As speculation about a possible successor intensified in recent years, Billy Graham always told reporters that the decision was not his to make, but up to God and the 32-member board of directors of his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA).

But in 1995, as age and health concerns increasingly have weighed on Graham—and after much prayer, as well as input from his wife, Ruth—he felt compelled to put forth a recommendation: his namesake, 43-year-old William Franklin Graham III.

By a unanimous vote at the BGEA's annual meeting ending November 7, Graham's seventy-seventh birthday, the board agreed. Franklin Graham became first vice chair—a new position with direct succession as chair and chief executive officer "should his father ever become incapacitated."

The action settles who will lead the 45-year-old organization once the founder is gone. In the short term, changes will be minimal. "I'm going to do everything I can to help my father so that the last years of his ministry are his best years," Franklin Graham told CT after the announcement. "I want to stay in the shadows and serve him."

According to several individuals close to the senior Graham, his elder son had the enthusiastic support of some directors, while others did not see him as their first choice. In the end, though, all rallied for the sake of unity—and for the sake of the founder.

MEGA MINISTRY: The BGEA is one of the largest evangelical nonprofits in the nation, after Campus Crusade for Christ, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Focus on the Family. The BGEA generated $88 million last year, raising $72 million in private donations. The BGEA employs 300 people at its Minneapolis headquarters and another 244 elsewhere, including 52 full-time at the Cove, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

While preaching crusades and subsequent nationwide telecasts of those events have been the staple of the BGEA, its other well-known ministries include the Cove, a weekly Hour of Decision radio broadcast, the monthly "Decision" magazine, and feature films from World Wide Pictures.

Franklin Graham has not been sitting around waiting for the call to head BGEA. He leads two evangelistic humanitarian relief organizations, Samaritan's Purse (SP) and World Medical Mission (WMM), both in Boone, North Carolina. He plans to continue heading those organizations, which provide relief to famine and war victims in trouble spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia.

Franklin Graham has been a director of the BGEA since 1979. (Most board members are executives of business and religious institutions.) For the past five years, he has been preaching eight to ten crusades a year in smaller North American cities, under the auspices of BGEA, with John Wesley White and Ralph Bell. He also chairs the committee that brought the $26 million Cove to fruition in 1993 (CT, Oct. 25, 1993, p. 89).

"The last few years I've been giving more and more time to the BGEA," the younger Graham told CT.

SUCCESSOR, NOT REPLACEMENT: Many observers are quick to point out that transferring the title is not the same as transferring the mantle. Naming Franklin Graham as next in line does not transform him into someone America turns to in a crisis, who gains the ear of the President, or who becomes a fixture on Gallup's annual list of most-admired men, all feats his father has accomplished since his son was a toddler.

"Franklin has not been, nor could he be, anointed to be the next Billy Graham," says Graham biographer William Martin, author of "A Prophet with Honor" (William Morrow, 1991). "Billy Graham is not an office which has to be automatically filled when the current occupant leaves it."

Evangelist Greg Laurie of Riverside, California, whose six Harvest Crusades this year attracted 317,850, says Franklin Graham is "uniquely qualified" to succeed his father. Laurie, 43, is on both the BGEA and SP boards. Still, Laurie says his friend will not quickly accomplish what his father has done in the past half-century. "Franklin is not being designated the premier evangelist."

Jerry A. Miller, executive director at the Cove and a BGEA board member, concurs. "Can he be the evangelist his daddy was?" Miller asks. "No one can."

But Anne Graham Lotz, Graham's 48-year-old daughter and also a BGEA board member, says, "The organization really has become too heavy for Daddy. This should have been done years ago."

Lotz says two factors triggered the timing: her father's declining health and his confidence in his son.

"When he collapsed in Toronto [CT, July 17, 1995, p. 58], it was the first time he couldn't fulfill a commitment," Lotz says. "That was a real eye-opener for him: there will come a time when he can't do this anymore."

Lotz also says her father was impressed with Franklin's "powerful" preaching the first time he heard him, in April 1994, in Charleston, West Virginia. At the first joint preaching appearance of the two Grahams in Saskatchewan in October, Lotz says her father thought Franklin's preaching was "anointed."

The 67-year-old Miller agrees that the vote was timely and necessary. "Billy always says he can't find the word retirement in the Bible, but I think he has come to understand the brevity and frailty of life," Miller says. "Sometimes he has a tough time standing because of his Parkinson's disease."

A quarter-century ago, it appeared Graham's brother-in-law Leighton Ford was being unofficially groomed to succeed him. However, in 1986 he started his own evangelistic organization, Leighton Ford Ministries.

Franklin Graham's rebellious ways—chain smoking, whiskey drinking, expulsion from college—eliminated him from contention, at least until his conversion in 1974 at age 22.

"He rebelled for so many years because he could not measure up to his dad," Miller says. "Then God got ahold of him in a mighty way."

A TIME TO PREACH: Soon he became head of SP, which now has an annual budget of $22 million, and WMM with an annual $6.8 million budget. There are 110 employees at the two ministries. Not until 1989 did Graham show an inclination to follow his father in preaching.

While he always has been an effective public speaker promoting his own organizations, preaching did not come naturally. A decade ago in Canada, evangelist John Wesley White, a part of the BGEA team since 1961, convinced him to speak at a rally. When Franklin Graham gave an invitation, no one came forward, and the son vowed not to try preaching again.

Six years ago, though, again at the request of White, Franklin Graham agreed to devote a tithe of his time—36 days a year—to preaching. Initially, White says, Franklin Graham appeared uncomfortable and nervous, but now he preaches in a "dynamic" and "dramatic" style akin to his father's 30 years ago. Their physical similarities are striking. The son has the same lilting voice, slender frame, handsome looks, and mannerisms when driving home a point about salvation.

Miller says Franklin Graham matured because he relies on the Holy Spirit and spends more time studying the Bible. Only with time and experience did Billy Graham learn to stay above the political fray, ditch the loud clothes, and tone down an overly apocalyptic gospel.

"There was no other logical choice to succeed Billy Graham," says White, 67. "He has been waiting for Franklin to mature, but he's had this in mind for 15 years."

BGEA OPTIONS: BGEA president and chief operating officer John Corts declined to be interviewed for this article. But in March, he told CT that the BGEA at that time had reached no consensus on the matter of succession and in fact had seven options laid out as to what could happen, including closing the massive ministry operation.

Franklin Graham, in his new autobiography, "Rebel with a Cause: Finally Comfortable Being Graham" (Thomas Nelson), says there had been no long-range plan for the BGEA until the Cove. "Some of the older members of the BGEA didn't like to think about what would happen to the organization when Daddy could no longer preach."

More and more, Franklin Graham has been identifying himself with his famous father (CT, Dec. 12, 1994, p. 63). The harmony hit a high note on October 29, when Franklin Graham released his autobiography and had his father preach—for the first time—a night of his own four-day crusade.

His crusades have been taking on more of the same tone as his father's. For instance, musicians performing at his Saskatchewan crusade included Michael W. Smith, Ricky Skaggs, and George Beverly Shea, who had all performed at Billy Graham's Sacramento crusade a week earlier (see "Innovation Remains Billy Graham's Speciality," in this issue).

NO CHANGES, FOR NOW: While some BGEA employees are relieved that the future is more settled, questions linger as to whether the younger Graham will eventually reorganize or shift the BGEA's ministry emphasis.

He has taken over an existing ministry before. He moved the two-person staff of Samaritan's Purse, an organization founded in 1970 by Bob Pierce, to Boone from Hollywood when he took over. But Franklin Graham says he sees no need to change BGEA.

"We've just got too many good people with families that have been loyal to this organization, loyal to my father," he says. "I would never think of doing anything that would hurt that kind of relationship or that unity that we have."

He says he has the support of the BGEA board. "I'm sure there may be somebody out there that may not like me," he says. "If there's somebody who wasn't happy, they didn't say anything, and they were given plenty of opportunity."

At the November meeting, the founder told board members to propose a better plan, if anyone had one, and to wait until January to approve his recommendation. Miller notes the board decided to act immediately.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: "I think everyone in the family is very supportive," Franklin Graham says. "I don't know of any jealousies. I think they all have expected this for some time."

All four of his siblings are involved in ministry: Gigi Tchividjian, 50, an author and seminar speaker; Lotz, 48, founder of AnGeL Ministries in Raleigh, North Carolina; Ruth McIntyre, 45, a Samaritan's Purse employee based in Fort Defiance, Virginia; and Ned, 37, president of East Gate Ministries in Sumner, Washington, a missionary organization working in China.

Some observers say Lotz, a Southern Baptist itinerant preacher, is every bit as powerful as her father in his heyday.

"I'm not an evangelist," she says. "I'm not comfortable giving an invitation in a stadium.

"The BGEA call is on Franklin," Lotz says. "I believe I am called to teach and preach. I don't need the BGEA to do that."

FINANCIAL INTEGRITY: One of the hallmarks of the BGEA has been financial integrity. Graham's salary and housing allowance amounts to $135,000 a year. Since 1950 he has received no speaking fees or honorariums, and his book royalties have been placed in a trust that pays for ministry operations.

Franklin Graham's annual SP salary is $106,533, and for now he will not be added to the BGEA payroll. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)—the watchdog organization cofounded by his father—suspended SP and WMM in March 1992, citing "inadequate control." ECFA readmitted SP and WMM in January 1993 after receiving information on the cost of fundraising as a percentage of income; board approval for Graham's involvement in a charity event; and explanation of advance budgeting procedures.

Franklin Graham has denied any wrongdoing. "We never broke any laws, we never violated any standards," he told CT last year. "It took several months for us to be able to give all the facts and all the material for them to look at, and they were satisfied."

THE LESS-TRAVELED ROAD: Franklin Graham says he is content to continue preaching in less-populated areas, and he will reduce his number of missions conference and church speaking commitments in order to focus on crusades.

While Billy Graham's recent venues have included huge, domed stadiums in Tokyo, Toronto, and Atlanta, his son typically preaches in gymnasiums and auditoriums in places such as Bozeman, Montana, and Farmington, New Mexico.

"We've had great results in these mid-sized towns," Franklin says. "If doors open up in bigger cities, fine. But I'm not looking for it."

Both Grahams plan to preach in Auckland, New Zealand, in February and in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, Australia, in March.

Beyond that, Billy Graham is scheduled to preach only in June in Minneapolis, his BGEA base, and in September in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. In the Sacramento crusade in October, he indicated the Charlotte event "may be the last crusade we'll ever hold like this."

Franklin Graham says, "If we get to September of next year and Daddy still has strength and health, we're going to go on. I'm going to be the first one to encourage him." By sharing some of the preaching, he believes his father's ministry may be extended. "As long as he can breathe and whisper the name of Jesus Christ, I'm going to say, 'Daddy, keep going.' "

Martin, Graham's biographer, says Franklin Graham faces a much more crowded evangelical field than his father did when he helped coalesce the movement. "It seems unlikely that mass crusade evangelism will ever have in this country the same kind of potential that it had in the 1940s and 1950s," Martin says. "There is now so much competition for the general public's attention and so many other avenues for evangelical Christians to carry out their missions than mass crusades."

Franklin Graham knows the comparisons with his father that he has dreaded over the years will only increase now. "I have not been asked to replace my father," he says. "If I had been asked to do that, I wouldn't, because I can't. But I have been asked to manage this organization and lead it. I'm committed to holding this organization together and keeping it in crusade evangelism."

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Billy Graham showed few signs of fatigue in October's five-day Sacramento crusade, his first since collapsing at a Toronto press conference in June and hurting himself in a Paris bathroom in July. In Canada, Graham lost five pints of blood from his colon, and in France, he cracked his back in three places.

"I'm a little bit older than when I was here before, but I feel just as good," Graham said as he took the podium on opening night. On doctors' orders, he spent most of the previous three months resting. He had also held crusades in the California capital in 1958 and 1983.

Graham blended anecdotes and fervent preaching, spending even more time than usual stressing the need for salvation in his only 1995 U.S. crusade. A total of 11,483 people registered commitments out of the 177,600 who attended. The 6.5 percentage was double the average for a Graham crusade.

Along with often mentioning the Second Coming, Graham, who turned 77 last month, noted his own mortality. "I don't know how many years I have left to live," Graham said on the final night.

SMALL AUDITORIUM: Attendees packed the 17,000-seat Arco Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings basketball team, each night of the crusade. Another 15,000 chairs were set up outside, where three outdoor stages with 16-by-22-foot Sony Jumbotron video screens had been erected. "We were afraid people would leave if they found it was full inside," said Roger Flessing, television director for the crusade.

This became the first indoor-outdoor interactive crusade in Graham's half-century of preaching. Musical and drama groups rotated different acts on each stage, with images—from a total of 15 cameras—flashed from inside to outdoors and vice versa. Sometimes groups on each stage performed simultaneous songs or skits. Because audio and video signals went both ways, organizers called it the most technically complex Graham event, surpassing Global Mission from Puerto Rico in March. In that crusade, 30 satellites sent video transmissions to 3,000 downlink sites in 185 countries.

Graham himself, rather than a local minister as customary, prayed for the offering on the final night because $200,000 needed to be raised to meet the crusade budget. "In all our travels, we've never left a city with a debt," Graham said. The offering totaled $211,000.

The $1.35 million budget ran over by more than $100,000, in part because of the need to hire extra labor. The stages, indoor and out, could not be set up until the day of the crusade because of a soccer playoff game at Arco Arena the night before.

In addition to targeting a laid-back, video-driven culture, the outdoor venues took advantage of the cloudless, breezeless, 70-degree weather that is a staple of Northern California autumn nights. Families brought blankets and lawn chairs to sit on grass near the parking lot to view the giant screens.

Graham realizes that to reach a younger audience he needs someone other than 86-year-old George Beverly Shea and 72-year-old Cliff Barrows leading music. While crowds averaged just under 24,500 the first three nights, 42,000 came when Michael W. Smith sang, and 45,000 attended "youth night" when DC Talk performed.

"For that many youth to be a part of the crusade made a major impact on the community," says Phillip Goudeaux, pastor of Calvary Christian Center, attended by 6,500 each week. Goudeaux, a former Black Panther, says he became a committed Christian after hearing Graham speak in 1972.

REACHING CATHOLICS: Graham's Sacramento visit helped penetrate Catholic parishes with the gospel, according to G. Henry Wells, senior pastor of the 3,000-member Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church. A total of 303 Protestant and 38 Catholic churches participated in the event.

"There is a renewed openness among Catholics to get back to church and start reading the Bible," Wells said. "We've had quite a few Catholic counselors who know the Lord."

Graham paid tribute to Pope John Paul II on opening night. "Thank God that he has the voice to speak out courageously on the moral issues of our day," Graham said, in reference to the 75-year-old pontiff.

Local churchgoers interpreted the crusade into nine languages: Urdu, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Hmong, Vietnamese, Japanese, Russian, and Korean. One of the Russian translators, Yuri Lavrenov, spent nine years as a KGB agent in his native Belarus. "When I accepted Christ, they kicked me out and wanted to put me in a concentration camp," Lavrenov says of the Russian spy agency. But because of glasnost and the reforms implemented by Mikhail Gorbachev, Lavrenov came to Sacramento on a refugee visa four years ago instead.

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While many local churches are conducting follow-up work on new converts from the Billy Graham crusade, employees at Reinhard Bonnke Ministries in Sacramento have a much bigger harvest field in sight: all 50 United States and the 12 Canadian provinces and territories.

The week before the Graham crusade, employees at the German evangelist's U.S. headquarters in Sacramento began work on a two-year project: designing a 20-page evangelistic booklet that will be mailed to all 112 million households in the United States and Canada in September 1997.

Bonnke's international ministry, Christ for All Nations (CFAN), based in his hometown of Frankfurt, has mailed booklets to the 24 million homes of the United Kingdom and the 40 million German-speaking households of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Liechtenstein during the past two years. To date, 70,000 decision-for-Christ cards have been mailed back to West Midlands, England, and 33,000 returned in Frankfurt.

The glossy British version of "From Minus to Plus: The Epic of Christ's Cross" features full-color photographs and the simple message of salvation in chapters from "Sin in the Twentieth Century" to "Close Encounter with God."

A HEART FOR AFRICA: Bonnke, 55, is known primarily for having held huge tent revival meetings in Africa since 1978. According to Bonnke's own numbers, in this decade alone he has preached to 17.5 million on that continent, with 3.6 million making professions of faith.

For most of his ministry, Bonnke has been preaching in the Third World. He continues to conduct crusades primarily in Muslim-dominated countries, such as Chad and Mali, that have a minority Christian population. He regularly encounters opposition not only from Muslim leaders, but the Orthodox church as well (CT, June 19, 1995, p. 44). "Reinhard is not interested in preaching in the United States, where there is 24-hour-a-day Christian television," says Ron Shaw, a native of India, who is Bonnke's national director in Sacramento. "He wants to go to the lost who haven't heard the gospel."

Lower costs and higher conversion rates are other factors. The typical Bonnke overseas crusade costs $200,000, with an average of 100,000 people making confessions of faith during a six-day event. Noting the cost of the Graham crusade in Sacramento, the 55-year-old Shaw says, "Reinhard feels a million and a half dollars is better spent in Africa and Asia."

Bonnke says God told him in a vision three years ago to blanket Europe and North America with the message of the Cross. His message encountered opposition in Germany from several prominent church leaders who have accused Bonnke of trying to confuse the population. Lutherans have been particularly suspicious of the theology of Bonnke, a Pentecostal whose crusades often feature miraculous healings. "No medical healings are shared publicly without medical verification," Shaw says.

Yet support has come from surprising quarters. For example, several Catholic priests in Austria read the sinner's prayer in Bonnke's booklet from their pulpits.

The key to the campaign, as has been the case with any Bonnke—or Graham—crusade, is local church participation. Some 3,200 German congregations have participated in the literature-distribution program. In the United Kingdom, 15,000 churches cooperated, a record for any joint endeavor there.

In the United States, the Bonnke ministry is hoping to have 50,000 local churches participate. Pastors must sign a statement of faith that involves orthodox beliefs.

CHURCH IN ACTION: Once an individual's response card is received, the ministry mails a letter to that person, informing him or her of the nearest church that is participating in the evangelism outreach. In addition, a follow-up booklet on the importance of church attendance, "Now That You Are Saved," is also mailed out. The church pastor then receives a letter giving notification of the response.

Bonnke is relying on the generosity of churches to help defray the cost of the U.S. mailing. At an estimated 60 cents per booklet, paper, printing, and mailing costs would be about $67 million.

"We're going to challenge God's people to help pay for their neighborhood or street," says Shaw, who is married to Bonnke's sister, Felicia. "We will challenge churches to take care of their own city." Jack Hayford's 7,000-member Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, has become one of the first congregations involved. The Foursquare Gospel pastor is on Bonnke's board of trustees.

In the UK, the project cost $10 million, and in Germany it cost $25 million. The Sacramento office—which moved into larger quarters last month—now has nine employees, but that number could swell to 200 when workers are needed to coordinate responses to the highly automated computer church data base.

Peter Van Den Berg, who moved to Sacramento from Frankfurt in October to direct the project, predicts it will be the most appealing mass mailing in U.S. history. "The quality of the material will lead people to make a decision one way or the other," says Van Den Berg, a 48-year-old Zimbabwe native who is vice chair of CFAN International. "People will keep it lying around the home even if they don't respond, because it is attractive."

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U.S. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) likes to tell the story of the Gospel Mission, a drug-treatment center for homeless men not far from the nation's Capitol. Under the leadership of John Woods, the mission successfully rehabilitates two-thirds of those who seek treatment there.

Just three blocks away is a government-operated shelter with similar goals. But even though it spends 20 times more per person, that shelter boasts only a 10 percent success rate. Coats has an explanation for the disparity: "The Gospel Mission succeeds because it provides more than a meal, more than a drug treatment. It is in the business of spreading the grace of God."

In recent decades, faith-based charities such as the Gospel Mission have been required to succeed on their own. Concerns about the separation of church and state have prevented them from receiving government aid. But all that will change if lawmakers retain what has become known as the "charitable choice" clause as part of legislation aimed at welfare reform.

U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) proposed the charitable-choice initiative. Approved in September as part of the Senate's welfare-reform bill, it prohibits discrimination against a social service organization "on the basis that the organization has a religious character."

This means that faith-based charities could contract with all levels of government—or receive funds in the form of vouchers or certificates—without having to change or suppress their religious identity. The legislation specifies that religious charities receiving government funds may require employees to "adhere to [their] religious tenets and teachings" and to submit to organizational rules "regarding the use of drugs or alcohol." Participating religious organizations would not be required to remove "religious art, icons, Scripture, or other symbols."

The measure also prohibits faith-based service organizations from discriminating against beneficiaries of their services "on the basis of religion, a religious belief, or refusal to actively participate in a religious practice." It specifies that no funds "provided directly to institutions or organizations to provide services … shall be expended for sectarian worship or instruction."

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY: According to Keith Pavlischek, who directs Evangelicals for Social Action's (ESA) Crossroads public-policy program, the charitable-choice provisions of the bill represent a "historic opportunity to reduce governmental bias against religious nonprofits and greatly strengthen the delivery of social services to the poor."

Both the House and Senate versions of welfare-reform bills are being considered by a joint conference committee. In a letter to members of that committee, ESA president Ron Sider stated, "Evidence is mounting that faith-based service programs are often more successful than other programs in correcting social problems." According to Sider, it is wrong "for government to demand that religious nonprofits gut precisely that part of their program that makes them so effective."

Serge Duss, associate director of government relations for World Vision, says the legislation is "especially important since government is wanting the private sector, including religious organizations, to do more."

NOT EVERYONE SOLD: Despite its popularity, the legislation has its share of detractors, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United, maintains that federal money "will inevitably be used to proselytize." He believes that, in spite of the language intended to protect beneficiaries from religious indoctrination, a connection between receiving services and participating in the religious activities will be impossible to avoid. Ashcroft points out that the proposed legislation mandates other service options for those who are uncomfortable with the religious environment of a faith-based organization.

Lynn also contends that the legislation will "corrupt the notion of charitable giving." He says, "I'm concerned that people will stop giving to charitable organizations if they feel the needs of those organizations are being addressed by the government." Supporters of the legislation focus on the other possibility: that faith-based charities will be able to accomplish more with more money.

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In spite of the strong vote in the House of Representatives against third-trimester, "partial-birth" abortions, a presidential veto may set back this first effort by Congress to prohibit an abortion procedure.

On November 1, the House approved the ban with a two-thirds majority (288 to 139). The Senate, however, delayed a vote on its version of the bill November 8 by sending it to the Judiciary Committee, where it is uncertain what amendments, if any, will be attached to the bill before it returns to the Senate floor this month.

Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) led the effort to scuttle the bill in the Senate. He and two other Judiciary Committee members, Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Hank Brown (R-Colo.), are expected to attempt to gut the bill by amending it to include an exception for the mother's health. Many courts have interpreted the mother's "health" to include the psychological well-being of the mother, which can be applied to virtually all abortions. The House version of the bill, sponsored by Charles Canady (R-Fla.), makes an exception only when there is "reasonable doubt" that the mother's "life" is in danger.

Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), sponsor of the Senate version, says opponents of the bill are trying to dilute the gruesome reality of partial-birth abortions. "They don't want to see what happens in this grisly, disgusting procedure," he says. "They don't want the American people to see it."

Smith says proponents of the bill are using the delay to build support to ban this abortion technique. "The more people see of this procedure, the less they like it," he says. As Smith described the procedure in detail, women walked off the Senate floor, and gallery visitors winced and covered their ears.

ENDING A LIFE: Partial-birth abortion, also known as dilation and extraction ("D and X"), is a procedure for ending late-term pregnancies: The mother visits the abortion facility on three successive days. On the first two days, her cervix is mechanically dilated. On the third day, the abortionist extracts the baby, feet first, from the womb and through the birth canal until all but the head is exposed. Then the tips of surgical scissors are thrust into the base of the baby's skull, and a suction catheter is inserted through the opening and the brain is removed, collapsing the skull and making it easier to deliver.

Opponents of the legislation charge it is part of a pro-life strategy to overturn abortion rights. In Washington, press conferences have been held to defend the procedure on the basis of its usefulness in ending pregnancies in cases of severe fetal deformity. In addition, some liberal columnists have defended it. Ellen Goodman, in a mid-November column, commented that the procedure is "sometimes the best of the rotten options—the one that may best enable a woman to have another baby."

Officially, the American Medical Association (AMA) is neutral on whether to ban the procedure, even though an AMA study committee has endorsed the ban.

Two physicians, Martin Haskell of Dayton, Ohio, and James McMahon of Los Angeles (who died Oct. 28), have openly acknowledged performing partial-birth abortions. Haskell told American Medical News in a 1993 interview that about 80 percent of his D and X abortions are "purely elective."

McMahon indicated in his report to Congress that even in the "nonelective" abortions he performs, his criteria are very liberal, including maternal depression, maternal youth, and non-life-threatening fetal deformities such as cleft palate.

Haskell said he performs partial-birth abortions until 26 weeks of gestation. McMahon had said he performed these abortions through 40 weeks. Both confirmed the majority of babies are alive until near the conclusion of the abortion.

MEDICALLY NECESSARY? Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the only physician in the Senate, says he has widely consulted with medical colleagues and found none who believes the procedure is necessary.

Prof. Watson Bowes of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Pamela Smith, head of the obstetrics teaching program at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, confirmed that partial-birth abortions are not necessary even to save the mother's life, although the bill as passed in the House makes allowance for that circumstance.

Clarke Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life in Chicago, agrees: "There is no medical procedure or medical condition in this country which would justify the use of the partial-birth abortion procedure. It's not needed to address any clinical dangers or condition that a woman might have."

There are conflicting data on how often the procedure is used since many states do not require doctors to report abortions. The National Abortion Federation estimates only about 450 of the 1.5 million abortions performed each year are partial-birth abortions. But Haskell and McMahon alone admitted to performing at least that many partial-birth abortions per year. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop estimated in 1984 that 4,000 third-trimester abortions are performed annually.

"Even though this bill may cut back on only a few thousand abortions a year, that's a few thousand children," Forsythe says. "Each abortion is important, and each saved life is important."

Under the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act, doctors performing the procedure would be sentenced to up to two years in prison and fined up to $250,000.

Parents and grandparents of minors would be able to sue doctors who use the technique. Women who undergo the procedure could not be prosecuted.

VETO THREAT: On November 7, the White House issued a statement saying President Clinton would not support the bill because "it fails to provide for consideration of the need to preserve the life and health of the mother, consistent with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade."

Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee in Washington, D.C., says he hopes Clinton will reconsider should the bill reach his desk. Overturning the President's veto would require a two-thirds majority in Congress, which has already been obtained in the House but would be difficult in the Senate.

If passed, supporters believe the bill could be upheld by the Supreme Court without disturbing the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which said "the unborn fetus is not a person" under the Constitution.

"Most Americans wrongly believe that Roe legalized abortion only in the first three months of pregnancy," Johnson says. "It is a great revelation to many Americans that a procedure like this partial-birth abortion could be legal."

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In the tiny central African nation of Burundi, it is difficult to find good news. Diplomats estimate that 100 people are being killed daily in interethnic violence between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes. Chaos and despair are evident in many areas, including in numerous churches in this mountainous country of 6 million people, of whom 90 percent are Christian.

Many pastors have fled to neighboring countries. During the past two years, 14 Roman Catholic priests have been murdered. Threats on the lives of clergy are frequent, especially against those preaching reconciliation.

Nonetheless, many pastors and lay church workers are continuing their struggle to encourage peace and hope.

TIME TO HEAL: Amid the ongoing ethnic and political violence, Protestant churches and organizations have been at the forefront of reconciliation efforts to avert full-scale genocide on the level that erupted in neighboring Rwanda last year (CT, May 16, 1994, p. 54).

International observers agree that the situation in Burundi remains critical. Ethnic tensions similar to those in Rwanda have long raged in Burundi. Hutus, who account for 85 percent of the population, had been ruled for four centuries by the minority Tutsi tribe.

In recent times, Tutsi military dictators held power starting with national independence from Belgium in 1962, but hopes for a new era ran high after the June 1, 1993, victory of Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi's first democratically elected Hutu president.

Then, in October 1993, Hutus saw elusive democracy being taken from them with the assassination of Ndadaye. Hutu militia started a bloodbath near the central town of Gitega. Tens of thousands of Tutsis were killed in a few days. Tutsis retaliated immediately in a campaign that continues around Bujumbura and northwestern regions.

Attacks on church leaders have come mainly from Tutsi extremists believed to be paid by wealthy Tutsi politicians and soldiers from the Tutsi-dominated army. Sources close to the government say the cabinet has virtually no control over the actions of the army.

Against such a backdrop, Protestants, who are estimated to represent between 10 percent and 15 percent of Burundi's population, have launched several initiatives for reconciliation.

The most aggressive programs have been sponsored by the International Bible Society (IBS). Simeone Havyarimana, IBS regional director for 22 French-speaking countries, says the "severe turmoil" in Burundi has made traditional IBS activities difficult to carry out.

"All of this pushes you as an organization to create new ways of ministering to the country without escaping the problems which are really visible," he says.

From his office in Bujumbura, Havyarimana described how IBS began its reconciliation projects in November 1993, one month after Ndadaye's assassination, with hourly 30-second spots broadcast over state radio.

"We quoted Scriptures that speak directly to the problems of Burundi," says Havyarimana. "Some of them would be a warning to the people, others would cultivate peace in the country." Listeners, some of whom had been hiding in the bush, responded that they never knew the Bible was relevant to them, the IBS leader says.

IBS collected its radio Scripture messages and compiled them in a booklet, "Where Are the People of God?" To date, 650,000 booklets have been printed and distributed to government officials, soldiers, teachers, and church members of all denominations.

Following favorable government reaction, IBS was granted an hour-long program on state radio each Saturday to preach peace and reconciliation. The organization is now requesting another weekly half-hour slot.

In March 1994, IBS convened its first reconciliation seminar for 100 leaders of churches and parachurch organizations. Havyarimana says the meeting of top leaders was a big breakthrough as other groups have since organized their own seminars.

In mid-November, IBS launched a three-year training program, "Kundane," which is Kirundi for "Love One Another." In this program, IBS will use reconciliation manuals developed by the organization to train 2.5 million people in the next three years in aspects of mutual acceptance and national reconciliation. Both Protestant and Catholic churches are to participate.

THE CHURCH RESPONDS: Other Protestant churches and related organizations have been active in reconciliation and rehabilitation efforts as well. World Vision, a leading relief-and-development organization, has financed three reconciliation seminars since March in Bujumbura and two in Gitega.

According to World Vision officer Georgia McPeak, the organization is also building 500 homes in Muramvya, caring for unaccompanied children who may have lost parents in the crisis, and running a health program in the country's central provinces.

"There are pockets of peace," McPeak says. "We try to find them and support them when we can."

The Pentecostal Church, the largest and fastest-growing Protestant community with some 500,000 members, has built 750 houses for displaced persons since February in the troubled regions of Kayanzi, Ngozi, Muyinga, and Cibitoke.

NOTHING BUT THE WORD: "Nothing else will solve the problems of Burundi except the Word of God," says pastor Nathanael Mpanganje, Pentecostal Church deputy legal representative. "So many people are in need of Bibles, but they have no way of getting them." The church's legal representative, pastor Meshak Kabwa, estimated that the country needs about 4 million Bibles.

Christian Aid's field officer, Eliane Duthoit-Privat, says her organization has been acting as a lead agency working through the National Council of Churches since August 1994 to provide emergency aid to northern provinces of Burundi, including to refugees from neighboring Rwanda, and to reinstall people in camps close to the hills around Bujumbura.

Celestin Musekura, director of healing and reconciliation ministries for Nairobi-based MAP International-Africa, has visited 11 camps in neighboring Zaire and Tanzania. Musekura, a Hutu from Rwanda, escaped last year's bloody conflict because he was finishing seminary in Kenya.

"In the camps, many people are repenting of killing and coming to the Lord," Musekura told CT. "The church must take the lead in helping people to reconcile with God and with each other."

Many Christian leaders asserted that Burundi's churches may be better positioned to deal with a national crisis than were churches in neighboring Rwanda. "It is a mistake to compare Burundi and Rwanda," says Bernard Ntahoturi, secretary general of the Episcopal Church.

Human-rights groups have accused some church leaders in Rwanda of escalating ethnic tensions by being too closely aligned with the government and by failing to speak out against spiraling injustices. Some Rwandan church leaders also have been accused of taking an active role in the genocide. "No church leader in Burundi, neither Protestant nor Catholic, was closely active in the political party, in political organizations, or institutions as they were in Rwanda," Ntahoturi says.

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The International Institute for Cooperative Studies is preparing to place Christian university professors in positions to influence the future leadership of a communist country.

Daryl McCarthy, executive director of the organization based in Overland Park, Kansas, has signed a protocol to provide professors for Vietnam National University in Hanoi. The new university, formed through an amalgamation of three universities in the capital city, is considered to be the flagship university of the nation. McCarthy also has completed negotiations with the president of the University of Ho Chi Minh, named for the Communist leader of the former North Vietnam.

McCarthy is actively recruiting professors who specialize in English as a second language, law, and economics. He hopes to have five professors in place by September. Some instructors will take a one-semester sabbatical from current positions, and others view the job as a tentmaking career move lasting several years.

While controversy over the recent establishment of full diplomatic relations with Vietnam continues to be debated in the United States (CT, Aug. 14, 1995, p. 54), the dilemma is not a question of politics for McCarthy. "We must remember that Vietnam is a country, a people, not a war," says McCarthy, who has led IICS since its inception in 1988. "Vietnam is a bruised and bleeding nation, which has been conquered, raided, bombed, and fought over for centuries. As Christ's agents of reconciliation, we are given the opportunity to extend his love to this people."

The significance of the IICS achievement can be seen by looking at mission statistics. There are about 20 Christian missions personnel from other countries in Vietnam, a nation of 75 million.

Bob Seiple, president of the Seattle-based World Vision, U.S., the largest relief-and-development organization operating in Vietnam, senses that the country's new openness could result in tremendous opportunities for Christians.

Last month, Seiple says, World Vision workers for the first time were allowed by government officials to bring in an unlimited number of Bibles from the International Bible Society. World Vision, which seven years ago became the first Western relief agency to return to Vietnam after the war ended, now has 150 workers within the country.

This is not the first communist country for IICS. The organization has had guest lecturers in China and teaching positions in Russia before the fall of communism. The interdenominational IICS contracts with public universities to provide professors, establish departments, and create curriculum. The host university provides the students, classrooms, support staff, and faculty housing. In addition to being cost-effective, IICS is able to provide biblically based training in locations where missionaries often are restricted.

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY: With Vietnam, McCarthy moved as soon as diplomatic tensions eased. University officials eager to integrate with the Western world responded quickly, and McCarthy says the Vietnamese embassy has been the most helpful of any of the 20 countries where IICS has placed professors.

With the twelfth-largest population in the world, Vietnam is a developing nation, with more than half of the population living in poverty. The average per-capita annual income is $189.

"Vietnam really has been in an isolationist mode since the war ended in 1975," McCarthy told CT. "Marxism and Leninist doctrines have been enforced."

Vietnam is one of the last communist countries left in the world, and McCarthy believes it is important to begin to reach out and instruct those who will be the future leaders of the nation if there is hope for change.

Seiple believes changes are coming. "In time, I fully expect Vietnam to be an economic power," he says.

Copyright © 1995 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

I turned the page and found a photograph of a man bending over and talking to a small boy. Both are dressed in black. The man, if I remember correctly, wears a flat-brimmed hat and has side curls. He stoops to the same level as the boy and looks directly into his face. His right hand is on the boy's shoulder and his left is pointing upward toward the sky.

Lifeless bodies are lying all around them. About ten feet away stands another man, in uniform. He is holding a rifle and sighting it at the heads of the man and small boy. It is their turn to die. The squeeze of the trigger must have been almost simultaneous with the click of the shutter.

The photograph breaks my heart. But, strangely, it also encourages me. Wanting somehow to understand what I am seeing, I do what human beings have always done when confronted with something that requires an explanation. I have created a story for myself about it. The story might not be accurate, but it is an important story for me nonetheless. It makes it more possible for me to live in a world that includes the Holocaust.

This man spends his last moments on earth telling a story, or at least so it seems to me. He is a Hasid, one of those most pious and fervent of Jews. As he bends down to speak to the boy, finger pointing to the sky, perhaps he is saying something like this: "Do not be afraid, my son. This man cannot really hurt us. He is sending us to the next world, where we will join your mother and sister. God is waiting for us. Everything is going to be all right."

The man, I believe, was making use of the story he had embraced for his life in order to come to terms with his and his son's horrific death. I choose to see it as an act of defiance. Deprived of all other means of resistance, he resists the soldier with the rifle and all that soldier represents in the most powerful way of all—he insists on the superiority and ultimate triumph of his own story. "You, killer, have the gun and think I am nothing. But I, killer, have God, and you have nothing." The man, however, does not actually say this to his executioner, or likely even think it. He has something infinitely more important to do. He has to comfort for a few moments longer a frightened child. And he does so by interpreting this final, terrifying event in light of the story of their whole lives.

This man has character. No, this man is a character—a character in the story he has chosen to live. The difference is crucial. Character is not something you have; it is something you are that inevitably shows itself in what you do. It is determined by the stories of which you are a part. As the concept of character makes a highly visible comeback in our public conversation, we must rescue it from glib politicians, do-gooders, and busy-body moralizers. When we worry about our character and that of our children—and we should—we ought to think of stories. We should more purposefully choose the stories in which we are characters.

America is rediscovering character. In magazines, on talk shows, in pulpits and classrooms (CT, Sept. 11, 1995, p. 35), and even in philosophy and social science journals, the recurring theme is that we need to be better people. Though it is still not possible to talk about virtue in America and be understood, it is now almost possible to talk about virtues—and that is an enormous change.

We have come to this conclusion reluctantly. Character talk used to be as American as apple pie. It was a conscious factor in whom we befriended, or hired, or married. But the whole concept of character became dated, quaint, even faintly suspect, and slowly disappeared from our public vocabulary.

The public rehabilitation of character has coincided with the values debates of recent years. Values is something of a weasel word, suggesting that the worth of anything derives from someone or other choosing it, rather than from any inherent merit in the thing itself. (Fidelity, for instance, is important if you happen to value it, but not otherwise.) The term fits our relativistic temperament, suggesting that you have your values and I have mine, and there is no valid way of choosing between the two.

We are slowly realizing that oftentimes we do have to choose, as individuals and as a society. We are being forced to admit that some values are better than others, as much as it sticks in our tolerant throats to say so. And as soon as we move from the general discussion of values to identifying the specific values by which one ought to live, we bump into character.

A leading commentator on this move is the well-known social scientist James Q. Wilson, who even a decade ago observed, "The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced—over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry." This concern is now omnipresent.

From the "New York Times" to "Newsweek" to "Forbes," we find sympathetic articles on the need to think consciously about our character. And, lest we forget, 1996 is an election year. We will be treated once again to dueling editorials about the character issue in politics—why it should matter and why it shouldn't. (My own editorial comment: how can anyone think character could ever be irrelevant in an arena so full of oughts and shoulds? Every ought is rooted in a value; every value requires a choice; every choice defines a character.)

When yapping ideologues can be gagged for a moment, there is broad agreement on the need for, and the content of, character. Ask people to list the traits of a good person and you will find consensus in an area where we are often told consensus is not possible. In fact, the list has not changed much over the centuries.

Like so much of Western culture, the traditional understanding of character arises primarily from two sources: the classical and the biblical. Common to each is the assumption that the only significant test of what you believe is how you live. Both wisdom and goodness exist only in actions in the real world. Character is values lived.

Aristotle, the godfather of the philosophical discussion of character, drew on certain common understandings in Greek thought: that human beings are social creatures, that human behavior can be shaped, that certain behaviors are helpful for the society and the individual and others harmful, that the best way to identify good behavior is to look to a good role model, and that good behavior—the key to a good life—is most likely when those behaviors have become habits after years of repetition. In short, do the right thing, and do it often.

In speaking of behaviors, I am instinctively using the language of psychotherapy in which we are all so steeped. The Greeks spoke of virtues. Virtue included the idea of strength, or the capacity to perform an act. Virtue was what you did, not what you did not do. (Avoiding certain wrong acts was not an adequate basis for goodness in Greek or biblical society.) As the skill necessary for athletic performance requires exercise and practice, so too a person could be virtuous only through exercising the virtues in daily acts. That exercise was seen as the basis for forming character.

The Greeks identified four chief or cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Prudence is practical wisdom—that is, wisdom (not to be confused with intelligence or information) that leads to good choices and results in successful living. Justice centers on acts of fairness and honesty and the rule of law. Courage, also called fortitude, gives one the capacity to do what is right or necessary even in the face of adversity. And temperance is self-discipline, the ability to control one's impulses to do things that are gratifying in the short run but harmful in the long.

It is not good enough to get two or three out of four. That might be great for baseball, but it is bad for society. The core virtues make each other possible. A sense of justice is ineffectual if one lacks the courage to stand against injustice. Courage without wisdom is simply foolhardiness. And all the other virtues are undercut when one lacks self-control.

The Bible agrees with all this and adds more. Each of the classical Greek virtues finds support in Scripture. In the Old Testament, a wise person is a person who lives wisely—that is, in right relationship to God—not a person who is simply intelligent or learned. Justice is seen as a primary quality of God that we should try to reflect in ourselves and in our society. Courage is prized on the battlefield but even more as a necessary quality for living as God requires under hostile conditions. And the Old Testament is replete with examples of the consequences of losing self-control.

One place among many where God reveals the character traits he requires is Psalm 15. The psalm opens with a question: "Oh Lord, who may approach your holy place? Who may worship on your holy mountain?" That is, what are the qualities a person should bring into God's presence?

The psalmist then answers the question in the rest of the psalm, part of which reads as follows: "Those who walk blamelessly, live righteously and speak truth from the heart. Those who do not gossip or wrong neighbors or speak evil of those around them." These are actions, not passive states of being. They are not descriptions of one's psychological state or level of self-esteem.

The New Testament brings to the forefront qualities of character that are implicit in the Old and that go beyond the classical understanding. These too grow out of the nature of God as reflected in his creatures: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23). There is a more empathetic, other-directed nature to the Christian virtues than to the classical, a product of their origin in the ultimate virtue —love. (Interestingly, the concern for the poor and disadvantaged in modern secular liberalism derives from this Judeo-Christian heritage, though the debt is rarely acknowledged.)

The Bible parallels classicism in emphasizing the importance of models and mentors. "Be holy as I am holy," God tells us. Christ calls the disciples to follow him so they can learn by word and deed how to live as they should. Paul offers himself as an example to the new Christians of the young church. Conversion begins, but only begins, a lifelong process of character formation and reformation.

And as in the classical example, that process depends more on actions than on abstract beliefs. Nothing is easier than mental assent to a set of propositions, but Christ sets a higher standard: "If you love me, obey my commands" (John 14:15).

As similar as they are in many ways, the classical and biblical notions of character differ at a crucial point—sin. For Aristotle, there is little if anything wrong in our character and our society that cannot be fixed by greater efforts in the way of wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. Paul, on the other hand, says, "I do not understand my own behavior. For rather than doing the thing I want to do, I do what I hate" (Rom. 7:15).

The classical model says there is nothing wrong that we cannot fix ourselves; the biblical says our radical brokenness can be fixed only by the one who made us. One sends us inside ourselves for help; the other sends us to someone greater than ourselves. This crucial difference continues today. A look at the overflowing shelves of the self-help section in bookstores tells us clearly which option contemporary America has chosen.

These two streams, classical and biblical, flowed together into Europe and shaped moral education (which was at the heart of all education) for 1,500 years. They were not seriously challenged until the Enlightenment. The savants of the eighteenth century recognized the need for morality, especially to keep the masses in line, and looked to the Judeo-Christian tradition to define moral behavior. But they found the God of the Bible inconvenient. Thomas Jefferson turned his Bible into a paper snowflake, cutting out all the passages that involved the miraculous. Like other leading Enlightenment thinkers, he sought to ground morality in reason, not in divine revelation.

The goal of philosophical ethics for the last 200 years has been to find that rational basis for morality—on which, presumably, all reasonable people can agree. The attempt has fizzled. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in his widely influential book "After Virtue," reasonable people have not even been able to agree on what constitutes moral behavior, much less actually find a way to ensure it. Because we no longer share a common moral tradition, we repeatedly talk past each other on moral issues. We are left sifting the fragments of many traditions for an alternative to radical, relativistic individualism. The only universally approved virtue today is tolerance, yet we are increasingly aware that we are doomed if we tolerate everything.

The ascendancy of relativism has been hard on the idea of character. But there is an equally important reason why the idea of character has disappeared from our public discussions, and that is the dominance of popular psychology and psychotherapy in all deliberations of what it means to be a human being. The concept of character—once part of the everyday vocabulary of personal assessment—has been almost entirely replaced with the concept of personality.

Psychology aspires to be a science, and science by definition is mute in the face of any ought. It can deal with what and sometimes with why but not with should. Though character was used as a term in psychology in the early parts of this century and has persisted in Europe, it was banished from American psychology well before midcentury. Gordon Allport, an eminent Harvard psychologist and one-time president of the American Psychological Association, expressed the common view when he wrote in the 1930s that we "must frankly admit that [character] is an ethical concept" and that, as such, "the psychologist does not need the term at all; personality alone will serve."

Psychology took the ancient idea of character, an idea that was central to education and moral development, stripped out value judgments (especially moral ones), and gave us personality to take its place. Allport says, "Character is personality evaluated, and personality is character devalued." In Allport's own terms, the notion of moral excellence (character) was replaced by that of social and personal effectiveness (personality). Defining the self by character traits like courage, honesty, and loyalty gave way to definition by personality traits like assertiveness, self-confidence, and introspectiveness.

Consider Allport's definition of personality as "character devalued." Likely he meant the self looked at objectively, unencumbered by controversial and imprecise values ("ethical moss," in his words). But the net effect of replacing the language of character by that of personality (and that replacement is almost total) has been the literal devaluing of human beings and the human experience. This is not the fault of psychology per se, which has the right to limit what it investigates, but of the wholesale adoption of this way of understanding the human person by a naive and confused society. Psychology may not need the concept of character, but human beings and human society do.

We are now seeing the early stages of a scattered attempt to rehabilitate the concept of character. This change reflects a widespread sense that our society is sick and only strong medicine will do. Having lost much of our faith in social innovations (where, for instance, are the advocates of "open marriage" today?), we are turning to some traditional remedies that we tried to live without, and one of those is character.

But why is the attempt only scattered? Why, in fact, is it often controversial, met in some quarters with great suspicion? Who could possibly object to a greater emphasis on character? The fact is that character has returned to the public conversation during wartime—the culture wars—and no discussion of the role of character is neutral. As so often happens in our public conversations, the debate frequently splits along ideological lines. Many take it as given (and even desirable) that no agreement could ever be reached on what constitutes character or how we should encourage it. They are frightened by what they see as the attempt to equate character and family values with one, and only one, political and social agenda. And the suspicion is mutual.

A clear example is the reception of William Bennett's "The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories." Since its publication in 1993, this hugely successful book has been widely praised as leading the way in the restoration of civilization and widely vilified as trumpeting a retreat to the bad old days of racism, sexism, and (gulp) spanking. Jesse Jackson has complained, accurately, that conservatives have co-opted character and values as their issue, making liberals look like defenders of irresponsibility and moral decay.

Many rightly ask where all this conservative concern for character—especially the virtue of justice—was in the 1950s and '60s, when African Americans were trying to win their most basic freedoms. The oft-lamented golden age when we were supposedly a virtuous (and Christian) people was also a time that was quite comfortable with overt racial segregation and sexism and great numbers of people living in poverty, among other sins.

Nevertheless, too much current liberal reaction is little more than relativistic skepticism about any attempt to establish a widely agreed-on set of values to live by. Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance, in an unusually cynical opinion piece last year for "Time" magazine, scorned the phrase "family values." While acknowledging that we "may be stuck with the family" until we progress to something more "sensible," she depicts the family as commonly "a nest of pathology" and cites approvingly a feminist view that compares marriage to prostitution.

While acidic views like Ehrenreich's contribute nothing to the debate, there is a legitimate concern that a renewed emphasis on character and values not be merely a convenient sound bite for pandering politicians nor provide cover for a retreat from hard-won and still fragile gains for minorities and women. Louis Sullivan, secretary of Health and Human Services under George Bush, argues often and passionately for the relevance of character to health issues in our society (a great deal of ill health being the result of bad choices) but insists that a renewed emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and community-enforced values should not be used as a smoke screen for an attack on the necessary and legitimate role of government in health and other areas.

In fact, both liberals and conservatives frequently promote an impoverished sense of character that is inadequate to support the kinds of changes we need—in ourselves and in our society. The conservative notion too often encourages mere conformity and defends a nostalgic version of the past. Character is not much more than the Boy Scout pledge sprinkled with civic religion.

Liberals have their own version, and it is equally pallid. "Embrace diversity, be nice to minorities, don't laugh at jokes that disempower women." They are unable to articulate a distinction between healthy pluralism and crippling relativism. They rhapsodize about e pluribus but have lost the vision for unum.

(Continued in Part 2)

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We've got to do better than this. As we grope our way back toward the idea of living by shared values (a working definition of character), we should consider the wellspring of talk about character—story. We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, buoyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely conscious of this element in which we exist.

Life as a story is not simply a metaphor, but the way our experience actually presents itself to us. We are characters making choices over time—and living with the consequences—and that is the essence of story both in literature and in life. The more we are conscious of our role as characters making choices that have consequences, and the more we purposefully choose the stories by which we live, the healthier we will be as individuals and as a society.

Stories, as MacIntyre writes in "After Virtue," teach us how to live:

I can only answer the question "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question, "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted—and we have to learn what they are. … It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children … youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living … that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.

If many young people seem confused and directionless today, and their elders with them, perhaps it is because they have been deprived of good stories. They "stutter" in their lives because they almost literally do not know their lines; they do not know themselves as characters in a meaningful story.

And of course, Christians believe the seminal story by which all other stories must be judged is the one which commences, "In the beginning God … " This is the greatest story ever told. The theme of this story is the most hopeful imaginable: God made us, God loves us, and God calls us back to himself. This is the story that gives ultimate meaning to our own stories.

Without meaningful choices there is no story and no character. But how to choose? A traditional answer, approved by both Aristotle and Christ, has been that we pattern our choices and our lives after someone we want to be like. And that someone is often presented to us in story.

Bruno Bettelheim claims that the stories of good and evil in fairy tales—or, we might add, in Bible stories—can play an important role in the moral development of children. And the power of these stories lies not so much in the abstract moral or theme as in the characters. Bettelheim says, "The question for the child is not, 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Who do I want to be like?' "

It is not surprising that the bulk of moral education in human history has been through models, exempla, heroes—that is, through story. Many of the traditional stories of moral education have fallen out of favor because of modern skepticism, the loss of centers of moral authority, fear of hypocrisy, and suspicion that morality might be just another name for authoritarianism, privilege, and misused power.

The stories that provide us the models that help shape our character are all around us. They come first from the family, then from church and school and the popular media. Some are from literature, others from history, politics, family lore, and, alas, television. Among the stories that come to mind from my own childhood are stories of missionaries killed by Auca Indians, of the ground opening up to swallow people who lied to God, of the defeat of Nazism by my uncles, of the first Thanksgiving, of Davy Crockett at the Alamo, of the kids who got paddled for skinny dipping in the creek, and on and on. It is difficult, in fact, to think of anything that significantly influenced me that wasn't part of a story in one way or another.

The most important stories have the power to change our character. I believe, for instance, that my life took a slight but perceptible change in direction in my late teens from reading J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Trolls, elves, hobbits, wizards, dark forests, forest havens, caves, mountain strongholds, treachery, cowardice, courage, perseverance—what have these to do with being a teenager in California during the Vietnam War?

Nothing and everything. I found embodied in that fantasy what every teenager needs to find—especially one coming of age in the moral ambiguity of the late 1960s: that there is a difference between good and evil, that the distinction is usually clear enough to act on, that fighting for good is worthwhile even if one loses, that average, even unimpressive, people can accomplish much, and, farfetched as it may seem, that good eventually wins out in the end.

I purposed quite consciously to try to be on the side of good in life, to the extent that I could discern it, and to take chances to see that it prevailed. I genuinely believe this story helped shape who I was and am. Its characters became a part of my character. If the change in direction was small at the time, it may have been one that, like a small, early course correction in a planetary probe, has made a larger difference in where I am, many years later.

After reading "The Lord of the Rings" two or three times in my teens, I have not read it since. I might not be nearly so impressed now, but that doesn't matter. It did me a service. It helped form my mind as well as my ethics at a time when both were up for grabs. When I later discovered sophistic thinkers who assured me that good and evil were not real categories but only subjective and transient points of view, I knew better. I lacked then the intellectual resources to articulate my disagreement, but I was armed with the holistic experience of a story that kept me from naively embracing what I now think is a widely influential but unlivable view of the world.

Stories not only provide moral education but also shape our sense of identity. In fact, it is impossible to separate our sense of who we are from the stories in which we cast ourselves as characters.

A few years back I was invited to speak at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. I was not acquainted with John Brown University. Wanting to know a little about the place and people, I asked the chaplain to send me some information on the school.

I discovered that John Brown had been a traveling evangelist on the sawdust trail during the early and middle part of the twentieth century. Based primarily in the South, he had ranged as far west as California, saving the lost and admonishing the saved. At some point, he had started a little school in Arkansas.

I will admit to a flicker of condescension when I read this sketch of John Brown's life. I am just old enough to have witnessed a tent meeting or two. I also know something about idiosyncratic institutions dominated by the personality of an eccentric founder, sometimes well after that founder has passed on. I did not make any sweeping judgments, but somewhere in the back of my mind I prepared myself for the possibility of a few days in a backwater place with people not quite as up-to-date as I was.

Shortly before leaving for Arkansas, I was talking on the phone with my father. He asked me what I was up to, and I mentioned I was going to a place called John Brown University. He replied, "Oh yes, John Brown. Your grandfather Nick was saved under John Brown."

It was one of those moments when God reveals to you in great clarity how stupid you are.

My father then told me a story I had never heard. My grandfather Nick had left a crowded and troubled home in Indiana when he was 15 or 16. It was shortly before World War I, and he had nowhere to go. So he jumped on a freight train heading west. He ended up in Los Angeles—lonely and without direction. One night he wandered by a revival meeting led by John Brown. He went in, and there he met God. And because he became a Christian, in a personal and life-directing way, he later looked for a Christian woman to marry, and they chose to raise their only child—my father—as a Christian, and he chose a Christian woman to marry, and they chose to raise me and my brothers as believers. So I discovered that this man, John Brown, whom I had safely pigeonholed as someone of no relevance to my life, was, in fact, an important link in the chain to my own salvation. It was a story I needed to hear.

I didn't just hear this story, I accepted it—made it a part of who I was and how I thought about myself and life. It reinforced my sense of living in a coherent universe, of belonging to something important that has stretched over time, of being a link in a chain—indebted to many in the past, mostly unknown to me, and responsible to many in the future, who likewise will not know who I was. In short, the story affected my character.

The key to every good plot is characters making choices. Choices instill values—right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, wise and foolish—into an otherwise sterile sequence of events.

Frank Kermode claims that every plot is "an escape from chronicity." Chronicity is mere clock time. It is succession without progression, or even meaningful cause and effect. It is time dehumanized and devalued, measured by repetition, not by significance.

The antidote to chronos is kairos, the Greek and biblical notion of time redeemed. In classical Greek, kairos referred, among other things, to a decisive time, a moment that required an important decision. There was a statue to a god named Kairos outside the stadium at Olympia, perhaps in recognition of the need for athletes to seize the moment, to act decisively before the opportunity was past.

Kairos was also linked to the idea of responsibility. One has a duty to fulfill the demands of the pregnant moment. In this sense, as in many others, story time is kairos, not chronos. In life as in art, the characters in a story must choose, and they are responsible for the consequences of their choices. With choosing comes significance.

In Greek thought, the opposite of such choosing and acting was passivity. The Greeks, of course, believed strongly in fate, but that did not mean one waited idly for things to happen. Seizing the moment was an act of faith that one's destiny required and rewarded decisive action. Kairos was an antidote to a fatalism that made one the passive victim of time and chance.

Early Christianity adapted and gave theological richness to the Greek notion of kairos (though its use in the New Testament is not entirely consistent). God is seen as impregnating time with significance throughout salvation history, most notably in the Incarnation. Jesus presents himself in the Gospels as the fulfillment of the very purpose of time and history: "The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" His life creates a new urgency for everyone who encounters his message: "Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation." This message requires a decision ("Who do you say that I am?") and a changed life, not merely assent or dissent ("Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?").

Stories turn mere chronology, one thing after another, into the purposeful action of plot, and thereby into meaning. If we discern a plot to our lives, we are more likely to take ourselves seriously as characters. Healthy stories challenge us to be active characters, not passive victims or observers.

Stories teach us that character, in the ethical as well as literary sense, is more important than personality. Because characters must choose (and refusing to choose is itself a choice), they are inherently valuing beings. Every choice implies an underlying value—a because, an ought. The more conscious we are of our stories, and our roles as characters in them, the more clarity we have about who we are and why we are here and how we should act in the world.

We learn that we are interdependent. Our stories are inextricably interwoven. What you do is part of my story; what I do is part of yours. Such an awareness encourages the shared understandings and shared commitments that are central to a healthy society.

An emphasis on story will not heal every social or spiritual ill, or solve every intellectual quandry. It is not a definitive solution to our troubles so much as a direction to be explored. It will not, by itself, clean up the moral waste dump spawned by relativism.

What it can do is defeat the passivity and paralysis that accompanies a "Who's to say?" approach to crucial issues. How? By encouraging us to think of ourselves as responsible characters in a meaningful story. And when we find that our stories collide with others' stories, it can encourage us to keep talking until we find that point at which our stories interweave.

If we think of ourselves more often as interdependent characters in a shared story, we are more likely to turn out as our mothers intended. One of my mother's favorite admonitions was "Straighten up and fly right." It never occurred to her to doubt that terms like "straight" and "right" had real meaning and were somehow rooted in the nature of things. We need to recapture that assumption, because it is not possible to live well together without it.

That assumption, of course, has been out of favor for a long time. The ruling supposition, instead, has been that all morality is a product of culture and, therefore, that no universal moral rules or principles exist. James Q. Wilson, however, is not alone in arguing, as he does in his recent book "The Moral Sense," that there is much broader agreement from culture to culture and age to age on moral issues than has commonly been allowed, and that the moral sense is actually something naturally built into each human being. (The Christian, of course, has some ideas about where that moral sense originates.)

And morality, specifically character, is at the heart of many of the crucial social and economic issues of our day. Wilson argues, for instance, that poverty and even oppression are not adequate explanations for crime, because they fail to explain why most oppressed people in poverty do not engage in crime—and have not in the past under even worse conditions.

Wilson also cites James M. Buchanan's answer to the question "Why haven't we always had huge deficits as a nation?" Buchanan says it was simply thought wrong in the past to spend money you didn't have and that your children would have to repay in the future. Balancing the budget was, among other things, a question of character, though until recently a discussion of the national debt rarely would have been framed in this way.

Multiply these examples a thousand times—in education, economics, politics, entertainment and the media, the church and the home, and in our private lives—and one can see something of the effect that the return of character is having and could have on our lives together. Character will not save America in the spiritual sense. But some of the qualities of God that he built into us could again be more evident in our public institutions, our private lives, and our shared lives together.

This will happen, however, only if our understanding of character surpasses what we generally hear around us today. Character is more than being a good person. It is choosing a role in a story worthy of the only life you will ever live, worthy of the calling you have received.

I return to that photograph. The man in that scene, if he was a pious Jew, lived his life by rules. And many of those rules were important. But the moment before their deaths he was not telling that frightened child about the rules. Nor did a lifetime of rule-keeping prepare him for his final loving act. If I am right, he was telling the boy a story. That act was the logical conclusion to the story around which he had built his life.

In truth, I do not even know if I am remembering the photograph accurately, having seen it years ago in a book I can no longer find. But it doesn't matter. Their story, as I imagine it, is now part of my own story. The courage and faith I ascribe to them make it more possible for me to believe that courage and faith are realistic options for me under infinitely less oppressive circumstances.

Our stories must be as strong as his. They must be strong enough to encompass not only death, but every kind of suffering and failure—divorce, disease, abuse, disgrace, and disappointment. They must even be strong enough to triumph over the dripping tedium of day after uneventful day.

We must be characters in life-defining stories that make it matter that we were ever here. If our present story is inadequate, we must choose to be different characters in a different story. I believe the ultimate author of such a story is the God who made and loves us and calls us to himself. But this is no Boy Scout God. Nor is he the God of humanitarianism. This God is one who came to us speaking these fearful words:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

To be a character in this story calls for more of us than we are anxious to give, but next to it, all other stories pale.

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Daniel Taylor is professor of literature at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Parts of this essay are adapted from his book "The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself Through the Stories of Your Life" (forthcoming from Doubleday).

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