king. He chose instead to die for the world.

Muhammad believed God’s kingdom should be an earthly kingdom, whereas Jesus told Pilate, “My kingship is not of this world” (John 18:36). The Arabian prophet believed force could be used to extend the kingdom and began the conquest of the neighboring tribes, which would later lead to the establishment of the Islamic empire. Jesus, however, refused to use force to build his kingdom. Saying his kingdom was not of this World, Jesus told Peter to sheath his sword when the soldiers came to take Jesus away.

The Arabian prophet also thought God’s kingly rule could be ushered in by applying divine law to all aspects of life. Jesus, on the other hand, saw the limitations of law to change people; so he talked about the need for a transformation from within. It is not enough, he said, to refrain from killing someone; we must not even hate another person in our heart (Matt. 5:21f.). The kingdom of God is like leaven, which transforms from within, not something that can be enforced from without (Matt. 13:33).

What we in North America call “religion” and “politics” overlapped in Muhammad’s understanding. Certainly our Lord expected that our faith would affect all aspects of life, including the political. Yet he distinguished between the two realms, saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). Thus, Christians do not experience the Muslims’ urgency to live under a government dominated by their faith.

These divergent visions are reflected in contemporary Egypt. Christians want religion and state separate so they may have freedom and may not, as a minority, be relegated to a second-class status politically. A large segment of the Muslim population desires the same freedom of a more secular state. Yet in recent years Muslim fundamentalists have grown in strength. In 1980 they were able to get the constitution changed to read that religious law is the main source of legislation. Now they are trying to make this claim a reality.

Faith and practice

The Arabic word Islam means “to submit” to God. (Christians, too, are enjoined to submit to him [James 4:7].) For Muslims, this submission includes observing five pillars of the faith. First (like Jews and Christians), they confess the unity of God, and then go further to confess the apostleship of Muhammad. Next, they are to pray five times a day, give alms, and fast during daylight hours in the month of Ramadan. (Forms of these practices are encouraged in Matthew 6:1–18.) Finally, they are to go on the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lifetime, if possible (just as Jews were to go to Jerusalem three times a year).

Underlying these practices, we note comparable similarities and differences in beliefs. When Muslims call upon God (Allah in Arabic), they mean the one God of whom the Bible speaks. The attributes of God are similar in both religions, but the emphasis and interpretation are sometimes different. Islam emphasizes the sovereignty of God to the extent that he forgives whom he wills and does not forgive whom he does not will, apart from any means of salvation like the Cross.

According to the Qur’an, God is a loving God, but he loves only those who love him, not those who do not (3:31–32). There is nothing here to compare with the unconditional love of God found in the Bible: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10); and “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Muslims reject the Christian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, which the Qur’an describes as being made up of Allah, Jesus, and Mary (5:116)—perhaps reflecting the veneration of Mary by Christians in Muhammad’s day.

The Qur’an refers to many people in the Bible: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and John the Baptist, to name a few. Sometimes the stories reflect apocryphal accounts, such as Abraham’s being saved from a fiery furnace (21:58–69; 37:97).

Jesus is always treated with the greatest respect in the Qur’an. But he is said to have been born beside a palm tree and to have spoken from the cradle—stories reminiscent of apocryphal gospels circulating at the time the Qur’an was first recited. Other similarities with our Gospels can be found, even though the same descriptions and titles are often understood differently. Christ was the Word (10:10; cf. John 1:1); he performed miracles (3:49; cf. Luke 7:21–22); and he was sinless (10:10; cf. Heb. 4:15).

Most Muslims believe the Qur’an denies that Christ was crucified (based on 4:157–158), although it merely says that the Jews did not kill him. It may, therefore, intend nothing more than Jesus did when he said to Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). The Christian believes that God’s power was demonstrated not by saving Jesus before he accomplished his work on the cross but by raising him after the work was accomplished.

Muslims believe that people are basically good and are capable of doing God’s will when they know it. The Bible teaches that all people have a bias toward wrong (Eph. 2:3). These contrasting views lead to significantly different understandings of the solution to the problem of human sin. Islam holds that all we need is to know the law of God and receive his forgiveness. The Bible affirms, however, that God’s law is only a tutor, showing us both God’s will and our inability to do it. We need forgiveness, but we also need an acceptable means of forgiveness if God is to remain righteous and yet acquit us. The Bible further declares that, because we have a bias toward evil, we need new life, which results in the transformation of our nature. Nicodemus, a pious follower of the law, was like many Muslims in his reliance on his own efforts. Jesus told him, “You must be born anew” (John 3:7).

Almost every church in Egypt has a mosque nearby. Frequently a cross on the church’s spire is held aloft beside the crescent on the minaret. Thus, when the cry goes out five times a day from the minaret, “Come to salvation,” the church bears its answer: the Cross of Christ.

By J. Dudley Woodberry.

Nor is Louka at peace about the radical Muslims and their prospects for power in Egypt. (Some Christians fear their numbers make up 40 to 50 percent of the nation—most estimates are much lower.) Louka refers to the unending stream of propaganda flowing from radios and televisions. “It goes on and on and on,” he sighs. “You breathe it.”

Yet despite his weariness, Louka himself rejected an opportunity to leave Egypt. After he earned a graduate degree at a prestigious American university, his friends there encouraged him to remain in the United States. He admits he was tempted. But he and his wife had a sense of calling. “That is why we are here,” he tells us in his living room. “Hopefully, we are providing a little more reason for our young people to stay.”

Whatever its effect on young people, Louka’s pastoring does not go unnoticed by the elderly in his church. One old man unburdened himself of the opinion that today’s church leadership is more talented and dedicated than that of earlier times. With a poetry that ennobled the sacrifice of Louka and the other sensitive, struggling pastors like him, he said, “The church here is bright like the sun and strong like a big army.”

A Steely Bishop

Like Louka Michael, Father John Mitri (not his real name), ministering in another urban setting, evidences the strain of pastoring in a land that considers Christianity foreign. Father John has a tall, athletic-looking body that appears out of place in his black cassock. His hair is closely cropped, his eyes unafraid. He agrees with Louka about the harsh outlook for the church in Egypt, but carries his concern differently. Whereas Louka seems tired, nearly resigned, this Roman Catholic priest’s relentless pessimism appears to animate and steel him.

He declares that without the Coptic Orthodox Church, there would be no church in Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox number approximately 7 million. By comparison, he says, there are 70,000 to Catholics, so few that “it is almost not right to call it a church.” (Others put the estimate closer to 150,000.) Stabbing a yellow Bic pen at the air to emphasize his point, Father John speaks of the ridiculousness of bishops strutting in crowns and sacerdotal finery, even though there are hardly any people in their churches.

The chief danger to Egyptian Christianity is not Islam, he claims. It is the church itself. The different denominations refuse to present a unified front, have no integrated plan for the future, and are unsuccessful in living with the poor and experiencing their problems. He also criticizes Catholics and Protestants for insufficiently developing their youth and for neglecting Christian service opportunities for women. Given these inadequacies, he says, Christianity in Egypt could disappear. Father John ends his litany with an impish announcement: “All this is not what you expected to hear. If you want to hear how wonderful things are, go see the archbishop tomorrow.”

But the priest admits there are sparks of hope in the darkness. There are “quiet saints.” There are young people “who say they are simply Christian and don’t worry what church they are in.”

These developments help him endure as a clergyman, Father John says. And there are other reasons. “First of all, my parents were true believers. My father lived to be 85, and every Sunday he went to pray at church. So I love Christ because of my parents.”

Second, he says, “I don’t have a lot in the way of earthly possessions. My car is a 19-year-old Volkswagen. So in my daily life and prayers, I have learned about a life of simplicity.” This simplicity is mirrored in the life of his parishioners. “They are poor families struggling to provide a life for themselves and their children. They manage to face each day with courage and hope. I learn from them.”

And finally, “The fewer sorts of desires a person has—with ambition, money—the more peace he will have. The fact I am a bishop is an accident. I did not seek it.”

That much was believable: the priest hardly sounds like an ensconced denominational bureaucrat. As far as he is concerned, honesty is paramount. Abraham Lincoln inspires him more than any other man “because of his patience and honesty—his honesty first of all with himself. Honesty with one’s self, honesty that refuses hypocrisy—this is what builds the church.”

Father John leans forward and harpoons the air one last time with his Bic. “MGM and Hollywood and space shots may change the way we live, but it’s people like Abraham Lincoln who will change the way we are.”

Egypt And The Iron Curtain

The stories of Louka Michael, Father John, and other Egyptian believers demonstrate the stress of being Christian in Egypt. So do news reports of events such as the 1981 imprisonment, following riots, of 1,536 religious and political activists. Though the large majority of that number were radical Muslims, Coptic Orthodox and evangelicals were arrested as well. Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenouda III was placed under house arrest.

The American and Canadian Coptic Association, and our Egyptian sources, report:

• that hundreds of church-building permits, to be issued by the president, are pending, with some going back more than ten years;

• that in Cairo’s Coptic neighborhood of Old Cairo, 15 historic churches have been taken under government jurisdiction;

• that the Christian periodical El Keraza has been banned;

• that Coptic Orthodox are discriminated against at all levels of government, holding none of the 160 top positions outside the Egyptian cabinet, and are refused positions as province governor, ambassador, university president or college dean, police commissioner, and president of a nationalized company;

• that the government regulates Coptic Orthodox schools and confiscated Coptic Orthodox hospitals while donating money and land to similar Muslim institutions;

• that the state-controlled mass media deny fair access to Coptic Orthodox Christians.

On hearing about imprisonment and other limitations on religious liberty, the Westerner’s reflexive reaction may be to compare such a country to those behind the Iron Curtain. However, while Egyptian Christians certainly suffer from curtailed freedoms, many say the analogy to the Iron Curtain nations is not a good one.

They are sensitive to the government’s position, arguing that it must try to pacify the fundamentalist Muslims. The 1981 riots exemplified the economic and social frustration much of Egypt’s population feels, a frustration that must be contained. And when hundreds of Muslims were arrested, a symbolic number of Christians were also arrested to save the government from accusations that it is anti-Islamic.

Many Muslims despise the connection Egyptian Christians have with the “imperialistic” West. They sometimes imagine a new Crusade is being planned for the retaking of Islamic lands. In addition, Christians are proportionately wealthier and better educated than Muslims. (Until World War II, 75 percent of the country’s schools belonged to the church.) Thus, there are many reasons—some more real than others—for friction between Egypt’s Muslim majority and its Christian minority.

All said, Egyptian Muslims consider Egyptian Christians the best-treated religious minority in the world. Although few Egyptian Christians would agree with the superlative, they say “oppression” is too strong a word for their condition. The more secular their government, the better, they say. Like Sadat before him, President Hosni Mubarak has so far resisted complete Islamization. One Christian observer believes Mubarak aspires to Islam “in its most serene and profound form,” which includes tolerance for other faiths.

On visiting Coptic Orthodox church offices, we were struck by two framed photographs on the wall of most offices. On one side was a picture of Pope Shenouda; on the other, a portrait of a resolute President Mubarak. The inclusion of Mubarak’s likeness on a level with the Pope indicates the careful respect many Egyptian Christians hold for their current government.

Addressing the same Mubarak, a Coptic monastic publication adopts a tone that would match the sentiments of the most ardent American civil religionist: “So now, dear President, you have been chosen by God in the midst of this most difficult era of history in Egypt and in all of the East—chosen to confront a reality in which peoples, interests, sects, and values are in disagreement. By his grace and inspiration God has appointed you not only to reconcile and protect the spiritual interests of our country which is steeped in the proud heritage of Islamic tolerance, but at the same time to bear all the economic, sociological, and cultural burdens. We stand behind you and consider ourselves among the front line soldiers of prayer: our heart is with yours, we are at your disposal …”

Egypt’S Christian Legacy

The Egyptian Christians’ equanimity about a government that has imprisoned its people and even restricted the freedoms of its leaders can be better understood with a view to Egyptian church history. Egyptian Christians possess a long and rich history. Dating to the early second century, it is nearly ten times the age of America’s church history—old enough that, in the words of one historian, it is more an instinct than a tradition or heritage. And it is a history (or an instinct) that includes suffering much worse than what present-day Christians know.

On one October Monday, Pope Shenouda III, elected patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church in 1971, speaks with appropriate pride about that heritage. Like all Coptic monks (the pope is chosen from among the bishops, and bishops come from the monasteries), Shenouda wears a full beard; his is a black-and-gray cascade nearly concealing his mouth. He is dressed in papal regalia, including the black, bejeweled cope and the turban-shaped crown of the Coptic Orthodox episcopacy.

Shenouda is, by Coptic tradition, patriarch in the line of Saint Mark, just as the Roman Catholic pope is believed to be in the succession of Saint Peter. Tradition has it that Saint Mark came to Egypt sometime after Christ’s resurrection. His sandal broke as he was walking the streets of Alexandria. He visited a cobbler for repairs, and the cobbler, cutting his finger with an awl, cried out, “Is Theos!” (“O One God!”). The oath was the disciple’s evangelistic cue. He told the cobbler about the redemption of Christ, and from there the gospel spread across Egypt.

There is no historical documentation for this tradition, but biblical scholars observe that Egyptians were present at the feast of Pentecost (Acts 2:10), making it likely the gospel was taken to Egypt within months or years of Christ’s death.

Referring to this ancient heritage, Shenouda claims the Coptic Orthodox have “kept the tradition of the past until now without any change,” and mentions as examples the Wednesday and Friday fasts it continues to observe, the sustained practice of removing one’s shoes before entering the sanctuary, and the church’s unshortened three-to four-hour liturgies.

Included in this heritage, Shenouda says, is Egypt’s role in founding Christian monasticism Saint Anthony (ca. 251–356), was the first Christian monk, the original desert father. Anthony was a hermit; but in the early fourth century, Pachomius, another Egyptian, founded cenobitic or communal monasticism.

No less a part of its heritage was the persecution Egyptian Christianity has known. “The Coptic church,” Shenouda says, “has carried the Cross all its life.” He does not explain his comment, but Coptic historians document the horrendous third-century persecution of Copts by the Roman emperor Diocletian. Egypt suffered the most from this, the worst of all Roman persecutions of Christians, with estimates of Egyptian martyrs running from 144,000 to 800,000. As one ancient writer put it, “If the martyrs of the whole world were put on one arm of the balance and the martyrs of Egypt on the other, the balance would tilt in favor of the Egyptians.” Diocletian’s slaughter was so catastrophic that Copts to this day consider A.D. 284, the year of the tyrant’s ascension to power, as the beginning of their calendar.

Around the year 640 Egyptian Christianity absorbed another shock: the invasion of Muslim Arabs. It survived under succeeding Muslim dynasties—Tulunids, Ikshidids, Ayyubids, and Mamelukes. The fortunes of the church have waxed and waned at different periods, and today, though Pope Shenouda did not say so, its relative numbers are dwindling. But it has known revival in recent decades, being reinvigorated by the Sunday school and Bible study movements, both probably inspired by the Protestant churches introduced by missionaries.

If the Orthodox have benefited from Protestant educational methods, they have not adopted Protestant piety. Like Roman Catholics, they venerate the Virgin Mary and the relics of saints. Yet, true to Pope Shenouda’s claims that they will not depart from the past, they adhere to the universal doctrines of orthodox Christianity.

The rest of the church has not always considered the Copts orthodox. At the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon, the Coptic church separated from the Eastern and Western churches over a question of Christ’s humanity and divinity. The Western church, following Chalcedon, declared Christ one person with a human and a divine nature. The Egyptians were “monophysites,” maintaining that Christ had a single, divine nature. But modern theologians agree that the difference was one of vocabulary, not substance, and no longer consider the Copts heretical.

Concluding his audience with us, Pope Shenouda affirms his orthodoxy by throwing darts at the “new theology” that attacks the veracity of Scripture. Surrounded by Muslims eager to discount the Bible’s authority, Egyptian Christians of all stripes—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—tend to be wary of even conservative biblical criticism. For his part, the Pope has no patience with those who would declare the early chapters of Genesis and the books of Jonah and Job mythological. Nor can he understand a New Testament scholar questioning who wrote the Gospel of John: “How can we benefit in such a doubtful way, guiding people to doubt, not to faith?” Only Egyptian theologians educated in the West are doing such things, he says.

Accordingly, he has some advice for Christians in America. “Take the verses of the Bible for spiritual benefit, not as criticism. Try to grow better and better in the depths of your life.… Work for your eternity, for the kingdom of God, and for the expansion of the gospel.”

The Pope says nothing about the challenges his church faces in a Muslim land. But across the street from his sitting room, visible from its windows, stands the papal cathedral. Its exterior has been finished for years, but rubble and half-dismantled scaffolding litter the inside. Awaiting presidential permission for its completion, the cathedral is mute testimony that the gospel will not expand easily in Egypt.

How Will The Church Fare In The Future?

What are the prospects for Christianity in Egypt? David Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia puts the Coptic Orthodox community of 1900 at 6.6 percent of Egypt’s population; in 1970 at 6.2 percent; in 1975 at 6.0 percent; in 1980 at 5.8 percent; and projects 4.8 percent for the year 2000. The Encyclopedia sees the Protestant and Roman Catholic populations holding steady—each at 0.02 percent of the population—into the year 2000. (During our visit, we learned that the numbers on Egyptian Christians are notoriously varied, according to whom you ask. Protestant sources, for instance, said there are twice as many Protestants as Catholics in the country.)

But Egyptian Christians insist such numbers fail to tell the entire story. They, far more than any foreign observers, know the cost of faith in a nation where Christianity is marginal. Yet they have hope because they can point to and participate in ministries clearly touched by the Holy Spirit.

One such ministry is that of Menes Abdul Noor, pastor of the Kasr el-Dubara Church in Cairo. At 57, the wiry Menes has an elastic face that one moment crumples into a frown, the next stretches into a full-toothed smile. He sits talking in the spacious parlor of his parsonage, directly joined to the tall, limestone church sanctuary. As Menes speaks, two or three young men and women drift into the parlor or out of the kitchen. Before disappearing to help them, Menes’s wife, Nadia, explains that the young people seek counseling; often some live with the Noors until their lives are straightened out.

Menes’s church of 600 members (with up to 1,000 regularly attending worship services), others have already told us, is one of the largest Protestant churches in the Middle East. Menes has translated 45 books from English into Arabic, including several of William Barclay’s commentaries and Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict. He has written commentaries on Ephesians, the three letters of John, the letters of Peter, and the letters to the Thessalonians. He preaches weekly in his church, but also on TransWorld Radio.

Menes claims to be accomplishing so much by virtue of having read a book on time management, hiring secretaries, and leaving most of the household affairs to Nadia. And he confesses that his days usually stretch from seven in the morning until just past midnight.

Others have said Menes’s frenetic ministry is effective. Now he provides some data. The radio sermons elicit about 7,000 letters per month. His books sell rapidly at newsstands; at the Cairo Book Fair, 500 copies of one title sold in 20 minutes. He has become one of the most recognizable “holy men” in the country, well known enough that later, at a restaurant, a waiter inquires of Nadia if her husband is the famous minister—and if so, why isn’t he wearing an ecclesiastical gown. In a fashion typical of both Noors, Nadia turns the occasion into an opportunity to share God’s love, explaining the Protestant split from Catholicism—and clerical garb—at the Reformation, and going from there into a discussion of justification by faith.

Such behavior is typical of Nadia and Menes. He is a bold evangelist who has continued his ministry despite opposition and death threats. He is optimistic, moreover, because Egypt is now seeing the conversion of entire households and villages to Christ. There are now Bible studies in the Coptic Orthodox and Catholic churches. And there are Bibles on the newsstands. All of this, he says, is unprecedented.

Finally, Menes is optimistic because of the faith of Egypt’s next generation. He stresses how important it is to visit a Monday night prayer meeting of young university graduates.

The prayer meeting begins at seven, and by half-past all the chairs in the room, on the second floor of the church, are filled. Still more recent graduates—most of them doctors, engineers, pharmacists, and other professionals—filter into the meeting, setting up chairs on the balcony outside the room’s open doors. The group spends a solid hour in praise, alternating spontaneous songs, silent prayer, and spoken prayer. The singing is spirited, with arms upraised, eyes closed, heads tilted upward.

There is a short talk by a leader, and finally the group of some 150 men and women breaks into smaller prayer cells and, like a grove occupied by cicadas, fills the night air with the hum of their petitions and intercessions.

The meeting ends around half-past nine. Afterwards, we knock on the door of Menes’s house. At the door he suppresses yawns and rubs bloodshot eyes. But soon he recovers his energy and loquacity. After all, he is busy translating a new version of the Bible into Arabic. And there are two-and-a-half hours left in the workday of the man whose name, translated, means “Servant of the Light.”

The Bishop Of Beni Suef

There was another ministry we heard about repeatedly in Egypt, but it is far away from the hubbub of Cairo. Orthodox Bishop Athanasius, admired by Coptic Orthodox and evangelicals alike, is the episcopal head of the rural district of Beni Suef, overseeing 86 churches. The town of Beni Suef, center of the district, is a three or four-hour drive south of Cairo. The road from Cairo to Beni Suef passes fellahin (farmers) hoeing in their fields; men roped to the top of date palms, slicing the yellow-brown fruit out from underneath dusty fronds; women carrying laundry to and from the Nile; and small, blindfolded donkeys ambling in their ceaseless circles at waterwheels.

The landscape beside the Nile is colorful. Corn and other irrigated crops, and groves of tall, stately palms, green the countryside. Children, especially, are dressed in rich reds, lime green, oranges, and yellows. They dash across fields and perch on top of huge bundles of cornstalks lashed to the backs of donkeys. Behind the fields, across the river, white limestone cliffs occasionally ascend, setting the limits of the desert. Rural Egypt avoids the urban air pollution of Cairo (said to be the second-most-polluted city in the world). The sky is wide and blue, although in places the baking of mud bricks darkens the air with thin, black clouds, which late in the day refract sunlight and deepen dusk’s rosy hue.

Unlike rural America, Egypt’s countryside is never free of people. Once on Beni Suef’s narrow streets, of course, the concentration of people thickens, though there are not many motor vehicles. Bishop Athanasius greets us in a large, dark room in his official residence. He is a small man, just over five feet tall, with heavy black-rimmed glasses and tiny hands. The bishop speaks with a pleasant, reedy voice that originates, ventriloquist-like, far down in his throat.

Athanasius, at 64, and a bishop for 25 years, is candid about the difficulties facing the church in Islamic Egypt. Like almost everyone else, he cites the rise of Muslim extremism as the greatest threat to the church. His answer to extremism is simple and pastoral: “I find the solution only in Christian behavior—Christian love, forbearance, Christian witness.”

But does he think the church in Egypt will survive? Bishop Athanasius refuses to accept the question as phrased. “The question is, will the church in Egypt, in the East, and in the West survive?” The Western church faces materialism, decadence, and rampant individualism; the bishop fears it has become “too timid” to face the “overwhelming anti-Christian” ethos of its societies. He insists there is a difference between happiness and affluence (“I am a poor man; I do not have much; but I am happy”) and that Western Christians confuse love with pleasure.

“The trend in modern civilization is to accept man as he is,” Bishop Athanasius says, “and we have degraded Christianity and humanity” by putting aside the Christian hope for a transformed humanity. “To see Christianity survive in the world is to become true Christians once more. It is this true Christianity which has the power to change life and make people really happy.”

The Bishop’S Bible Study

The bishop is one of several leaders in the Coptic church who have come to believe that an essential element of restoring true Christianity is study of the Bible. Accordingly, he conducts a Bible study each Friday evening.

On one Friday, Bishop Athanasius’s church is full at 5:30. There are about 600 men, women, and children in the church, with males seated on the left side of center and females on the right (following ancient Oriental custom). The bishop stands at the front of the nave with an overhead projector and a microphone. Seated directly behind him are a dozen priests and monks, the monks wearing black hoods dotted with yellow crosses. Behind them, in typical Coptic Orthodox custom, is a screen painted (in golds, reds, and blues) with icons of the apostles and Christ. The altar is hidden behind the screen.

The bishop begins the Bible study by announcing the topic: the image of God in humanity. Laying some groundwork in Genesis, he then opens the floor to discussion by asking what it means to be created in the image of God. A man stands and says it means having freedom and humility. Athanasius listens, but then asks, “Where is the reference?” When the man can provide no scriptural citation, the bishop waves his tiny hand and points a finger at another person now standing to speak.

“When God created man he created a working man,” this gentleman says. Before he can say anything more, Athanasius asks, “Where is the reference?” and again his interlocutor is at a loss. With that the bishop summarizes both answers; then, ranging from Genesis to the genealogical accounts of Luke 3, he supplies the scriptural background he considers sorely missing.

The discussion begins once more, and eventually the talk—among simple farmers and fishermen in a nation with an adult illiteracy rate over 50 percent—turns to genetic engineering. There is both openness and suspicion on the part of the people, with the bishop declaring that genetic engineering need not threaten orthodoxy. “There is a great difference between God creating things from nothing and science creating from things already there,” he says. One, then two men, stand to disagree. In the midst of this interchange, a bird enters the church through an open door and flits from one chandelier to another. Engrossed in their study, few people look up, even when it begins chirping.

Here, as in the prayer meeting at Menes’s church or when witnessing the quiet determination of Louka’s ministry, we are impressed with the intensity of faith possessed by Egyptian Christians. In any of these settings, the question “Will the church survive?” becomes less academic. We had sensed that Bishop Athanasius and other Egyptians were impatient with the question. Now we realized that perhaps, for them, such inquiries are more profound than we appreciated. Knowing the costs of faith in ways beyond our experience, they could not answer such questions with mere words: they could reply only with their spirits, wills, flesh, and blood—with the commitment of their entire lives.

Soon the Bible study’s discussion shifts to other attributes of the image of God, including beauty. There is still too much tendency to forget scriptural support of arguments, and at one point the bishop demands, “References! I want references, not just talking.”

Redirecting the study, the bishop lectures on the importance of being “born from the Lord,” since it was only “through Christ that we can return to the first image.” (Outside, a wedding party passes, complete with horns and drums, but again the study is oblivious to distraction.) With that he ranges through Genesis, the Psalms, Hosea, Ezekiel, Job, and Paul’s letters, laying out an understanding of the image of God that in no way suffers from a paucity of biblical foundation.

The study winds down with questions on suffering. To hear these questions is to be reminded again of the dozens of Egyptian Christians we have talked to during the weeks of our visit. The questions summarize what we have learned: that Egyptian believers have learned they cannot avoid suffering, yet they find sustenance in their faith.

On this subject the bishop could be speaking for Louka, for Father John, Menes, Adel, or Pope Shenouda. Suffering, he says, can be a gift for purification. It came “because we had entered into a way marred by Satan” and need to turn from it. And when it is not a gift, it is an unavoidable part of being human—and Christian. “All people suffer,” says the bishop, “but especially the believer, because the world is against him.”

The people listen, intently, to their diminutive but powerful bishop, who had told them before about their Muslim neighbors, “We can’t preach, we can’t evangelize, but we can love,” and who now, ready again to send them back into a world dominated by those neighbors, speaks words true not just to his parish, but to any and every church in Egypt.

He says simply, “Bear and forbear.”

Life Among The Garbage Pickers

Cairo’s teeming streets are covered with cars, trucks—and occasionally, incongruously—donkey-drawn carts. Usually the carts are driven by stoic-faced men and laden with chicken crates, reams of cardboard, rotting food, and other garbage. Often a child or two rides atop the pile, sometimes sleeping, sometimes watching the whirl of traffic.

The carts’ drivers and children are part of Cairo’s infrastructure, the unpaid garbage collectors of Africa’s largest city. They are bound for one or another of the garbage collectors’ villages on the outskirts of Cairo. There they will dump the refuse, sort through it for foodstuffs or any salable items, and discard the rest—in their tin hovel homes, in their streets, in the canals where they bathe.

We visited one such village, a burg of about 2,000 garbage collectors and another 1,500 sheep and cattle herders. The air was filled with the smoke of burning garbage and dust from passing carts. The homes had dirt floors and partial roofs, actually serving as little more than shades. A pack of ducks starkly demonstrated the unsanitary conditions of the village: their white feathers stained and sodden, one or two ducks limping on diseased legs, another with eyes red-rimmed and inflamed.

Living among the garbage collectors are five doctors and nurses, there because of their Christian commitment. Working from 8:30 A.M. to 10 P.M. daily, they are staff members of the Coptic’ Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS), a remarkable organization with development programs in several major cities and nearly 50 rural villages.

The doctors and nurses at the village, and other CEOSS workers who do not live on site, have taken on a huge assignment. The clinic they operate one day a week is the only medical assistance available within 12 kilometers of the village. They struggle against superstitions. (Many villagers, for instance, still entrust their health to practitioners of magic; some parents will paint a hand on a child’s forehead to ward off the evil eye of the covetous.) CEOSS staff members also work at educating villagers on the importance of hygiene (encouraging them, for example, to wear heavy gloves while sorting garbage).

The myriad CEOSS programs include family planning, literacy education, teenagers’ coffee houses, a children’s club, a home economics program, and loans for everything from sewing machines to small trucks.

CEOSS’S director, Samuel Habib, is president of the Protestant community in Egypt. Because of his wide influence, including close connections with Protestant, Coptic, Catholic, and government leaders, he is only half-jokingly referred to as Egypt’s “Protestant Pope.” His organization is an example of how much dedicated Christians can accomplish—even in a land where evangelization is forbidden.

By Rodney Clapp.

“Remember Lot’s wife.” That is one command of Jesus I’ve never had a hard time with. Genesis 19 relates one of those episodes that should be included in a book called Bible Stories You Can’t Forget No Matter How Hard You Try.

This woman, known to us only by her husband’s name, flees for her life. Actually, she and her family are forced to leave Sodom when two mysterious visitors take them by the hands and lead them outside the city wall. They save her from death by brimstone. They say, Keep running, don’t look back; and then they disappear.

As I always had it pictured, in a flash, Lot’s wife froze into a womanly statue of salt that stood for centuries, until sandy wind storms wore away her features, then her torso. Her pillar, I knew, eventually, mysteriously poisoned what is now called the Dead Sea.

My friend Camilla says I had it all wrong. Lot’s wife instantly melted—like the Wicked Witch of the West-dwindling smaller and smaller until all that was left of her was a grain of salt the size of one that would spill from a shaker.

Whatever the circumstances, Lot’s wife lost her chance, and for several years I have wondered just what her thoughts were as she made that fatal turn.

She had left behind neighbors—an evil crowd, but neighbors nonetheless—mothers who had raised children alongside her own, young men who were betrothed to her daughters, shopkeepers who knew her by name. Did she hear their screams and look back in horrified disbelief that for them there was no way out?

She had left behind a house that was a home to her—a refuge from the unspeakable goings-on occurring just outside the door—and filled with mementos that told a family’s story. Did she wish she had been able to slip a treasure or two under her arm before she’d rushed away to safety? Did the familiar, with all its imperfections, suddenly seem too difficult to abandon? And the promise of salvation—did it seem too distant and too hard to grasp?

“Remember Lot’s wife.” Luke drops those words of Jesus in the middle of a paragraph describing the day of Jesus’ eventual return to Earth. The short verse is sandwiched between others, more familiar and more obviously eschatological: “On that day no one … in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left” (Luke 17:31–34, NIV).

Imaginings of that future day have set up permanent camp in my mind. Childhood sermons found their way into childhood nightmares of abandonment: Jesus had come and I’d been left behind. Songs I sang with a college evangelistic team bounced off back walls of church halls, echoing over and over: “I wish we’d all been ready.” I stayed away from church the evening they showed a color preview of things to come, as if my imagination wasn’t vivid enough: Thief in the Night.

Surely I wasn’t alone in the way I had always pictured Jesus’ return: Like a hawk for a mouse, he would swoop down and carry away his church, whose fate was to parallel wedded bliss rather than ravaged beast. His choice—you, you, not you—would depend on a person’s past choices. But this faster-than-a-blink second was to be his moment of decision; yours and mine would have come and gone.

Or was my scenario wrong? What about Lot’s wife? Where does that old story fit in?

When I reread Genesis 19 I see a wrinkle in the scene that will someday unfold: Yes, the Lord himself will take his people out of a doomed land. But at that late date, might our own hearts betray us? Will we still be able to choose: Go or stay? Run on ahead or linger? Loosen our grips or hold on to the familiar? Fix our gaze on the promised salvation or turn back to steal one last look …?

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34, NIV).

Evelyn Bence is a free-lance writer and editor living in Arlington, Virginia. Her books include the coauthored Growing Up Born Again (Revell, 1987), written with Patricia Klein, Jane Campbell, Laura Pearson, and Dave Wimbish.

“The race’s deepest separation from God is epitomized by ‘the journalist,’ ” wrote Kierkegaard. “If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I would not despair of her. I would hope for [her] salvation. If I had a son who became a journalist and remained one for five years, him I should give up.”

Many American evangelicals are equally critical of journalists. In The Hidden Censors, the Reverend Tim LaHaye argues that the media have been “taken over by men and women who for the most part do not share our traditional values. It [sic] has been seized by people who are much more godless, immoral, or amoral in their outlook than are the American people as a whole.” LaHaye believes that “media bias” is the result of secular humanist control of the media.

Because Americans are increasingly dependent upon the big-three networks for their picture of the world, we should focus our critical attention on television news. Network news is the major provider of what journalist Walter Lippmann called the “pictures in our heads” of “the world outside.” Americans get more of their news from television than from any other medium. In fact, two-thirds of us turn primarily to television for news and information, while the percentage of adults who read a newspaper is declining, and few cities can support competing dailies. Without the sports pages and coupon sections, papers would be in even deeper financial trouble.

There is a big difference, however, between enlightened critcism and naïve suspicion. Unfortunately, many Christians hold a simplistic and dangerous view of TV news. They believe that TV news is simply the handiwork of immoral or liberal reporters, who reject stories that seem to contradict their own biases. It is not. TV news is shaped by both the picture-tube gurus who make it and the bored viewers who consume it. The tube tells news stories both for the financial gain of its creators and the story appetite of its audiences.

The Bad News

The biggest myth about network news is that its bias is primarily political. There is little doubt that reporters, editors, and producers of these programs are more liberal politically and morally than the population overall. This is in part because such journalists are members of the liberal Eastern establishment. It is also the result of their formal education in liberal colleges and universities. Finally, network news people are more liberal simply because of the natural selection process that takes place in the profession; journalism attracts many people who are likely to question the status quo and hold altruistic ideals about improving society.

But there is very little evidence that journalists’ own beliefs and values determine the ways that news is selected and reported. Michael Robinson found in 1985 that news is more negative than political; there were 20 times more bad than good news stories. In 100 days the networks made only 47 positive statements. At the same time, there was very little political bias.

Vice-President Spiro Agnew addressed this phenomenon in his legendary antimedia speech in Des Moines while the Nixon administration was under press scrutiny. He called the news media “nattering nabobs of negativism,” an image supported by Robinson’s findings and often translated by all of us as “no news is good news.” Columnist James Reston wrote that TV news “encourages the view that everything is going wrong, and erodes the optimism of the American people, which may still be the last hope of the Western world.”

Consider the two major religious news stories of 1987—the Jim and Tammy Bakker scandal and the visit of Pope John Paul II. The former dribbled bad news to the media for months. The latter was repeatedly reported as an attempt to shore up American support for a declining church that opposed the Pope’s stands on important moral and social issues. On network television, the Pope’s homilies were often set against demonstrations by disenchanted American Catholics, including homosexuals and former priests.

The upbeat news story, if it appears at all, is usually reserved for the end of the newscast. Its purpose is to reassure us that in spite of all of the signs of imminent disaster reported in the previous 20 minutes, we can rest assured that the world will survive and that the show will be back on with more news tomorrow evening. (Of course, it would also be nice if we stayed tuned for the game show coming next instead of running off to pray for the fallen world.)

Television’s political power rests largely on its ability to deliver emotional appeals and social conflicts directly to our living rooms. The medium forced change when it focused on the antics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, freedom marches in the South, battles in Vietnam, and the Watergate hearings. But there is no guarantee that such compelling TV coverage is authentic. On television, the line between fact and fiction, propaganda and news is sometimes very thin because TV news is dramatic storytelling about power and conflict.

Reporters As Raconteurs

What kinds of pictures of the world does network news project into our living rooms? The news is not a mirror of society, but a collection of stories about society. Like poetry or paintings, news is a human creation that frequently says as much about its makers and viewers as it does about its subjects. Without reporters and editors there would be no news as we know it.

The networks package the news as narratives. They are not so much interested in data or information as much as they are stories and anecdotes. Except for stock market reports or economic indicators, nearly everything on national news is a story about people and nations. Dan, Peter, and Tom ask us to sit on their laps while they and their journalistic acolytes tell us tales and teach us lessons.

Network-news bias stems primarily from the desire of reporters and editors to entertain audiences. Interesting tales require compelling characters—Gary Hart, Pat Robertson, Jesse Jackson, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart. Outspoken and well-known members of Congress are tracked down for their on-camera reactions to presidential decisions or international events. Even the televised images of crowds of anonymous demonstrators nearly always focus on the most outrageous or the most flamboyant of the marchers. Reports from Iran during the holding of American hostages were loaded with such character bias. Arab stereotypes are frequently fueled by the camera, making it increasingly unlikely that public opinion will cause the American government to shift its Middle East foreign policy.

Some characters are deemed too important in the drama of news not to play at least a minor role. In spite of all of the careful White House management of media access to President Reagan, our nation’s chief officer may well go down in videotape history as the President who spent most of his time walking back and forth on the lawn between the White House door and an air force helicopter. The President’s waves and cupped ears have probably accounted for hours of network news time during his second term.

Crafty Conflict

Television news also thrives on dramatic conflict. Like all good storytelling, TV reports follow the battles between individuals, groups, and organizations. We tune in to hear the latest in the struggles among nations, politicians, and activists. During presidential campaigns, we track the primaries and eventually the general election, waiting for the dénouement that signals a new resident of the White House. Reports suggest who is winning, who is losing, and how they are reacting to the shifting winds of political fate.

But presidential politics is only the most obvious example of network television’s insatiable appetite for character and conflict. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited the United States, the networks immediately turned the negotiations into a showdown between the Great Communicator and the sly and debonaire Soviet official. Meanwhile, the subplot was painted by the tube: Mrs. Reagan and Mrs. Gorbachev, locked in a struggle to see who could better impress the other.

The men were in an image-making shoot-out, while the women entered a popularity contest. Foreign policy seemed to depend on these two conflicts, as if the months of preparations before the summit were mere cartoons before the real movie. As close observers know, the contours of such meetings are hammered out well in advance. Reagan would not make the same mistake of the hastily called summit in Iceland. Only network TV dramatics could hinge the latest U.S.-Soviet meetings on communication styles and etiquette.

News coverage also follows the scent of conflict identified by interested news sources. More stories are leaked to news organizations than most of us would believe. Informants hope to draw their enemies into public conflict either to discredit them or to advance their own careers. As a result, much of the conflict in America takes place, not directly between contending parties, but through the media. Reporters and their sources conspire to create the most compelling stories possible. The Jim Bakker scandal illustrates this symbiosis. Ted Koppel invited the Bakkers onto “Nightline,” thus boosting the ratings to the highest in the program’s history. The Bakkers, in turn, told their side of the story to rally supporters they could no longer speak to on the “PTL Club.”

As ABC News reporter Dan Corditz has written, TV news anchors are not paid seven-digit salaries for their journalistic abilities. “At the top,” says Corditz, “they are the salaries of entertainers.” They are raconteurs who make a living by telling tales carved out of the characters and conflicts of real life. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman writes, “A television news show is precisely what its name implies. A show is an entertainment, a world of artifice and fantasy carefully staged to produce a particular series of effects so that the audience is left laughing or crying or stupefied.”

The Myth Of Objectivity

Public-opinion surveys have found repeatedly that most Americans trust the news they get from network television. In one Roper study, 58 percent said network news is “neutral, objective and middle of the road.” A Gallup poll found that 81 percent of American adults believe that TV news is accurate. Ironically, 37 percent of the respondents also said that news media had reported inaccurately about stories they had been involved in personally. Other studies have shown repeatedly that viewers have little confidence in the television business, compared with other businesses and institutions in society. Nevertheless, they believe the news. Walter Cronkite was voted the most believable man in America.

For most of us, TV news is objective when we agree with it. As long as the networks do not challenge our prevailing views, they are doing fine. Such attitudes suggest that public-opinion polls tell us nothing about the objectivity of network news and a lot about our own biases.

In fact, objectivity is a meaningless term to describe or evaluate news. Sometimes the word is used to suggest balance, other times fairness, accuracy, or factuality. No two journalists would ever report the same story in precisely the same way. Nor would two editors agree exactly on the importance or significance of thousands of possible stories to report on every day. There is no objective standard of news because news never defines itself. Someone always has to decide what is news.

A few years ago I asked the managing editor of one of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers what percentage of the copy available to the paper on a given day actually hits the presses. After a five-second pause he said, “Well, at most, 3 percent.” That was a newspaper. Consider the state of network news, where the complete script for a program would easily fit on one page of a newspaper. Add to that all of the videotape or film footage left unused for every newscast. What could objectivity really mean in such an incredible process of distillation?

Yet night after night we see basically the same few stories, often reported from the same perspectives on the three major commercial-network news shows. Moreover, those stories also are reported on the front page of the New York Times. How could this possibly happen so consistently?

News Smarts

The answer is not objectivity, but conventional news wisdom. Over the years editors and reporters have decided what to report and generally how to report it. They have sent correspondents to some places (e.g., the White House), and not to others (e.g., the CIA). They have covered particular meetings (e.g., the Iowa presidential caucuses) while skipping others (e.g., the National Association of Evangelicals). Their coverage of some events has changed significantly even in the last ten years; only a few elections ago few major television reporters and anchors went to Iowa for the caucuses. If one of the networks introduces a new type of coverage, the others will usually follow; none wishes to be beaten in image or, more important, in the ratings.

As a result, much of American society is normally outside the lens of network news. This was true of evangelical Protestantism until the 1980 presidential election when the news media, unable to explain the overwhelming support for Ronald Reagan, searched for political answers in the actions of the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, and other groups. Generally speaking, religious faith is not newsworthy unless it has obvious and easily reported connections to politics or social issues. Richard Neuhaus has appropriately called journalists “religious illiterates.”

But the limits of journalistic “objectivity” do not stop there. American network news is incredibly ethnocentric. As James R. Larson documents in Television’s Window on the World, our TV sets capture little of the scope of international affairs. From 1972 to 1981, 90 percent of all network news covered the U.S., the Soviet Union, or Israel. “This lack of network news attention to the ongoing struggle for social change and development in the Third World,” says Larson, “gives U.S. policymakers broad leeway to ignore, minimize, or postpone consideration of such problems.”

Promoting The Powerful

Modern network news is also tilted toward powerful individuals and institutions. In its day-to-day telling of tales, the news cares little about the weak and disenfranchised. Few New York or Washington correspondents could get to their offices every day without passing street people. Yet how often does what these journalists actually see appear on the nightly network stage? Little is mentioned about prostitutes or alcoholics, about the “unimportant” problems of depression, poverty, and even hopelessness. Instead we see and hear about “officials” in and out of government who are supposedly in charge of nations, states, and municipalities.

Similarly, the simple joys and pleasures of life are missing from the network news. How often do we see acts of kindness, expressions of love, or signs of generosity—except at the end of the “real” news? Thousands of sick and lonely people were visited by friends and pastors, but who really cares? Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans asked and were granted forgiveness for minor and major transgressions. Is forgiveness ever a significant news event? Many worshiped and prayed in churches and homes across the land. According to the network news lens of power, these are unimportant events in the life of the nation.

Could it be that the manifestations of power reported on television have little significance in the kingdom of God? Is the latest Washington scandal necessarily more important than the loving acts of Mother Teresa’s thousands of volunteers, the rehabilitation of convicted criminals through Prison Fellowship, or the feeding of the homeless at soup kitchens? Perhaps TV news is a parade of power and pride that masquerades as a mirror of authority and truth. Do we all fool ourselves by believing that people who appear on TV news are actually more intelligent, faithful, or compassionate than others?

Watching The World

In the novel and film Being There, author Jerzy Kosinski describes the emotionless world of a man raised on television instead of human love and nurture. “Chance” never learns how to relate to others and to shape the world around him. In biblical terms, he lacks both dominion and responsibility for creation because he simply assumes that the real world is entirely separate from his own being—just like television programming, which remains the same regardless of whether we watch. He cannot act, but only react; like the ideal television viewer, he sits passively before life, unable to do anything significant except change the channel.

As Richard Neuhaus has written in The Naked Public Square, news gives us the illusion of power. Because it reports on supposedly powerful individuals and institutions, network news generates the false impression that we actually participate in the tales told. In fact, we participate only vicariously in the news. Like Chance, we merely react to the “important” stories at the appointed times. The power displayed on the tube eclipses our own authority as caretakers of creation and brothers and sisters of mercy, justice, and peace.

Of course, there are unusual television news stories that bring people together: a girl trapped inside a well for several days, the assassination of a President, the outrageous taking of innocent hostages by terrorists. However, these stories also suggest the powerlessness of the audience. We might send a get-well card or a gift. But mostly we sit and watch, hoping and praying that good will come out of tragedy. We are largely spectators of a world narrated by the networks.

At the end of Being There, Chance is about to enter politics at the top as a presidential candidate. Politicians and the media have unwittingly conspired to create a convincing public image for a man who lacks any human trait. In real life he is a nobody; on the tube he is a celebrity. Chance fools the public only because he has first fooled the CIA and the media moguls, who cannot find anything on him in their files. He is the only possible candidate without known faults or political liabilities. His authority stems not from what he has accomplished or from political connections, but from his own powerlessness.

In their quest for “the story” behind Chance, the media create a real-life tale of political absurdity. The problem is that the media do not see their own role in propelling Chance into the national political limelight. For them Chance is merely another powerful character worth a news story. The media never realize they gave Chance his authority. As the national storytellers, they created the very story they claimed only to be reporting.

Network news reporters receive their authority from the faithful audiences measured in ratings. But do they really deserve such power to define news? During 1988 many political pundits argued that the presidential campaign was unique because neither the political community nor the news media knew what would happen as the election drama unfolded. Larry Eichel of the Philadelphia Inquirer sees it differently. “The truth is that we never have any idea what is going to happen,” writes Eichel. “What makes the 1988 campaign unique is that this time we know we have no idea of what is going to happen. That awareness of our limitation just may be our saving grace.”

Someone must decide the news, and it is certainly not going to be the viewer, no matter what the ratings suggest. Today network reporters have the authority to tell stories to passive audiences. Like Roman citizens, we wait to see what spectacles will be unleashed for our amusement and entertainment. When the lions are done, we leave the arena and return to what the public media have convinced us are dull lives. Fortunately, tomorrow will usher in new tales created just for our pleasure. And that’s the way it is in a fallen world.

Quentin J. Schutze is professor of communications arts at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of Television: Manna from Hollywood? (Zondervan).