The Abortion Debate Is Over

Columnist

Pro-lifers overestimated the average American’s allegiance to logic.

The twenty-seventh anniversary of Roe v. Wade is coming up and I have some bad news. The abortion debate is over. For a couple of decades it was the hot topic, the subject of television debates, and flash point of political campaigns. Many a punditorial brow furrowed over "this difficult, controversial choice."

Then the public got bored and saw only two possible positions: thoughtful, regretful pro-choice and hysterical, prudish pro-life. Pro-lifers, the average person thought, did not realize life is tough and women deserve compassion. Never mind that pro-lifers began establishing free care centers to support pregnant women eight years before the Roe ruling.

Then the outrageous assassinations of abortion workers began. Peaceful pro-lifers were presumed guilty by association, and any residual feeling that fair play guaranteed them a hearing evaporated. While 15 or 20 years ago abortion opponents might be seen as reasonable-but-wrong, after these shootings they be came dangerous kooks. In fact, pro-lifers were accused of pushing murderers off the deep end by using terms like "killing unborn babies." Just as pro-lifers were about to lose their right to free speech—rendering the unstable few even more explosive—the debate ground to a halt. The curtain was rung down and the "sensitive, difficult question" escorted offstage.

It's been said that the American political attention span is two weeks long, so logging over 20 years is some thing of an achievement. During that time the movement acquitted itself well. In the early years there was a mistaken overemphasis on the rights of the unborn, based on the erroneous presumption that the average person would oppose abortion upon realizing that the life in the womb was a baby. When ultrasonography made this obvious, Americans still preferred to keep abortion available. They were uneasy about it, but wanted to keep the procedure legal, as pro-choice leader Kate Michel man said, for only three reasons: rape, incest, and "my situation."

This isn't a logical position. Either an unborn child has a right to life and abortion is an appalling injustice, or it is the equivalent of a root canal. Yet it's where public opinion settled, and pro-lifers saw that they had overestimated the average American's allegiance to logic. In the last decade or so pro-lifers have also realized the folly of dividing baby from mother and treating them as combatants. This played into pro-choice rhetoric of antagonism and struggle, a setting in which might makes right. Of the two—mother and baby—only one was empowered to enforce her choice, so pro-life language picturing them as opponents backfired. A more holistic pro-life approach, summarized as "Love Them Both," makes more sense, and in recent years support for pregnant women has bloomed and professionalized to an impressive degree.

The abortion debate is over. The pro-life cause is not. Christians have opposed abortion since the first-century Christian code, the Didache, specified: "Thou shalt not kill a child by abortion." Valuing the unborn and newborn, women, slaves, and the disabled were distinctive ways early Christians challenged their prevailing culture.

What about our current culture? We can grow numb, but abortion is one of those monumental issues of justice that comes along once in a lifetime. It is violence against children, a hideous act of poisoning or dismembering tiny bodies, then dumping them in a landfill or garbage disposal. Over 37 million children have died this way. We must respond, and as always this means giving practical help—building support services for pregnancy and adoption, as previous generations built leprosariums, hospices, and hospitals. It also means working patiently for legal justice, since the minimum purpose of law is to protect the weak from violence. To our great-grandchildren it will be obvious that this was the civil-rights challenge of our time, and we will be judged for our response. If we are not moved when people kill children, nothing will ever move us.

I also have some good news: the abortion debate is reemerging transformed. This moment of silence may have been necessary for hardened hearts to hear the whisper of conscience. Pro-choice leaders mourn that disapproval of abortion is rising while their own troops are graying. The average member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League is 55, while college freshmen have dropped their support for legalized abortion from 65 percent to 51 percent since 1990. A 1996 poll found those most likely to agree that "abortion is the same thing as murdering a child"—a stunning 56 percent—are between the ages of 18 and 29. No wonder young people oppose abortion. Anyone younger than 27 could have been killed this way. A third of their generation was.

People longed to be in the pro-choice in crowd and avoid pro-life stigma, and to keep abortion handy. Yet deep inside they knew it was wrong, and a rising generation appears ready to tell us so. Columnist Paul Greenberg put it best: "Some questions will not be answered till they are answered right." That right answer gets clearer every day.

Your World: A Frederica Mathewes-Green column that ran from 1998 to 2000

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Elegy for a Jesus Freak

Wendy Murray Zoba

“These are the ultimate Jesus Freaks—the people who are willing to die for their faith.”—Toby McKeehen of dc Talk

Not too long ago my 17-year-old son Ben came bounding into my room after youth group and announced, “When I die I want you to play the Supertones‘ ‘Heaven’ at my memorial service.” My heart skipped a few beats. Then I said, “OK.”

He and his brother Jon, 16, had also been reading the recently published book Jesus Freaks, by the Christian rock group dc Talkand The Voice of the Martyrs. The book, written for teens, highlights the martyrdoms of people from every corner of the globe, from the apostle Stephen up to Cassie Bernall. Jon was struck by the testimony of a young Russian named Ivan who served in the Soviet military at the age of 18 (in 1970). Ivan was forced to stand in subzero temperatures wearing his summer uniform for 12 nights in an attempt to make him renounce his Christianity. “A lark threatened with death for singing would still continue to sing. She cannot renounce her nature. Neither can we Christians,” Ivan said to his tormentors. The tactics intensified and by 1972, when he was 20, Ivan wrote his parents, “You will not see me anymore.”

When Ivan’s body was returned to his family, he had been stabbed six times around the heart, with wounds on his head and around the mouth, and signs of beatings on the whole body. Ivan “died with difficulty,” his commander told the family. “He fought death, but he died a Christian.”

In dc Talk’s popular song, “Jesus Freak,” the singers ask:

What would people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus Freak?
What will people do when they find that it’s true?
I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus Freak
’cause there ain’t no disguising the truth.

“I looked up the word freak,” says band member Toby McKeehan, who wrote the song with Mark Heimermann. “It said ‘an ardent enthusiast.’ Then, when I began to read these stories, I realized that being a Jesus Freak is deeper than being an ardent enthusiast. These are the ultimate Jesus Freaks—the people who are willing to die for their faith. When you look at the killings at Wedgwood [Baptist Church] and Columbine, I believe that people are going to have to start counting the cost of saying ‘I’m a Christian.’ I talked to a kid yesterday who told me that on his first day of high school as a freshman, a kid walked up to him and said, ‘I’m gonna kick your—’cause you’re part of the God squad.’

“This generation is into extremes,” McKeehan says. “There are extreme sports and Hollywood is into throwing extremes at us. I believe that Christians will live up to these extremes because that is what the culture calls for. As believers, we need to be just as potent.”

This might all be dismissed as hard-edged over-the-top teen-culture enthusiasms except that, as David Van Biema noted recently in Time, “Christians have made up an increasing proportion of the victims of mass murders.” The kids who were killed in Paducah, Kentucky, were huddled in prayer; of the 12 students who were murdered at Columbine, many were known as Christians, and the three who were killed execution style—shot through the head—were outspoken believers; at Wedgwood the kids who were killed had gathered to celebrate See You At the Pole Day.

“There’s an intensity among the Christians that wasn’t there when I was younger,” dc Talk singer Michael Tait says of his band’s concerts. “It almost dumbfounds me. These guys are 15 and 16 years old and serious about their faith. At the same time it shows you your true colors.”

When I was 16 and a new Christian, my Jesus Freak-ness expressed itself in trappings from the hippie culture—parting my stringy hair in the middle and getting “high on Jesus.” I boldly went into shopping malls and opened little yellow booklets to complete strangers, introducing them to “God’s wonderful plan for your life.”

“At youth group, we’re really starting to understand the urgency of telling people they have to decide—that they can’t sit on the fence,” my son Ben says. “With Columbine and [Wedgwood], we realize we might not be here tomorrow—or they might not be. We better say what we’ve got to say now.”

Which is why he told me that day what song he wanted played at his memorial. It is why I am asking myself if I am still a Jesus Freak.

- More from Wendy Murray Zoba

Making Room for God

Mark Galli

Two routes to divine encounters.

Something that makes no sense at one time can make perfect sense at another. I just reread the mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing and found it rich with spiritual insights. Apparently I did not think so some years ago. As I savored the book recently, I kept bumping into margin notes scribbled in my handwriting, most of which contained emphatic question marks and other signs of confusion and disapproval.

The two subjects of this review are classic expressions of Christian spirituality, but readers who find The Holy Longing enriching probably will be disappointed with Satisfy Your Soul. And readers who relish Satisfy Your Soul will be confused by The Holy Longing.

That’s because these two new books understand Christian spirituality in markedly distinct ways.

Religion or life?

Satisfy Your Soul is by former (self-admitted) rationalist Bruce Demarest, professor of theology at Denver Seminary. It is partly a spiritual autobiography, describing his move from a faith centered on doctrine and action to one that now includes the spiritual and experiential. It’s also an argument for the validity and necessity of evangelicals’ pursuing spirituality.

The Holy Longing is by Canadian Ronald Rolheiser, a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate—in other words, a real Roman Catholic. Rolheiser wrote his book to help anyone struggling with spirituality, but especially those inside the church (and not just the Catholic church).

Demarest, in spite of his significant journey toward spiritual experience, remains a theologian at heart. He spends a lot of pages arguing the legitimacy of spirituality and helping readers discern true and false spiritualities. For example, he warns that the “Labyrinth Walk”—in which people walk through the outline of a maze to increase spiritual awareness—may expose people to “serious error”; on the other hand, “inner healing, or healing of memories [under certain conditions] is consistent with biblical and theological principles.”

And when Demarest describes the essence of Christian spirituality, he points to formal theological categories: it must be Trinitarian, Christ-centered, and biblical.

Rolheiser, on the other hand, though acknowledging his own orthodoxy (“I write … as some one within a confessing, worshiping, Christian, Catholic community”) is interested in embracing truth wherever he finds it. He’s willing to look—in addition to Scripture—at humanist thought and other world religions, but seeks “to weave these perspectives for discipleship into a specifically Christian framework.” He even manages to draw spiritual insights from the lives of Janis Joplin and Princess Di.

Rolheiser’s “nonnegotiable essentials” of Christian spirituality are not theological categories but “(a) private prayer and private morality, (b) social justice, (c) mellowness of heart and spirit, and (d) community as a constitutive element of true worship.” In short, more incarnational, experiential—that is, Catholic—criteria.

The writers describe their goals quite differently. For Demarest, Christian spirituality means “the shaping of our inner character and outer conduct in cooperation with the work of the Spirit so that we are gradually being conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ.” For Rolheiser, “Christian spirituality is not as much about admiring God, or even trying to imitate God, as it is about undergoing God and participating, through taking part in the ordinary give and take of relationships, in the flow of God’s life.”

In short, for Demarest spirituality seems to be a more specifically religious undertaking, something engaged in more or less apart from the world, though it equips us for the world.

For Rolheiser, authentic spirituality includes religious practices like prayer and worship, but fundamentally it is a way of living in and with the world.

Individual or church?

Demarest’s title gives away another difference: Satisfy Your Soul. He addresses individuals. Though he formally agrees that church is vital (“transformation occurs in the context of community”) and encourages readers to seek out spiritual companions, he thinks of the lone individual as the key actor in the spiritual drama.

At the very end of the book, for example, he exhorts readers, “Formulate your personal plan for spiritual growth in Christ. Include clear spiritual goals as well as the means by which you hope to achieve these goals.” To achieve the goal of a more intimate relationship with Christ, he says, “Carve out thirty minutes at the beginning of each day for quietness, Bible meditation, the practice of various prayer forms, and writing in a journal.” He makes no mention of community or corporate worship.

For Rolheiser, Christian spirituality is very much centered in Christian community, and he devotes entire chapters to describing what participating in the church and in the Eucharist does for us spiritually: “In an age when it is so difficult to sustain faith and to sustain community, there can be no better advice than that of Jesus himself: gather around the word of God and break bread together.”

Satisfaction or longing?

The books’ titles give away one more key difference. Demarest suggests that our spiritual longings can be satisfied, and his subtitle suggests his book will “restore” the essence of Christian spirituality. “God has sculpted us humans for eternity, and the crumbs of time fail to satisfy our undying souls,” he writes. “Life that isn’t centered on God and lived in communion with him consistently disappoints. Fortunately, the Teacher does not leave us despairing. In God, our hearts find satisfaction and meaning.”

For Rolheiser, the spiritual life is not about satisfying “the holy longing” but embarking on a “search for Christian spirituality,” in which the spiritual life is never complete. It’s not a one-way journey toward satisfaction as much as learning to live in the ebb and flow of life, which at times is fulfilling and at times is not.

Even moments of intense suffering have their value, says Rolheiser. He considers Mary, the mother of Jesus, the archetype of a central issue when salvation and suffering meet: In observing Jesus on the Cross, “She is carrying a great tension that she is helpless to resolve and must simply live with. … There is great joy in that but there can also be incredible tension.”

Demarest recognizes that evangelical spirituality does not resolve all tension or alleviate suffering, but such themes play no part at the “heart” of his Christian spirituality. They do for Rolheiser: “By pondering as Mary did, as she stood helplessly beneath the cross, and by enduring suffering as Jesus did in the garden at Gethsemane, we have the opportunity to turn hurt into forgiveness, anger into compassion, and hatred into love.”

Satisfy Your Soul strikes me as a better book for those coming from a conservative Protestant background. The book is a fine apologetic for conservatives suspicious of spiritual experience.

Nevertheless, because Demarest overlooks the spirit-forming role of suffering and the church, some readers may wish to venture into Rolheiser’s seemingly more foreign territory.

- More from Mark Galli

Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime

At the end of the eighteenth century, William Wilberforce believed the British Empire stood at a threshold. He thought slavery, which had woven itself inextricably into the British economy, could be eliminated throughout the empire. Though Wilber force’s peers scoffed, his vision became reality in less than 40 years—and by purely political means. David Beckmann and Arthur Simon, both with the political action group Bread for the World, argue in a new book that we stand at another similar threshold at the end of the twentieth century:

Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World
by David Beckmann and Arthur Simon
InterVarsity, 219 pp.,
$10.99, paper

Widespread hunger is no longer necessary.

Wars and tyrants will cause some people to go hungry, no matter what we do. But the resources, technology, and knowledge needed to end the sort of routine, pervasive hunger the world now tolerates are readily available. Ending hunger, in this sense, is quite feasible worldwide. It’s even more clear that most of the hunger in the United States could be eliminated, because other countries at the same level of average per capita income have done so.

A generation ago, scientists and government leaders realized that for the first time the world had the means to overcome hunger. At the World Food Conference in 1974, U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, citing political will as the critical factor in overcoming hunger, proposed and the conference re solved “that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry.” President Gerald Ford then commissioned a National Academy of Science study, which confirmed that lack of political will more than anything else prevented the eradication of hunger. A few years later, President Jimmy Carter’s commission on world hunger concluded that “if decisions and actions well within the capabilities of nations and people working together were implemented, it would be possible to eliminate the worst aspects of hunger and malnutrition by the year 2000.” But the United States did not, as both commissions urged, make this a major policy objective.

All of us stand on the threshold of a new millennium. Progress has been made. In the developing countries, the proportion of the population that is hungry has decreased over the last 25 years from one-third to one-fifth. And even though the population of those countries grew substantially, fewer people there are hungry now than in 1970.

God is giving us an opportunity to reduce human suffering dramatically. Hunger, though complex, can be overcome.

New & Noteworthy: Church History

Mark Galli

Recent and important releases that will shape evangelical thought

Eusebius The Church History: A New Translation with Commentaryby Paul MaierKregel, 412 pp., $24.99

Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260- c.340) was the first historian to pull together (and edit) the first three centuries of the church’s history into some coherent narrative. Modern historians fault his theme—which, to paraphrase Eusebius, was “Ha ha, Rome! The Christians won after all, which proves the truth of our religion!”—but the work remains a rich mine of stories and original source documents. Without The Church History, our knowledge of these centuries would be paltry. Maier—professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University and author of popular historical fiction like Pontius Pilateand The Flames of Rome—has done us a tremendous service: translating, and to some degree editing, Eusebius into readable, engaging prose. With supplemental full-color illustrations, charts, maps, and commentary included, there’s no excuse for not dabbling in history. Some passages, especially the accounts of persecution and martyrdom, still make for gripping reading.

Dictionary of the Presbyterian and Reformed Tradition in America
D. G. Hart, general editor; Mark A. Noll, consulting editor.
InterVarsity, 286 pp., $16.99, paper

This is the only dictionary of its kind (emphasizing history more than theology), guided by the keen minds of two highly esteemed historians, cleanly written and edited, and a bargain as well—a combination that suggests it will be a standard resource for American historians and thought leaders of the Reformed tradition for many years.

Unshakable Faith: Booker T. Washington & George Washington Carver
by John Perry
Multnomah, 400 pp., $21.99

The subjects of writer John Perry’s double biography are politically incorrect on two counts. First, these two intellectuals believed that individual effort and education—more than political demagoguery or rights talk—were the key ingredients to achieving social justice for black people. Second, they were devout Christians. Perry’s biography reacquaints us with these two largely forgotten heroes of American history and Christian faith. Washington and Carver may not have had all the answers to injustice, but it’s clear in retrospect they had some worth considering again.

Inventing the “Great Awakening”
by Frank Lambert
Princeton, 300 pp., $35

The Great Awakening signals the birth of modern evangelicalism, when many of the key social traits of evangelicalism as we know it (e.g., popular, conversion-oriented, biblical, and media savvy) come together. Frank Lambert, associate professor of history at Purdue University, shows how this was an “invented” event, meaning that someone (in this case, revivalists) interpreted the many scattered and local revivals of the 1730s and 1740s, seeing them as a powerful, widespread, and God-initiated religious revival. Opponents saw no such thing, tried to show there was more hype than reality to revivalists’ claims, and called the whole business a “great ado.” Aside from the unfortunate term “inventing” (which suggests, even if Lambert doesn’t, that the whole thing was made up), the book insightfully examines an early American culture war, in which competing groups vied to determine (for themselves and their readers) the meaning of the local revivals erupting in many colonies in a short span of time.

Mark Galli is Book Review Editor for Christianity Today and Editor of Christian History magazine.

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Ideas

Doctor’s Orders

Philip Yancey

Columnist

Why should I care if my doctor is unhappy? I’m not his psychiatrist.

In a recent sermon, my pastor told of a frantic phone call he received from his mother several years ago. “Peter, you must come home right away!” she said. His elderly father had been knocked out, badly cut, and relieved of thousands of dollars. He was lying in critical condition in a local hospital. Peter caught the next plane home and congratulated the men who did the deed.

“You see,” he explained, “they were cardiac specialists. By operating so quickly after his heart attack, they saved my father’s life.”

Last summer I too had an encounter with masked men bearing scalpels. A surgeon operated on my foot, not my heart, and my life was never in danger. Yet the horizontal recovery time did give me a chance to reflect on pain that we choose voluntarily, sometimes for our own good and sometimes to our peril.

While rehabilitating, I often did exercises that hurt because I knew that working through the soreness would allow my foot to regain its usefulness. On the other hand, the surgeon warned against bicycling, mountain climbing, running, and other activities that might endanger the healing process. Basically, anything that sounded fun, he vetoed.

On one visit I tried to talk him into granting me a premature golf match. “Some friends get together once a year. It’s important to me. I’ve been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body, and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?”

Without a flicker of hesitation my doctor replied, “It would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months.”

“I thought you were a golfer,” I said, appealing to his sympathies.

“I am. That’s how I know you can’t swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal.”

Later, I told my wife about this strange way of expressing disapproval. “Why should I care if my doctor is unhappy?” I joked. “I’m not his psychiatrist.”

The point was obvious. My doctor has nothing against my playing golf; as a fellow golfer, he sympathizes with me. But he has my best interests at heart. It will indeed make him unhappy if I do something prematurely that might damage my long-term recovery. He wants me to play golf next year, and the next, and the rest of my life, and for that reason he could not sanction a match too soon after my surgery.

As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor’s odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict—”No golf!”—I might have stubbornly rebelled. He left me the free choice and expressed the consequences in a most personal way: Disobedience would grieve him, for his job was to restore my health.

The role of a doctor may be the most revealing image in thinking about God and sin. What a doctor does for me physically—guide me toward health—God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs—for our own sakes.

Dr. Paul Brand told me about attending a meeting of government health experts. He compiled a list of all the behavior-related problems on the agenda: heart disease and hypertension exacerbated by stress; stomach ulcers and cancers associated with a toxic environment; aids; sexually transmitted diseases; emphysema and lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking; fetal damage stemming from maternal alcohol and drug abuse; obesity and other diet-related disorders; violent crime and automobile accidents involving alcohol. These were the endemic, even epidemic, concerns for health experts in the United States.

A comparable gathering of experts in India, he knew, would have dealt instead with malaria, polio, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid, and leprosy. After valiantly conquering most of those infectious diseases, the U.S. has now exchanged its old health problems for new ones—most of which involve personal choice.

Sin represents a grave danger to my spiritual, and perhaps my physical, health. The more I see my sins in this light, the more I understand God’s strong words against them. I find myself gazing into the grieving eyes of a Doctor whose patients are destroying themselves. As Jesus said, applying the doctor image to himself, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Sometime today, sometime tomorrow, I will recreate the original rebellion of Eden and act by my standards and my desires, and not God’s. God cannot overlook such behavior; it must be accounted for. But in that reckoning he aims not to destroy but to heal. No surgeon who wills the health of a patient can effect it without some pain.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.

—T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Philip Yancey: A Philip Yancey column that ran from 1985 to 2009

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Ban May Go to Supreme Court

Jody Veenker

The U.S. Supreme Court may end up finally settling whether it is legal for states to ban partial-birth abortions, because federal appeals courts are rendering contradictory judgments.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago recently upheld state laws in Illinois and Wisconsin that ban partial-birth abortions. The Seventh Circuit’s decision contradicts a September ruling by the Eighth Circuit appeals court, which struck down partial-birth abortion bans in Nebraska, Arkansas, and Iowa. The disagreement between two appeals courts of equal influence may lead the Supreme Court to issue its own ruling.

About 30 states have partial-birth abortion bans, but at least 14 of those laws have been struck down in court. According to the National Right to Life Committee, ten states (including Illinois and Wisconsin) actively ban partial-birth abortions: Indiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia. The New Jersey legislature also recently passed a partial-birth abortion ban in October over the veto of Governor Christine Todd Whitman.

Pro-abortion activists believe the Supreme Court ruling could affect the way Roe v. Wade is interpreted in future cases. Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, says the circuit court’s ruling disregards that abortion is a “fundamental constitutional right.” She fears that if the Supreme Court agrees with the Seventh Circuit, the decision would be “the death knell of Roe.”

Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, is quick to point out that “the Supreme Court could uphold these laws without disturbing Roe.”

The language of Roe refers to unborn fetuses, but partial-birth abortion procedures are performed while the fetus is being born.

Partial-birth abortions are usually implemented during the second or third trimesters of a pregnancy. The procedure involves partially removing a fetus from the womb, inserting scissors into its skull and extracting its brain before removing its entire body.

In October a federal ban on partial-birth abortions was passed by the Senate for the third time, but it fell short of the majority needed to override President Clinton’s expected veto. The 49 Republicans and 14 Democrats who voted in favor of the bill came up 2 votes shy of the number needed for a two-thirds majority.

The House, which has overturned President Clinton’s veto on this legislation twice, is also expected to consider the ban next year.

- More from Jody Veenker

Marketing Martyrdom to Teens

Jody Veenker

Merchandisers not only are banking on teenagers believing in God, but also on their desire to buy the T-shirt, do the Bible study, and wear the bracelet.

After the tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and Wedgwood Baptist Church in Texas, martyrdom is becoming a common theme for youth pastors and a business opportunity for retailers.

“We quickly realized there was something in this event that young people were drawn to,” says Jason Janz, a youth pastor at South Sheridan Baptist Church in Denver.

To inspire kids with Cassie Bernall’s proclamation of faith, Janz worked out an endorsement agreement with Bernall’s parents for a line of “Yes, I Believe” merchandise that includes bracelets, hats, T-shirts, and a testimonial video. A Web site (www.yesibelieve.com) allows visitors to register for Bible study, purchase materials, and chat with other teenagers about Bernall’s example.

Janz also got the permission of Bernall’s parents to write a play and a Bible study based on her life. And She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, written by her mother Misty, has stayed on bestseller lists since its October debut.

A percentage of the proceeds from all “Yes, I Believe” merchandise goes to the Cassie Bernall Foundation, which will fund ministry in North America and other countries. One of the first projects supported by the foundation will be the construction of an orphanage and up to 20 homes in Honduras.

Family Christian Book stores also believes Bernall’s story will help move merchandise. In its catalogs and stores the company promotes a similar line of necklaces, key chains, mugs, books, and even a CD, packaged with the well-known phrase, “Yes, I Believe in God,” boldly lettered in red, white, and blue.

The Center for Reclaiming America has developed a program, titled “Yes, I Believe in God,” that encourages students to share their faith in public schools. The program kit includes a T-shirt with a list of student freedoms (including the freedom to bring your Bible to school, to speak openly about your faith, and to wear religious symbols and jewelry), a New Testament, book covers bearing the Ten Commandments, and a “Yes, I Believe in God” bracelet.

Christian artists are also holding up examples of martyrdom. dc Talk, a Christian music group, recently repackaged Foxe’s Book of Martyrs for a new generation, calling suffering saints “the ultimate Jesus Freaks” (see “Elegy for a Jesus Freak,” p. 88).

Singer Steven Curtis Chapman helped create a video program after the fatal shootings that took place at his alma mater—Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky—in 1998. That program helps teenagers share their faith and recognize violent warning signs in their peers. It is crucial to remind youth that Christians do not live or grieve like people without hope, Chapman says.

But it is also important to guard against the commercialization of faith, says William D. Romanowski, professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College. “In some ways, wearing religious paraphernalia is hardly different from wearing brand-name clothing,” says Romanowski, author of Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life. “Both tend to foster a consumer-oriented identity in which purchasing is like an act of faith. Wearing a clothing item that advertises a religious theme can easily be confused with, or even substituted for, genuine belief.”

- More from Jody Veenker

JESUS Film Debuts on DVD

JESUS has gone high tech.

The JESUS Film Project, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, has released its missions-focused film on digital versatile disc (DVD).

The disc contains eight language versions of the film, including Arabic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. The organization estimates the multiple translations will allow about half of the world’s people to view the film in a language they understand. It is the first feature-length film to use all eight language channels, making it one of the most advanced DVDs ever produced.

The new format can be played on some laptop computers, allowing for greater portability to remote locations, says JESUS Film Project president Paul Eshleman.

“The future of technology is that people are going to be watching movies on computer screens,” Eshleman says. He hopes to bundle the film with new computers as DVD becomes standard on more systems.

The JESUS film DVD also links with the Internet, providing biblical references, maps, character profiles, director’s notes, and an interactive knowledge game.

The San Clemente, California-based ministry estimates more than 2 billion people in 230 countries have seen the film since its 1979 release.

In Brief: December 06, 1999

Robert D. Van Kampen, 60, antique-Bible collector and multimillionaire investor, died of a viral heart condition October 29 in Chicago. The founder of Van Kampen mutual funds created a Scriptorium of ancient Christian manuscripts in Grand Haven, Michigan. Holdings include the book of Daniel from the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, Hebrew Torah scrolls, and papyrus and clay tablets dating back to 2000 B.C. A graduate of Wheaton College, Van Kampen also wrote several books on eschatology, including The Rapture Question Answered, The Fourth Reich, and The Sign.
Betty Chapman, who founded the Bible League with her husband William in 1938, died October 7 in South Holland, Illinois, at age 97.
Despite Hindu opposition, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), on the heels of its Jewish evangelism prayer guides (CT, Nov. 15, 1999, p. 18), has released a prayer guide for Hindu evangelism in time for Divali, the Hindu Festival of Lights celebrated in November.
George W. Murray has been named president of Columbia (S.C.) International University. Murray has served as president of The Evangelical Alliance Mission since 1994.
James Guy Jr., dean of the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, has been named the eighth president of Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa.

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