Understanding life through the lenses of codependency and addiction has made a lot of people feel better. But, for Christians, serious questions remain.

It’s out there. And it’s growing. Called the “codependency movement” by some, it is a loose network of self-help organizations, therapists, authors, and “recovering addicts” that combines concepts derived from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and family systems theory to deal with a diversity of bad habits, addictions, and unhealthy relationships. Anne Wilson Schaef, author of Co-Dependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated (Harper & Row), sums up the essence of this broad movement when she asserts the existence of a “basic, ‘generic’ disease” she calls “the addictive process” that encapsulates “co-dependence, alcoholism, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive personalities, and certain psychoses.”

Strictly speaking, one should make a distinction between disorders in which a person becomes dependent on an addictive substance or behavior (heavy drinking, for example) and codependency, the need to be needed by an addict, to be a dependent person’s rescuer.

But this distinction is frequently not observed by those who talk and write about the “addictive process.” Addiction and codependence are practical synonyms in the fuzzy parlance of this growing movement. Today there are codependency groups of every imaginable strain—for gamblers, workaholics, sex addicts, shoppers, drug abusers, those with eating disorders or addicted to narcotics or alcohol, people pleasers, and for all their friends, relatives, and coworkers who may be “enabling” the addicted. These groups meet to “work their twelve steps,” a process derived from AA that begins with facing one’s powerlessness and surrendering to a Higher Power (see “Taking the Twelve Steps to Church,” p. 31).

The “ ‘generic’ disease” has only one general diagnostic category into which most of us fit: codependent. Once again, the language and concepts are fuzzy: What precisely qualifies one to be called codependent is not well defined. In general, however, codependents are caretakers who are overcommitted and overinvolved in the lives of needy individuals. They can be obsessive and controlling people who feel low self-worth and have high need for keeping people dependent on them (see “False Messiahs,” page 35). They are often passive-aggressive, lacking in trust, angry, rigid, controlled, and self-centered. Poor communicators, they may have problems developing intimacy in relationships and handling their sexuality, and they often repress feelings and thoughts. Many are perfectionists who feel powerless, hopeless, withdrawn, and isolated.

Lest you think you’re off the hook because that comprehensive summary of human weakness doesn’t characterize your life, take heed: you don’t have to be all of those things to be considered codependent. Any combination thereof is sufficient. In her checklist of codependency, Melody Beattie, author of the best-selling book Codependent No More, lists over 200 characteristics in 15 categories. But even that is not “all inclusive,” she says. It is a disease, adds Schaef, that has “no respect for age, color, social standing, or sex; it touches everyone in the society in one way or another.”

In The Beginning

Codependency emerged as a concept to describe the preoccupation with and severe dependency upon another that was observed first among families of alcoholics. Closely linked to AA, the earliest codependency groups were begun for adult children of alcoholics (ACOA) under the auspices of Al-Anon, an organization started in the 1950s for wives of alcoholics. In 1981 only 14 ACOA groups were registered with Al-Anon; but by 1988 the number had reached 1,100.

The movement emerged through the convergence of the AA model for treatment of addiction and insights from family systems theory. Claims Schaef, the codependency concept bridges the gap between “the mental health, family therapy and chemical dependency fields.”

In the families of alcoholics, the system revolves around the alcoholic as family members protect and enable him or her to continue the alcohol abuse. Each family member becomes involved in a collusion of sorts that requires massive emotional energy.

The alcoholic’s destructive behavior is denied or minimized, rigid boundaries are formed with regard to communication outside the family, and feelings of anger, shame, fear, and sadness are hidden. Thus counselor Claudia Black’s often quoted phrase about the rules within these homes that are “full of secrets”: “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.”

As families become more entrenched in this pattern of denying the destructiveness of the alcoholic’s behavior and subsequently more preoccupied with protecting the alcoholic from being discovered, roles are reversed—children function as adults, becoming the caretakers, while adults behave like children. Family members take on the roles of the “family hero,” the “scapegoat,” the “lost child,” or the “mascot.”

This lifestyle, with low self-esteem at its core, almost certainly results in codependency. The codependent lacks a clearly defined sense of self that, in turn, results in an inability to differentiate from others or make choices without first focusing on what others want or demand. As this concept has developed over the past ten years, it has been applied not only to the family members of alcoholics, but to those in which all manner of compulsive behaviors or addictions are present.

An early voice in the development of the concept of codependency was social worker Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, who estimates that 96 percent of the population fall into that category. She defines a codependent as anyone who is in love with or has been married to an alcoholic, has one or more alcoholic parents or grandparents, or who grew up in an emotionally repressive family.

It is, she says, “a specific condition that is characterized by preoccupation with, and extreme dependence (emotionally, socially, and sometimes physically) on, a person or object. Eventually, this dependence on another person becomes a pathological condition that affects the codependent in all other relationships.… Anyone who lives in a family of denial, compulsive behavior, and emotional repression is vulnerable to codependency.” Earnie Larsen, another prominent spokesperson in the field, includes anyone living with a neurotic as potentially codependent.

Taking The Twelve Steps To Church

No one is sure where the 12 steps came from, but these biblical principles were adapted by AA for use with alcoholics. Now Dr. Vernon J. Bittner, executive director of the Minnesota-based Institute for Christian Living (ICL), has readapted them for Christians.

To reclaim the 12 steps for the church, and to be specific about the identity of our “Higher Power,” Bittner founded ICL in 1980. Since then, ICL has established 12-step groups in 65 Minneapolis-area churches, as well as in other sites from New Jersey to California.

“The strength of these groups is in their diversity of issues,” says Ron Keller, program director of ICL. “It is a healthy integration of the human side of life with the spiritual.” The 10 to 14 person groups are not directed toward any specific crisis or addiction.

“2 Corinthians 5:17 says, ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.’ ” notes Keller, “but we are still in process. The new creation hasn’t come to full fruition. A 12-step group helps us come to live in the reality of this life, at the same time knowing we’re being transformed by the power of Christ in us. The group provides a support system that helps us have integrity.”

A nonprofit, ecumenical organization, ICL is now a program of the Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis. It has 14 Christian therapists on staff who provide counseling services at over 30 satellite sites in area churches. It also hosts 12-step retreats throughout the year and an ongoing training program for 12-step conveners.

Twelve Steps for Christian Living

1. We admit our need for God’s gift of salvation, that we are powerless over certain areas of our lives and that our lives are at times sinful and unmanageable.

2. We come to believe through the Holy Spirit that a power who came in the person of Jesus Christ and who is greater than ourselves can transform our weaknesses into strengths.

3. We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Jesus Christ as we understand Him—hoping to understand Him more fully.

4. We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves—both our strengths and our weaknesses.

5. We admit to Christ, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our sins.

6. We become entirely ready to have Christ heal all of these defects of character that prevent us from having a more spiritual lifestyle.

7. We humbly ask Christ to transform all of our shortcomings.

8. We make a list of all persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.

9. We make direct amends to such persons whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong, promptly admit it, and when we are right, thank God for the guidance.

11. We seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Jesus Christ, as we understand Him, praying for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having experienced a new sense of spirituality as a result of these steps and realizing that this is a gift of God’s grace, we are willing to share the message of Christ’s love and forgiveness with others and to practice these principles for spiritual living in all our affairs.

Other definitions of codependence range from seeing it as a pattern of learned behaviors, feelings, and beliefs that “make life difficult” to “an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules.” Physician Charles Whitfield asserts that codependency affects individuals, families, communities, businesses, states, and countries. Schaef takes that all-encompassing definition a step further to propose that society itself is an “addictive system.” She concludes, “When we talk about the addictive process, we are talking about civilization as we know it.”

Oversimplified Complexity

Critics point out that one danger of the blanket application of codependency is that serious psychological disorders are easily misdiagnosed. Minneapolis psychiatrist Carl Malmquist charges that the concept of codependency “doesn’t do justice to the complexity of problems that are often present. I think it is applied too widely, too indiscriminately. Many of the people using it have not had exposure to other kinds of training that would fit it into the broader realm of the interpersonal school of psychotherapy.… I have seen people who have been treated that way, gotten some temporary help and then slipped into much more subtle patterns of what I would call masochistic behavior.”

It is not that codependency is erroneous, he continues, but that it fails to encompass the complexity of human nature. “Someone may seem to be addicted to food, but I want to get in and see what’s the source of this eating disorder. Some bulimics are depressed; some are schizophrenic. Diagnostically we want to be very clear on that. Just to say they are all addictive people doesn’t tell me enough. It’s not sufficient.”

This oversimplification can be a particular problem, notes Minneapolis child psychiatrist Richard Miner, in the parent-child relationship when the legitimate dependency needs of children and adolescents are viewed as “manipulative or destructive.” The parent may end up seeing “all dependency behavior as pathological when it is simply nurturance-seeking behavior on the child’s part,” says Miner.

Because this model developed through work with adults, specifically adults from alcoholic families, it is especially weak in giving consideration to the developmental needs of children or adolescents for healthy dependency. The model also fails to acknowledge the full range of individual psychopathology, states Miner. Unreasonable expectations for change often result.

Another psychologist cited two cases in which juveniles were inappropriately identified as codependent when in fact one was manic-depressive and the other schizophrenic. Each was told to leave home by parents who refused to have a “codependent relationship” with their child.

Psychiatrist Timmen L. Cermak has attempted to qualify the wide-reaching application of the codependency label by advocating codependence as both a “legitimate psychological concept and an important human disorder.” In Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence (Johnson Institute Books), Cermak notes that codependency has not provoked much interest within the mental health community because there exist no “generally accepted definitions” of codependency. Most definitions of codependency have been “anecdotal or metaphoric and neither … stands up well under scientific scrutiny.”

Calling for a definition at a level of sophistication at least equal to standards set forth for diagnosing other psychiatric disorders, Cermak faults the “apparent ubiquity” with which codependence has been applied. He rejects the broad definition of those who have called codependence “a condition of the twentieth century.”

Cermak does recognize, however, that when such traits become “enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself,” they result in a personality disorder. Codependency is at that point a definable, clinical entity that must be taken seriously, he contends. While we may all at various points act codependently, to argue that almost everyone is codependent, Cermak says, discredits the useful application of this concept by oversimplification.

The Ultimate Addiction

For Christians, the all-inclusive definition of codependency may sound like another way of identifying the universal human problem of sin. Such a view is held by J. Keith Miller, who postulates that addiction is endemic to the human condition; it is just another word for sin. Specific sinful acts are not what constitute Sin (with a capital S), he claims in his book Sin, the Ultimate Deadly Addiction (Harper & Row), but are only “symptoms of a basic and all-encompassing self-centeredness, an attitude that colors every relationship, including our relationship with God. It is this deeper, more central attitude that leads to all the thoughts and actions we call sins. And it is the underlying attitude that is Sin.… Sin, in this view, is about our apparent inability to say no to our need to control people, places, and things in order to implement our self-centered desires.”

The “blinding self-absorption called Sin,” Miller continues, is the same underlying dynamic at work in the life of the chemical addict. “Sin is the universal addiction to self that develops when individuals put themselves in the center of their personal world in a way that leads to abuse of others and self. Sin causes sinners to seek instant gratification, to be first, and to get more than their share—now.”

While even secular leaders in the movement agree that embracing one’s spirituality is fundamental to the task of getting “unhooked” from codependency, they generally have a less than charitable view of the church and traditional Christianity. Schaef, for instance, sees the family, school, and church as equally guilty of “cultural co-dependence training.” She charges: “They teach us to think what we are told to think, feel what we are told to feel, see what we are told to see and know what we are told to know.… In training us to be ‘nice,’ the church actively trains us to be co-dependents.”

In Colorado Springs: A Church Reaches Out

Twice a year. First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs offers an eight-week workshop entitled “Freedom from Codependency.” Started as a ministry to adult children of alcoholics, the workshop is now open to anyone struggling with a relational dysfunction.

Each year attendance has swelled. What began as a group of 45 in 1984 has mushroomed within four years to attendance of over 600. This year registration was limited to 550 and filled to capacity.

The workshop is the brainchild of Dennis Chambon, a local businessman and a member of First Presbyterian who has been in recovery from chemical dependency for several years. It meets for two and one-half hours each session and is designed to help participants face their own codependency. Drawing upon his experience as a counselor at a local chemical dependency treatment center, Chambon teamed up with Marilyn LeVan, associate for singles ministry at the church, to begin a small support group for adult children of alcoholics.

Chambon and LeVan make it clear that the workshop is not for onlookers who are merely interested in learning about codependency. “We talk about what codependency is and tell them they are not there to fix anyone else,” says LeVan. “Each person is there because they’ve got codependency. We hope it will lead them into a 12-step group when the eight weeks are done.”

Through the use of movies, lectures, role playing, and personal testimonies, the workshop explores codependency as an addiction, its impact on family members and other relationships, and points the way to recovery.

Seeking spiritual answers

LeVan and Chambon do not hesitate to share the importance of their relationship with Christ as they have worked through their own problems with codependency. But they make an effort not to be “offensively Christian” inasmuch as the workshop attracts most of its members from outside the church.

“We’ve got a way of communicating that slips into people’s lives,” Chambon says. “We know their defenses and try to come at it from another angle. A lot of people are beginning to understand they have problems in relationships and are seeking spiritual answers.”

LeVan concurs: “Our approach is to focus first on people’s powerlessness. But when it fits and is appropriate, we are free to share who our Higher Power is. Were there to help people understand how powerless they are so that they are ready to turn to God for help.”

Church growth and staff growth

What has the impact of this workshop been for the church? Executive minister Jim Smith is one of three pastors on the staff who have completed the workshop, Dennis Chambon and he praises it on several levels. “Personally, it was very good for me to look at my upbringing, to begin to discover things about myself,” he says. “It has stimulated real growth in my own life.”

“ ‘Freedom from Codependency’ has been a tremendous outreach into the community,” he says. “It’s evangelism.” But the workshop has also been attended by church members. “People who have been Christians for 20 or 30 years are finding that examining the past is freeing them from dysfunctional patterns of relating,” Smith notes. “It is a workshop where lives are changed. Here is a tool that the Lord is using to bring a newness, an intimacy in their relationship with Christ.”

Smith also refers many of those who come to him for counseling through the workshop. “Here we have an opportunity to plug people into an ongoing ministry. I now see their lives in a new perspective, through the lens of codependency.”

LeVan acknowledges that a number of people have joined the church whose initial exposure to First Presbyterian was through the workshop. “Perhaps more important,” she says, “are the staff members and professional people from the church who have gone through the program and found it to affect their ministry in significant ways. The more into recovery they are from their own codependency, the less likely they will relate to people in a care-taking rather than care-giving manner.”

Do Chambon and LeVan see people latching onto the codependency movement itself as a panacea for all of life’s problems? “I trust God in the process,” says LeVan. “If people are falling into false gods, including 12-step groups, that too will fail. I trust that God will bring each one of us to where we need to be. God weeds out our false gods until we find out who he really is.”

For the future, LeVan and Chambon have a dream of training church leadership. “Every single minister, counselor or psychiatrist needs it for themselves in order to do what God has called them to do even better,” says LeVan, articulating her vision. “But the only way to train others is for them first to experience it themselves, for them to deal with their own insecurities. Then it will change lives.”

By Jim and Phyllis Alsdurf.

Christian author Melody Beattie disagrees: “Codependency is learned behaviors that are passed on from one generation to another. Certainly if you do a biblical study you see the importance of family of origin, the sins of the fathers being passed on. And the goal of recovery and of Christianity are the same: healthy human behaviors that work. Certain behaviors have certain consequences; there are certain laws. Recovery is about learning those laws. Hating yourself doesn’t work. Taking care of others and not yourself doesn’t work.”

Colorado Springs psychologist Joseph Hammock agrees that some scriptural truths are echoed in the message of codependency, but feels that its proponents don’t go far enough. “Codependency says that human beings have problems because we don’t exist in the right relationships with each other—we either get too close, or enmeshed, or we are too far away, and we become disengaged,” he says. “But if we become disengaged from people, it’s because we’re enmeshed with something else—because all human beings are made with a need to become involved, to have intimacy.

“That is close to what the Bible says, in that we need a relationship with God to be all that we can be, to be in balance. The world is full of people who are trying to fill that ‘God-shaped vacuum’ with one thing or another, and hence compulsions arise. The cure for codependency is that one moves into a right relationship with God, and as a result—in part, both as a cause and an effect—into right relationships with people in your life, with yourself, and with your natural environment.”

Hammock cautions, however, that while codependency experts have the right idea about the fundamental problem of humanity, “they are missing the key ingredient as to what the solution is. Leaders of codependency groups, even those who are Christian, don’t emphasize that fact, often saying they are trying to appeal to a broad variety of people. But at a certain point, if you go too far in trying to reach the lowest common denominator, you give away too much of what in the end is required to solve the problem.”

Taking The Morality Out

Another critical issue Christians face in assessing the codependency/addiction movement is the concept of moral responsibility. Writing about sexual addiction in his book Out of the Shadows (CompCare Publishers), psychologist Patrick Carnes advances the popular perspective that the sexual addict has “no choice. The addiction is in charge.” Similarly, in Fat Is a Family Affair (Harper & Row/Hazelden), psychologist Judi Hollis says that “the addictive model takes morality out of eating disorders.”

What is being crafted in this deterministic outlook is a view of the individual as having no control over choices because of the presence of an insidious disease/addiction/codependency. The irony, of course, is that the addict is expected to make the choice to admit that he or she is powerless to control the addiction and to place his or her faith in a Higher Power.

Psychiatrist Gerald May specifically addressed the issue of addiction and moral responsibility in a telephone interview from his office in Washington, D.C. “We are absolutely responsible,” he asserted, “and our addictive patterns don’t change that.” He defines codependency as “one person’s addictive patterns aligning themselves with another’s or others’ so that there is some degree of systemic collusion or addictive pattern.”

May, the author of Grace and Addiction (Harper & Row), makes the following distinction concerning the neurological, spiritual, and psychological factors in addiction: “If you look at the addictive pattern in terms of nerve cell interaction, those patterns are something we can’t change. But, how and when we act or behave in response to those patterns, we are responsible for such acts. There is always choice.” While the existence “of the thing itself [compulsion or obsession] is not something we can control, we do control how we respond to it. There is always a level of freedom to that, and that’s the bind, and that’s why grace is so essential.”

Acknowledging that it is “a bit devastating” to recognize the “global nature of how addicted we are,” May rejects the notion that addiction and disease are synonymous. “If you’re looking at it from the standpoint of understanding what really goes on with the basic nature of human beings and the addictive process,” he said, “then you don’t want to be thinking in terms of disease, abnormality, or anything like that. It’s just theological anthropology, just the way things are.”

The Disease Myth

Without a doubt, one of the most disconcerting aspects of the codependency/addiction movement is the freedom with which the term disease is applied to every imaginable compulsion. Building on the assumption that alcoholism is a disease, spokespersons in the field are often cavalier in applying this concept to a host of other behaviors. But because codependency fails to meet even the physiological, genetic, and metabolic criteria that might qualify alcoholism as a disease, codependency as a disease is all the more called into question.

“You have a disease when you are not at ‘ease,’ ” claims Judi Hollis. “Alcoholism is a disease and so are eating disorders.” Arguing for the concept of a “basic disease underlying all of the addictions and addiction-related diseases,” Anne Schaef says, “Everyone who works with, lives with, or is around an alcoholic (or a person actively in an addictive process) is by definition a co-dependent and a practicing co-dependent. This includes therapists, counselors, ministers, colleagues, and the family.… These people are not just being affected; they are also slipping into their disease and losing their own sobriety.”

Researchers P. Nathan and A. Skinstad note that the disease mode “has been no more productive of positive therapy outcomes than have any of the countless, unidimensional views of alcoholism that coexist with it.” In his controversial new study on the subject, internationally recognized addictions expert Herbert Fingarette argues that the disease concept of alcoholism stands on a precarious foundation, at best. It is a simplistic, outdated, and “arcane” concept, he charges in Heavy Drinking: the Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press), a book that is “bitterly resented in alcoholism circles,” he said in a phone interview. Such a view rests not on scientific or psychological support but largely on the powerful influence of certain economic concerns, says Fingarette (referring perhaps to the large degree to which many alcoholism treatment programs depend on patients’ medical insurance for income).

Fingarette sees the disease model as “a harmful notion” because it removes the problem from the realm of the human, “where humans are acting responsibly, even though unwisely, destructively, foolishly and there ascribing it to some simple, though unknown, physical process or breakdown in a piece of inner machinery.” Such a shift in conceptualizing the matter “distorts the nature of the problem and makes it into a technical thing where experts are to be called on.”

“It’s really a human problem, and it comes down to that when you push people to the wall,” he stated. “They say, ‘Well it’s not just physical, but a psychological and spiritual problem, a cultural problem. That’s the kind of disease it is.’ What they are doing is using medical-sounding language to talk about these matters, which disguises the fact that they don’t have a medical account of it. They are constantly withdrawing the person’s attention from what is the person’s dilemma and trying to turn it over to medical experts, when in fact the evidence is against it.” The disease model “undermines a person’s resolution to handle this problem responsibly,” he continued. “And it also insidiously incites more of the behavior.… Objectively speaking, it’s an encouragement to continue if you let people know they are not responsible, that they will be excused for it.”

False Messiahs

Four years ago Carmen Berry burned out. A social worker who generally devoted six days a week to her job, she volunteered at her church, served on committees, and saw clients before the Sunday morning and evening services. She was indispensable. Until she burned out. “My relationships were unsatisfying,” Berry recalls, “I was absolutely exhausted. I was alienated from other people.”

Physically sick and emotionally spent, Berry took a year off—quit her job, stopped going to church, and began a spiritual journey of prayer and therapy. “God really met me in that year,” she says. “My relationship with God was the basis of my recovery.”

Out of that experience and her work with numerous driven clients emerged Berry’s concept of the “Messiah Trap,” which she outlines in her book When Helping You Is Hurting Me: Escaping the Messiah Trap (Harper & Row). “Messiahs” are so busy taking care of other people that they don’t take care of themselves, she says. “Messiahs neglect themselves because they feel that they are supposed to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of others. This is the Messiah definition of love.… [It] is an odd combination of feeling grandiose yet worthless, of being needed and yet abandoned, of playing God while groveling.”

Berry feels that the church has contributed to the problem. “In my background the church overemphasized helping others to the neglect of one’s own growth,” she said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “There is a heavy emphasis on helping other people without struggling with what it means to really love people. This attitude is almost considered a virtue in the Christian subculture. Rarely have I heard a sermon that perhaps you should go home and take time for your family. The attitude is that we are basically selfish and need to be pushed into more service.”

Judging by the frequent calls she gets from Christians who are “absolutely desperate—marriages falling apart, leaving the ministry,” Berry sees the problem as a serious one. She cautions that in any healthy, loving relationship “there are disciplines that go with the relationships.” Self-sacrifice and submission are part of genuine love, she notes. Messiahs, however, are “very narcissistic.” By promoting themselves as superhuman beings, they avoid real intimacy: “I’m helping you, but I’m also using you for status, for money, or to gain power.”

“My faith and trust in God are significantly deeper now,” Berry notes. “I used to struggle with evil in the world. Here I was doing an enormous amount, and I didn’t see God doing anything. I had a skewed attitude.

“Now I have this wonderful sense that he is active and in control, not that he is trying to keep up with me. I have a sense of peace I never had before. Before I was too busy for God to see him.”

What are some precautions, some safeguards against becoming a Messiah? “You need to be connected to your internal signals,” she says. “If you are helping in such a way that you feel angry, exhausted, and guilty—and that no matter what you do you aren’t doing enough—then you’re probably falling into the Messiah Trap.”

Balance is the key for Berry. “Jesus illustrated in a balanced way how to minister,” she concludes. “He took time to pray, time for his personal relationships. He didn’t respond to every need.… He knew when to say no.”

By Jim and Phyllis Alsdurf.

No Pigeonholes

Fingarette also dismisses the view that if “it isn’t a disease then it’s a matter of just will or choice.” “We have to get rid of the very simplistic notion that it’s simply a matter of will or sin and replace it with the sense that gradually, over the years, whatever it may be—sex, drinking, adventure, money, or power—with some people it becomes more and more central to them.… Gradually it becomes the central activity in a person’s whole way of life. It is true for anyone, unrelated to disease or symptoms, that if your whole life is shaped in such a way, it is very difficult for anyone to make radical changes even if they think rationally they should.”

The concept of a person’s way of life is “purposely broad,” he said, because just to look at the problem of addiction as primarily physical or psychological is inadequate. An “overarchingconcept” is needed that emphasizes “the entire being.” “It’s a human problem, which involves the physical, mental, cultural, and so forth,” said Fingarette. “We can’t put it in one pigeonhole or another. It will vary from person to person. I don’t believe that one disease with one cause and one process will explain it.”

The acknowledgement of the spiritual dimension within alcoholism treatment and codependency is “a move in the right direction,” he said. “Although AA allows you to mean anything you want by it, it’s a gesture in that direction. But it doesn’t give any real guidance.”

The church, on the other hand, should be nothing but “fundamentally opposed” to the disease concept, contended Fingarette. “I just don’t understand why any churches would go for the disease idea, except insofar as they are taken by the notion that we have to be enlightened and that seems to be the enlightened view. The disease approach denies the spiritual dimension of the whole thing. People in the church may be afraid to take a different stand because it will be labeled antiscientific, antimodern, or old-fashioned. I think that’s all misguided.”

Help For The Sexually Addicted

It was time to come clean. Twenty-five-year-old “James” had made a searching moral inventory of his life. He could no longer live the lie. As his young wife, “Sarah,” the mother of his two children, sat numb, James spelled out forher a story of secret betrayal and bondage that even the most exploitative checkout-stand tabloids would have found difficult to print.

He started with foggy memories of being molested by a male schoolteacher at age nine. And he ended with a tearful account of stalking two adolescent girls and trying to lure them into his car in order to seduce them.

In between, James described a complex web of symptoms of his own sexual compulsivity: fascination with hard-corepornography for as long as he could remember; habitual masturbation; dozens of sexual encounters as a teenager with girls, other boys, older women; anonymous sodomy with other men inside X-rated “peepshow” booths; “binging” on prostitutes during work trips; seducing a church teenager while serving as a youth sponsor; and the syphilis and herpes he had brought home to the marriage bed.

“I was the consummate Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” James would recall a year later, from the small, Colorado town in which he lives. “I had a good job, expense account, company car, house, and was active in the local church. Two years later, I was bankrupt, the furniture was gone, the house was in foreclosure. During those months, I spent $20,000 on my habit … grocery money, shoe money for the kids.

“It got so bad at one point I had to stop changing my little girl’s diapers because of the thoughts that would come into my head,” he confesses. “I didn’t care who it was with. I just had to have my fix.”

Ten million “sexaholics”

James is an example of what a growing number of psychologists are calling the “compulsive sexual addict.” Or, in the vernacular of one of the 12-step recovery groups that has emerged in the last two decades, a “sexaholic.”

He is one of an estimated 10 millionplus Americans suffering from a personality disorder that is sending many psychologists back to school for further training, and leaving sociologists shaking their heads in disbelief.

In the promiscuous shadow of the sixties and seventies, the psychological world has been slow to view sexual compulsion as an addiction as serious and destructive as alcoholism or other chemical dependencies. Unlike the pathology of physical addiction to drug or drink, which for decades has been considered a medical illness, the victims of sexual and other behavioral addictions (such as compulsive eating and gambling) have struggled to find much professional sympathy.

Sociologists, on one hand, continue to regard sex as a relative human experience, in which notions of normality drift with the ebb and flow of culture. Some argue that stigmatizing sex outside of marriage as mental illness is a dangerous precedent—a legitimizing of the Judeo-Christian view of sexual sin as a pathology needing treatment by professional psychology. They point to Scandinavian countries and other cultures, where many practice recreational sex apparently free of guilt, as evidence that deviations from strict monogamy occur naturally.

“We sociologists take a real jaundiced view of the degree to which some psychotherapists have pathologized the world,” says Martin Levine, associate professor of sociology at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, who presented a paper entitled “The Myth of Sexual Compulsivity” to the American Psychological Association Convention in 1986.

“There are people who talk now about being addicted to jogging—where’s it all going to stop? The Christian fundamentalist camp, both politically and through its ministry, is now using the sexual-compulsion model in its antipornography crusade. Some are even using the 12 steps to deal with members of their congregations they call sinners,” Levine adds.

Psychotherapists, on the other hand, are trying to make up for decades of indifference. Picture the multicolored “Rubik’s Cube,” and you have some idea of the complex matrix sexual behavior has become for researchers.

Not waiting for science

Meanwhile, sexual addicts have not waited for the behavioral sciences to catch up. In the mid-1970s, a recovering alcoholic on the East coast began experimenting with the 12 steps—pioneered decades earlier by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)—for his own sexual compulsion. Soon he had formed what is believed to be the first support group for sexual addicts, Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous. At the same time, similar movements were taking shape in Minneapolis and Southern California under the names Sex Addicts Anonymous and Sexaholics Anonymous.

More recently, another program, Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, was started in Los Angeles by a group of homosexuals. They were uncomfortable with the “no sex outside of heterosexual marriage” tenor and Judeo-Christian concept of God found in AA’S traditional 12-step program.

Leaders of the four organizations estimate there are hundreds of meetings reaching thousands of sexual addicts each week around the country. In Los Angeles, for instance, there are now 30 meetings of SA, SAA, SCA or LSAA held each week, drawing more than a thousand participants. This is not particularly large when compared to the 2,000 AA meetings taking place in Los Angeles. However, leaders point out the sex-recovery movement is growing far faster than did AA during its infancy.

The 12 steps of AA and those for most of the sexual rehabilitation programs are virtually the same. They require a willingness to acknowledge powerlessness over sexual compulsion, submission to God, or “God as we understand Him,” and the need to make amends with others who have been harmed by the behavior.

The bible of sexual sobriety

One of the relatively few psychologists who have specialized in the field of sexual addiction is Minneapolis’s Patrick Carnes. In 1978 Carnes established the nation’s first treatment center for sexual dependency. His Golden Valley Health Center integrates the 12-step program in an inpatient program that includes group therapy and family counseling.

Bucking professional trends, Carnes made his treatment ideas public with the release of a book in 1983, which has become a sort of bible for many of the sexual-sobriety groups. Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction (CompCare Publications), says Carnes, grew out of his experiences treating a group of sex offenders in prison.

In his book, Carnes describes the theory of “addictive progression,” in which some people with compulsive tendencies climb the ladder of sexual deviation a rung at a time. Starting, for instance, with pornography, the subject then seeks out more and more taboo forms of sexual experience, sometimes crossing the line from legal to illegal sexual behavior.

In the introduction to his book, Carnes describes the moment when one realizes he or she is a sexual addict: “When you have to tell yet another lie which you almost believe yourself … when the money you have spent on the last prostitute equals the amount for the new shoes your child needs … when your teenage son finds your pornography … when you see a person on the street you had been sexual with in a restroom … when you make business travel decisions on the basis of the affair you are having … when you have to leave your job because of a sexual entanglement … when you cringe inside because your friends are laughing at a flasher joke, and you are one.…”

Many in his field initially criticized Carnes’s book as “pseudoscience.” But as more and more sexual addicts seek help, a growing number of therapists are seeing the book as an important foray into a new frontier.

And for James of Colorado, Out of the Shadows was his last hope. “I went to a psychologist for help, and he tried to tell me I didn’t have a problem,” James remembers. “In a small town you don’t have a lot of choices, so Carnes’s book has been my only source of help.”

By Brian Bird, a journalist and screenwriter living in Southern California.

Flight From Loneliness

It is important to note that something need not qualify as a disease in order for it to be a legitimate and significant human concern. Certainly the mere popularity of the codependency movement indicates that it strikes an important chord with countless individuals who feel trapped in unsatisfying patterns of relating to others.

One cannot help wondering, however, if the prominent voices within the codependency movement who tell us that almost everyone is codependent are merely describing human nature. Could codependence be that part of the human condition in which the search for connectedness and the avoidance of loneliness have gone awry? Codependency may well represent desperate attempts to avoid aloneness. It reflects the struggle of humankind from the Garden onward not to be alone. Certainly this search is more a statement of what it means to be human than a symptom of some medical condition.

The ontological reality of being human is that in any attempt to avoid loneliness we may give away too much of ourselves—to a chemical substance or to an unhealthy relationship—and so experience a new form of loneliness. Regardless of its flaws, the codependency movement beckons us to discover the balance of healthy interdependence. Along a continuum, with consuming codependence on one end and reclusiveness at the other, we are challenged to find the point of healthy balance where we will be in right relationship with others.

Although many Christians will find much that rings true in the addiction and codependency literature, one major hurdle remains: the invitation to narcissism. Statements such as the claim that recovery from codependency “involves learning one new behavior that we will devote ourselves to: taking care of ourselves” will make Christians understandably nervous.

Even when such bald statements are softened with qualifiers (loving someone does involve giving at times, for example), generally no clear guidelines are offered for determining where taking care of oneself ends and self-centeredness begins. Clearly, negotiating the lonely path of suffering and sacrifice Christ has charted for his disciples, yet not winding up with the label of codependent, requires some tricky footwork.

Gerald May aptly sums up the challenge facing any Christian who struggles to be free from compulsive behavior, addiction, or codependency. “Real freedom, real recovery amounts to not filling the space that’s left by the addiction,” he concludes. “Virtually every program I’m familiar with regarding treatment or prevention is based on substituting something else [for the addiction]. Even values—’We need better values.’ ” May draws on the contemplative tradition in Christianity for help. For him, “the notion of just baring the space [before God] without filling it has the most important thing to say.” And that, says May, “is pretty radical in most circles.”

No-Diet Weight Loss

For most of her life, Kara has been at least 100 pounds overweight. She has been on every imaginable diet. But, Kara noted, none of them worked because they only dealt with what she ate and not why she ate. A year ago she began therapy with Dan Bero, a Christian and a certified addictions counselor. Since then she has lost 85 pounds.

“The first thing he said was he didn’t want me to go on any diets,” Kara recalls. “He reasoned that dieting is self-defeating if a person eats, not because they love to eat, but, like me, if they don’t get their needs met.”

Bero had Kara read books about food addictions and the emotions behind them. “I saw myself clearly in them,” Kara notes. “I knew I ate when I was sad, depressed, or lonely and didn’t want to deal with it. I’ve learned to uncover the whys of my food addiction, and now I’m learning to cope.”

Know thy Higher Power

Bero embraces certain aspects of the addiction model but does not believe it removes moral responsibility from the addict. Rather, he says, it focuses on the fact that an addiction cannot be overcome without God.

“Scripture is clear that even in our frailty God expects us to make a decision,” he says. “Once I understand my illness, I have to make a decision.”

Bero encourages his clients to enter 12-step programs if they know who their Higher Power is. “Not just any higher power will give us eternal life,” he says. “It can open people up to the wrong spirit. I see a strong movement within the mental health and treatment field of an inner awareness being emphasized rather than a personal relationship with God. That is potentially misleading and dangerous.” Nonetheless, Bero notes, the 12-step programs “are based on Christian principles. If people follow them, they’re going to achieve benefits, including sobriety. But if they don’t address their sin, they are still in trouble.”

Favored child

Kara first started to overeat at age six, shortly after her mother died. “I ate whenever I didn’t want to deal with feelings. In my family we weren’t taught how to express sadness.”

Raised by a stepmother who was an adult child of an alcoholic, Kara was favored over her sister. “Consequently,” she says, “outside family members overcompensated for the favoritism by being overly critical of me.”

Kara says her stepmother “isn’t one to express real emotion, and she can’t express positive feelings. I received love from her by getting things, not affirmation. She’d give me anything I wanted to eat.”

On Bero’s recommendation, Kara began to keep a journal of reactions she doesn’t like and perceived rejections. “After six months I began to realize I was so angry,” she says, “but I had just stuffed my feelings away.”

“My biggest breakthrough was when I realized I didn’t ask for any of this,” observes Kara. “I always blamed myself for the fact that my sister was emotionally abused. But as a child I wasn’t responsible for that because I didn’t know any better. Now the Lord has brought me to an accountability that I am responsible to work toward healing.”

After high school, Kara was drawn to Christ “because of a love with no strings attached,” she says. “I had never known love like that.”

Throughout the past year’s healing, Kara has been shedding pounds and learning to be more open with people who hurt her. “Before, if people hurt me, I determined it was my fault,” she says. “Even a small rejection would just about devastate me. But I’d ignore it and eat.”

Kara says this year has been extremely difficult. “At times I’ve been so afraid because I knew I was going to have to look at painful things in the past,” she notes. During those times, Kara has found passages such as Deuteronomy 31:8 (“He will not fail you or forsake you; do not fear …”) and Philippians 1:6 (“He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion …”) especially comforting. “It is painful,” she concludes. “But it’s a good kind of pain. I know when I’m feeling this pain there is healing taking place.”

By Jim and Phyllis Alsdurf

Addiction and codependency in Christian perspective.

The notions of addiction, disease, and therapy seem to be replacing sin and sanctificaiion in our society and our churches.

Addiction is potent and real. Destructive behaviors (such as heavy drinking, smoking, gambling, and certain sexual practices) as well as the good things in life (personal relationships, food, and exercise) can enslave even Christians. That we find ourselves In bondage is a puzzle. How to find our way out is a conundrum. For many believers, “Just trust in Jesus” has not been completely effective advice.

Various physical and psychological therapies have been helpful. But the devotees of the therapeutic approach would like to label every experience of bondage a “disease” and sign us up for treatment. The disease and addiction model have helped many who would otherwise be too ashamed to seek help. But some believe the role of human will and responsibility has been minimized.

This CT Institute report examines this trend and helps us evaluate it.

• Journalist Phyllis Alsdurf, former editor of Family Life Today, and her husband, Jim Alsdurf, forensic psychologist for the Bureau of Community Corrections. Hennepin County, Mi nnesota, describe the broad outlines of this trend and offer a professional critique of the “codependency movement,” a spin-off of Alcoholics Anonymous’s work with family and friends of the chemically dependent.

• Brian Bird, a screenwriter in Southern California, takes us into the shadowy world of sexual addiction.

• Archibald Hart, dean and professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary’s graduate school of psychology, helps us understand how behaviors like compulsive jogging, shopping, and gambling can be physically addictive.

• And in an institute interview, Richard Mouw, professor of Christian philosophy and ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary, explores the Christian doctrines of sin, grace, and human nature as they relate to these lives of bondage we are now calling “addictions.”

The idea of religious liberty in America has been stood on its head.

The clamor of the political bandwagons has passed; the voters have spoken. A new administration will be installed next month in Washington, and soon afterward the rest of the nation will settle back into its usual political nonchalance—save, perhaps, for a small portion of those who bothered to turn out at the polls.

But the months ahead should hold clues to the direction in which the new government will take us in regard to one vital issue—an issue of prime inportance to Christians: religious liberty.

Last summer, several hundred representatives from diverse parts of American society gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia, to affirm the foundation of religious liberty as set forth in the First Amendment (CT, Aug. 12, 1988, p. 50). The highlight of their meeting was the signing of the Williamsburg Charter, a 23-page document that hails “the genius of the First Amendment” and explores “the place of religion in American life.”

In this article, adapted from an address given to the Fulbright International Scholars at the Williamsburg Charter Summit, Richard John Neuhaus examines the “religious liberty clauses” of the First Amendment—the foundational freedom upon which all other freedoms rest.

Americans are forever trying to “sort things out.” We are always going back to first principles, invoking precedents, and debating conflicting views of the future.

This is part of what we mean when we say that America is an experiment—a claim that may seem strange to outside observers. After all, European settlers have been here more than 350 years now, and our form of federal government, embodied in the Constitution, is 200 years old. Indeed, it is the oldest continuing form of government in the world. Yet we Americans persist in the claim that ours is an experiment.

In no single place is the experimental nature of American democracy more obvious than in the “religious liberty” clauses of the First Amendment. The first item in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” There are two parts, or two clauses, in that provision. One is usually called the “no-establishment” clause, and the other the “free-exercise” clause. Both are in the service of religious freedom.

Some would go further and insist there is really only one religion clause or provision, made up of two parts, each related to the other as the end is related to the means. The free exercise of religion is the end, and nonestablishment of religion is an important means instrumental to that end.

A Curious Inversion

That point needs to be underscored because, especially in the last half-century, the two parts of the religion clause have frequently been inverted. That is to say, it has become common in some circles to give “no establishment” priority over “free exercise.” Thus people often refer to the religion clause simply as “the establishment clause.” Some legal scholars go so far as to suggest that the goal is nonestablishment, and they then allow that some space or “accommodation” can be made for free exercise.

One reason for this inversion is the popular belief that the religion clause is essentially a protection against religion rather than for religion. In other words, it was suggested that the religion clause was intended to protect the state and public life generally from the influence of religion. Thus the “separation of church and state” came to mean the separation of religion from public life.

Such an inversion is both contrary to history and exceedingly dangerous to religious freedom and other human rights. Historically, religious freedom is in largest part an achievement of religion, not a secular achievement against religion. The chief reason impelling the Puritans to these shores was the search for religious freedom.

Roger Williams, perhaps the best-known champion of religious freedom in American history, challenged the Puritans of New England to develop their understanding of religious liberty more consistently. Williams was a champion of religious freedom not because he was hostile to religion, but precisely because he was a deeply committed Christian who insisted that the government had no right to interfere with religious belief and practice. Government establishment of a religion, in his view, constituted such an interference.

Similarly, the debates surrounding the adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution make clear that the premier concern of the Founders was the freedom of religion (including the freedom of the nonreligious conscience). Early drafts of the amendment focused on religious freedom, and some did not even mention nonestablishment. The logic is very clear: If you are for religious freedom, then you must be against the imposition of a governmentally established religion. Thus the curious inversion, by which “free exercise” is subordinated to “no establishment,” has, I believe, no support from history.

Such an inversion is exceedingly dangerous to religious freedom and other human rights. This has become increasingly obvious in recent decades with the expansion of governmental programs and power into more and more areas of American life. The perverse consequence of the inversion is that wherever government goes, religion must retreat. That is because “no establishment,” it is said, means no connection between religion and government, and especially no connection that involves government support or funds.

The result of this kind of thinking, as you might imagine, is the increased restriction of the free exercise of religion. Schools, social agencies, and other associations that are nonreligious or even antireligious can receive government support and funds, while those that are religious in character cannot. The message is clear and ominous: If you wish to receive the help of government, get rid of religion.

To make matters even more troubling, there are those who argue that tax exemption is also a form of government funding. Therefore, they say, all institutions (religious, educational, scientific, cultural) that are exempt from certain taxes must toe the line of government policy. The implications of such thinking for religious freedom—but not only for religious freedom!—should be obvious.

The Foundational Freedom

The Williamsburg Charter is an effort to arrest these trends by calling us back to the constituting insight that the religion clause is for religion, not against religion. In the words of the Charter: “[T]he two clauses are essentially one provision for preserving religious liberty. Both parts, No establishment and Free exercise, are to be comprehensively understood as being in the service of religious liberty as a positive good.”

This truth is important for all human rights, for the right to religious freedom is the foundation of all other rights. Why should this be the case? Again, it is the logic of our historical development. The Declaration of Independence, which is key to understanding our constitutional history, says that we are endowed by the Creator with certain “unalienable rights.” As the charter puts it, “[T]he security of all rights rests upon the recognition that they are neither given by the state, nor can they be taken away by the state. Such rights are inherent in the inviolability of the human person. History demonstrates that unless these rights are protected our society’s slow, painful progress toward freedom would not have been possible.”

Why should the state respect, and even take pains to protect, the rights of people whose views are disagreeable? Why should troublesome minorities be permitted to get in the way of what the government and the majority of people want to do? The answer to these questions is essentially religious in character. These people have been given rights by an authority that is prior to and higher than the state.

The moral legitimacy of the state itself depends upon the state’s acknowledgment of a higher authority, and this leads us to the factor that was so radically new in the American experiment. Other states in human history believed that their moral legitimacy was derived from a higher authority. From tribal dynasties to the Greek polis to the kings of medieval Europe, it was acknowledged that states derived their authority from God or the gods. Therefore, until the American experiment came about, every state took it for granted that it was necessary for the state to control religion. Until the American experiment, the establishment of religion was the universal rule. After all, if the state’s authority was derived from religion, the state could hardly afford to let religion out of its control.

The novelty, the audacity, of the American proposal was to break that pattern in the belief that religious freedom would be good both for the government and for religion. In agreement with many statements by the Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early nineteenth century that religion is “the first political institution” of American democracy. The striking oddity is that the first political institution is not included in or controlled by the formal polity. The political institution on which the entire order of government depends is itself beyond the reach of government.

Painful Progress

All things considered, I believe the audacious experiment of American democracy has worked. I have mentioned some of the problems we have had and will continue to have, and I could mention many more. But the religion clause of the First Amendment has served both religion and government well in our effort to secure ordered liberty. I do not say this boastfully, but gratefully. And I certainly do not suggest that this arrangement can be or should be translated wholesale to other countries and cultures. In some other societies, the problems of religion and government are painful, and progress in resolving those problems is not only slow, but may seem imperceptible.

Despite all the talk about secularization, most societies of the world are pervasively religious, and that may be increasing rather than decreasing. Although this reality is often overlooked, the empirical evidence indicates that this is also the case in American society (see Unsecular America, edited by Richard John Neuhaus [Eerdmans]). The Williamsburg Charter takes note of this important fact: “Highly modernized like the rest of the First World, yet not so secularized, American society largely because of religious freedom remains, like most of the Third World, deeply religious. This fact, which is critical for possibilities of better human understanding, has not been sufficiently appreciated in American self-understanding, or drawn upon in American diplomacy and communication throughout the world.”

Yet in some societies, religion is perceived as a source of conflict and divisiveness. It is seen as an obstacle to progress, especially by those who are eager for modernization. The notion is still prevalent that there is a necessary connection between modernization and secularization. Whether or not there is such a necessary connection is the subject of much theoretical debate.

We can say with considerable certainty, however, that the American experience does not support such a connection. It is at least worth pondering whether the key to the American difference in contrast with, for example, societies of Western Europe, is our way of securing religious freedom. In societies where religion is seen as an obstacle to progress, the temptation is to ignore, banish, or control religion. Generally speaking, where governments have given in to that temptation, the results have been very unhappy both for government and religion. The evidence strongly suggests that the institution of religious freedom is the better way.

The ideas and institutions of religious freedom must have their source not only in government policy but in religious belief and devotion. As noted earlier, religious freedom is in largest part a religious achievement. Respect for those of different religions and protection of those who dissent from all religions must be religiously grounded, if such respect and protection is to be secure. In other words, religious freedom cannot be secured by law alone. Religious freedom requires a religious rationale.

The great goal is to secure an order of religious freedom that permits citizens to engage their deepest differences in a manner that does not destroy, but strengthens, civil society. The achievement of that great goal is at least as much the task of theology and religious leadership as it is the task of social science and political leadership. That task is never completed. It is not completed here in the United States of America. Our task and our experiment continue.

Richard John Neuhaus is director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society in New York.

Patriotism is a mixed blessing for the Christian. I relearned this when I watched the Seoul Olympics on TV a few months ago. I relearned it especially while watching the men’s 100-meter finals, the race where Canada’s Ben Johnson was pitted against America’s Carl Lewis, not just for a gold medal but for the informal title of “World’s Fastest Man.” Despite the fact that as a Christian my primary identification is with the church universal and not with any nation-state, I found I really wanted the gold to go to my Canadian compatriot.

Picture, then, my satisfaction when Johnson not only won the race, but broke the 9.8-second barrier as well. The world’s fastest man was a black immigrant Canadian, and I, a Canadian living in America, had watched live coverage of the historic event.

So what was my reaction two days later when I learned that Ben Johnson’s post-race urine sample had tested positive for drugs and that he would be stripped of his title? Regret, yes; disappointment, yes. But in the end I am too much of a Calvinist to exempt my own compatriots from the effects of pervasive depravity. And as I read detailed postmortems of the scandal, I could only grieve over the way greed and subterfuge had produced only losers in this sad business. Even Carl Lewis must feel that his belated victory is, at best, a Pyhrric one.

There is an old blues song whose refrain goes, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” That’s quite true. As one Canadian magazine put it, only the story of the scandal has any sales value for Johnson now. But it’s also true, though the song doesn’t say it, that everyone wants to know you when you’re up and in. And it’s clear that many people stood to gain from Ben Johnson’s success, so much so that we may never know whether he took steroids knowingly or unknowingly, or how much time, money, and subterfuge went into masking them—in the end unsuccessfully.

Can anything redemptive come out of such a mess? I have a hope that someone from Ben Johnson’s entourage will come down with a case of old-fashioned foxhole religion. When the Watergate scandal broke in 1974, and everyone involved was frantically engaged in damage control, a Christian legislator quietly slipped Charles Colson a copy of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The seed fell on fertile ground: having nowhere to look but up, Colson turned to God.

“Foxhole religion,” the press called it, and predicted it wouldn’t last beyond the royalties someone would pay for Colson’s life story. But while in prison Colson learned firsthand about the despair and cynicism of “forgotten men” behind bars. After his release he realized that he, too, couldn’t just forget them. Fourteen years later Prison Fellowship, which Colson founded, is an international agency involved in prison evangelism and efforts aimed at reforming the penal system.

So my word to Ben Johnson and company—in case any of them are hearing a still, small voice from God—is simply this: There is nothing shameful about foxhole religion, as long as you take it out of the foxhole and let it bear fruit. Is it impossible to imagine a Ben Johnson, four years hence, more involved in the Special Olympics than the Summer Olympics? Role modeling a life of service to the Canadian children who still stand around his home chanting, “We love Ben”? Or serving on the Canadian government Commission for Fair Play (a body formed to work against escalating violence in hockey and to reverse the win-at-all-costs attitude that threatens to eclipse skill, camaraderie, and honesty in every other sport)?

With God all things are possible. And if Ben Johnson responded to God’s call, he would be my brother three times over: first, as a fellow Canadian; second—and more basically—in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the solidarity of sin” that affects us all, and because of which none of us dares throw stones at another; and third, and most happily, he would be my brother in Christ in the family of God, which knows no national boundaries. And indeed, a welcome addition to the family.

MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN

SPEAKING OUT

As the trial of Oliver North approaches, my family—along with millions of others—has once again received letters from Christian organizations urging us to petition the President for “an immediate and unconditional pardon for a real American hero—Oliver North.”

The committed activists who send these appeals are gravely concerned about the dangers of totalitarianism in Nicaragua. They view Colonel North’s actions in diverting Iran arms-sale profits to the contras as bold initiatives for the cause of freedom. They are outraged that someone so dedicated could be, in their words, “harassed, humiliated, and persecuted unjustly.” They decry North’s 16-count indictment as a “travesty of justice” perpetrated by “liberals in Congress.”

I don’t quarrel with their concern about Nicaragua. I, too, believe the current regime is brutal, repressive, and incorrigible. Given that belief, should I mail in the petition with my signature? Should Oliver North be pardoned? It’s a question we discuss as a family.

My oldest son will soon enter college to begin studying accounting. If I sign the petition, he is going to ask me some tough questions. Didn’t North misappropriate several millions of dollars that didn’t belong to him? Well, it appears so. Isn’t that normally considered embezzling? Well, yes, under normal circumstances. Can an action that is normally defined as a crime become, on rare, urgent occasions, a valiant and heroic deed?

If so, then some heroic accountant’s task in such a situation is to hide the transactions. He will create spurious documentation to camouflage what is going on. And if the authorities should open an investigation, he will gather armloads of incriminating evidence and dump them in the paper shredder.

This, I must explain to my son if I sign, is how true heroes operate.

My younger son aspires to the legal profession. He wants to be a judge. To him I must explain that the laws cannot apply to cases like this one. After all, Congress made a mistake by passing the Boland Amendment, which prohibited further military aid to the contras. North should not be blamed for disobeying this bad law. Nor for stealing the money. Nor for destroying evidence. Nor for lying to investigative bodies.

Somehow I must help my son unlearn all the notions he has picked up in his civics classes—clichés about checks and balances, separation of powers.

As a judge, someday he may have to try a similar case. Will he know when to acquit a lieutenant colonel acting on his own impulse, who commits crimes in a worthy cause? Or will he mistakenly assert that officers of the military and executive branch have a duty to protect and defend the Constitution?

Evidently the friends of Oliver North fear that the presiding judge in his case will make this very mistake. So they call for a presidential pardon.

These fellow Christians exhort us to glorify in Oliver North what they condemn in Daniel Ortega: the expedient and illegal use of political power.

When the cause obliterates the distinction between falsehood and truth, between end and means, the cause has destroyed everything good, including itself. When expediency is transformed into principle, chaos is unleashed.

My comments have presupposed that North is guilty. Perhaps he is innocent. If so, a pardon would inflict an egregious insult upon his person. He deserves a trial in which he can demonstrate the folly of the charges. He deserves the right to walk out of the courtroom exonerated of all wrongdoing, not pardoned as if he were a gangster with friends in high places.

So, I’ll let the red, white, and blue petition gather dust on my desk. North’s self-interests and our family’s lively discussion can best be settled in a court of law.

Gary Hardaway is a free-lance writer living in Hillsboro, Kansas.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

A Missed Opportunity

I enjoy reading Robert Coles and I appreciate what Joseph Sobran writes. Thus I greedily turned to these and others’ reflections on the impact of the Reagan White House on religion and society [“Sizing Up the Reagan Revolution,” Oct. 21]. The pieces were too “nice.”

Coles and Sobran disagree, as do Neuhaus and Reynolds. For the sake of understanding, CT missed a golden opportunity to let them disagree with each other, to criticize each other, and thus clarify each’s position and help readers come to better understanding and appreciation of the complexity of the religion-in-society issues.

REV. DAVID K. WEBER

Montana State University

Bozeman, Mont.

Robert Coles’s evaluation of President Reagan based on how well he has led the American people, with Jesus as a model, seems to forget that Reagan is not an ordained minister but the head of state—which, in the U.S., is not the church. He seems to forget further that if the church is in God’s right hand, the state, in its nature, is in his left and should serve God as such.

I did not start out with many expectations of Reagan in this presidency, but I and millions have been heartened over his release of many of our economic, political, and inalienable liberties that had become dangerously trammeled.

E. D. REED

Boston, Mass.

Of Mormons and geography

I just read “Rising Star at the Twirling Tomato” [Church in Action, Oct. 21]. At first reading I was annoyed that Rob Wilkins knows little about Utah geography—the people of American Fork may be surprised to find out they are so near to the people of Roy. As I continued, the phrase “Christianity that relies on the Bible as its sole authority is practically nonexistent” hit me. Ah, here we go again. There is a plethora of churches in Utah that exist solely to bash the Mormons. There seems to be a habit among many fundamentalist preachers and believers in Utah to seek out fulfillment for their own prophecies of oppression and fear. It seems an odd way to live for people who claim that Jesus won rather than lost the battle.

REV. GREG B. ANDERSON

Zion Lutheran Church

Salt Lake City, Utah

Wilkins did an excellent job in describing Lofquist’s ministry without the typical snide innuendos so often directed towards other denominations.

T. R. POCOCK

Fairfax, Va.

Discerning protest

Terry Muck’s editorial regarding well-publicized protests is insightful and provocative [“Holy Indignation,” Oct. 21]. Christian spokespeople often have been self-appointed individuals without clear motive, babbling rebuttals devoid of substantiation or offering a complete contextual misinterpretation of the issues at hand. Muck’s closing remarks are timely. The boiling point of protest isn’t a duel between activeness or passiveness, but of choosing to discern how I can be the most effective. God will be glorified amidst our limited, futile efforts.

DAN SCHERLING

Tacoma, Wash.

The word protest inaccurately describes what has been taking place in Atlanta and across the nation. A more accurate word would be rescue, from God’s command, “Rescue those being led away to death …” (Prov. 24:10–12, NIV). Because the goal is to save lives and not simply protest the killing, we should not use the word protest, which is the language of the media, but rather rescue, which accurately describes what is being done.

DANIEL R. DUFFY, JR.

Atlanta, Ga.

Two Western seminaries

I read the news article on seminary education with interest [Oct. 21]. But Joe Maxwell has confused Western Evangelical Seminary (Portland, Oreg.) with Western Theological Seminary (Holland, Mich.). The former is Wesleyan, while the latter is Calvinist.

REV. SIMON CHOU

Evangelical Chinese Church

Seattle, Wash.

Debatable Wisdom

My church took a lesson from the 1988 presidential campaign to help us call a new pastor. After the search committee narrowed the list to two names, we scheduled a debate.

Moderator (to the congregation): Please refrain from expressing your support for either candidate during our limited time together.

Panelist: Candidate #1, you have said you are tough on sin. How can we be sure this is not an empty promise?

Candidate #1: My record speaks for itself. In the past year I preached on sin 14 times. I believe sin is the most original problem the church has ever faced. My administration will do everything possible to fight sin right here in your community.

Candidate #2: We are all aware that last year my opponent’s Sunday school secretary redirected funds from the junior high bake sale to the purchase of vacation Bible school craft materials. So we must ask, Is he really tough on sin, or does he just talk tough?

Panelist: Candidate #2, you changed the rules at your last church so that saying the Lord’s Prayer was no longer mandatory. Why did you do that?

Candidate #2: I love the Lord’s Prayer as much as the next guy. My wife and I say it together after our devotions every morning. I simply believe it should not be imposed on a whole congregation.

Candidate #1: I am one who believes the Lord’s Prayer brings a church together. This is an issue on which my opponent and I have a very fundamental difference of opinion. This is a clear indicator of his stand on tradition, values, and ideology.

As you can see, nothing beats a debate for clarifying the important issues. I’m off to vote.

EUTYCHUS

Real bliss or real agony?

I did not appreciate “Rumors of Heaven” [Oct. 7]. I decided the point of the article was to portray the views of a book that minimizes hell. In the end, there is apparently no question about personal destiny. To say “It will be overwhelming bliss” really upsets me, because Satan’s favorite trick is minimizing what is really important in life.

Second, the article does not do justice to the orthodox Christian response, which would primarily be centered on the words of Christ in his story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16). Does Christ’s after-death account sound like overwhelming bliss? It doesn’t even sound like underwhelming bliss to me. Let’s hear it for real agony.

DAVID G. TOUSSAINT

Fishers, Ind.

Infallibility and the true Jesus

I very much appreciated Kenneth Kantzer’s article “Why I Still Believe the Bible Is True” [Oct. 7]. I have one question: Kantzer stated that belief in the infallibility of the Bible was not absolutely necessary. However, if we are to believe in the true Jesus who reveals himself in the Word, and not in a Jesus of our conception, and if the fact that Jesus is really Lord means we are to live our lives for him as he says, isn’t the infallibility of the Bible necessary so that we know the true Jesus and know what he says about how we should live our lives?

REV. WM. G. BROUWERS

The Christian Reformed Church

Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.

A flaw in biblical inerrantism is revealed in the very illustration by which Kantzer seeks to demonstrate its validity. He feels that upon investigation, the two diverse accounts of an elderly lady’s death were satisfactorily harmonized so that both of them could be described as “inerrant.” If one wishes to allow that the Bible includes minute errors in reporting such as this, as it rather clearly does, and still describe it as “inerrant,” he may do so. He must be prepared, however, to realize that others of us will find in the use of this word just the slightest hint of dishonesty, which we cannot harmonize with our submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

REV. BURRELL PENNINGS

North Haledon, N.J.

False accusation

Your news report [Aug. 12] falsely accused me of charging Murray Harris of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with “heresy” because he teaches that Jesus did not rise in a physical, material body. While I believe his view is unbiblical and inconsistent with the doctrinal statement he signs, I never called it “heresy.”

Then, although you apologized in a letter for not contacting me for comment, in the very issue in which you published an edited version of my letter of complaint [Oct. 21] you also published another letter right after it from Mike Andrus that repeats the false claim that I charged Harris with “heresy.” Doesn’t your right hand know what your left hand is doing?

Furthermore, the same letter contains the false and slanderous charge that I was under “disciplinary procedures” by the Evangelical Free Church. The truth is that no such procedures ever occurred. That was merely a personal threat by Mr. Andrus if I did not desist in my attempt to inform my fellow Free Church pastors of the denial of the physical, material nature of the resurrection body by one of their seminary professors.

Publishing defamatory evangelical garbage about a fellow Christian leader, especially without checking out its truthfulness, is inexcusable. Consider the very words you printed [Oct. 7] in the way another magazine handled the Swindoll issue: “We do not want to appear to be slanting the news, especially against those we know to be credible.” And “it would seem that the responsible thing for a journalist to do would be to check out the story he or she decides to print.” I fully agree.

NORMAN L. GEISLER

Dallas Theological Seminary

Dallas, Texas

We apologize for not contacting Dr. Geisler for comment before publishing this material.—Eds.

Changing views of Judaism

It was with much appreciation that I read the articles in the CT Institute, “Changing Views of Judaism” [Oct. 7]. As a Jewish believer in Yeshua, I have been touched on a personal level by virtually every issue therein discussed. Perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned over the years, through participation on a grassroots level in this “task of reconciliation,” is that we (Jews and Gentile church) need each other. The reconciliation of God’s people is more than mere pleasantry or moral rectitude; it is God’s purpose and heart that his people be one.

S. G.

El Toro, Calif.

David Rausch perpetuates an inaccurate accusation when he mentions Martin Luther and the Holocaust in the same breath, at least implicitly suggesting some level of cause and effect. Luther was not anti-Semitic. A careful reading of the sources will show that he made a distinction between Jewish people, who are fellow travelers on the road of life, and the Jewish religion, which tragically rejects the only Way to eternal life. The church today should have the conviction to do the same.

LAWRENCE O. OLSON

Loves Park, Ill.

Censorship vs. moral indignation

David Neff’s editorial “Scorsese’s Christ” [Oct. 7] neatly exposed the difference between “censorship” and moral indignation, while carefully analyzing the weakness of both liberals and evangelicals whenever Jesus is not accepted as our pre-existing Lord. Of course Jesus grew, learned, and made decisions as all boys and young men do. Of course he had to think through his relationships regarding “sexual attraction” and “his calling.” The only advantages he had were that he chose his own mother, and he did not carry the extra burden of self-inflicted bad habits.

HERBERT E. DOUGLASS

Weimar, Calif.

The other side of Yasir Arafat

In the intriguing review by Bob Hitching of the Alan Hart book on Arafat [Books, Oct. 7], the reader is left with several nagging questions. If Arafat “finds death abhorrent,” why does he actively and proudly continue to promote it? If he is such “an intensely sensitive man with a passion for justice and equity,” why do we still read of Fatah leaflets which attack supporters of a political solution with Israel? The “other side of Arafat” found in the book and review are not new, they are merely the side he shows the Western media.

DR. JOHN FISCHER

Menorah Ministries

Palm Harbor, Fla.

Wake Forest or Louisville?

A report on the recent troubles at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary incorrectly located that school in Louisville where the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is located, rather than in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where Southeastern is located. To set the record straight, the committee of the Association of Theological Schools in the U.S. and Canada visited Southeastern in Wake Forest. As for Southern Seminary’s accreditation, the last visit of an evaluation team resulted in a recommendation for reaffirmation of full accreditation for the institution.

DAVID R. WILKINSON

Vice President for Seminary Relations

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Louisville, Ky.

Swindoll’s troubles

I read with interest CT’s account of “Swindoll’s House Woes” [News, Oct. 7]. Swindoll would have us believe “we were naïve.” No way. Out of touch, perhaps, but not naïve.

WALTER R. PETERSON

Huntsville, Ala.

I think he was a bit smug.

ANITA MIDDLETON

Duluth, Minn.

In this, our last issue for 1988, we review the major issues, events, and personalities that were the journalistic mainstay of CT News for the past 12 months. In addition to offering the “Top Ten” news stories of the year (as selected by the CT news staff), we are, for the first time, presenting a second look at some of the men, women, and children whose stories were a part of CT News (and church life) in 1988.

“This is more than a simple ‘where are they now’,” says associate news editor Randy Frame, who led this project. “Take Vladimir Khailo, for instance” (a celebrated Soviet immigrant who has now returned to Europe, unable to cope with life in the U.S.). “The follow-up to his triumphal entry into this country should serve the church notice that more help is needed to insure that people like him can survive the culture shock, foreign lifestyles, and, yes, the basic freedoms we so quickly take for granted.”

In addition to Khailo, CT also pays a return visit to drug-busting pastor Willie Wilson of Washington, D.C.; Sharon Batts, whose Top 40 prayer for abused children, “Dear Mr. Jesus,” took the country by storm late last year; and former Mississippi policeman Joe Daniels, who left the force rather than arrest picketing prolifers. Special thanks go to news intern Joe Maxwell, who telephonically tracked down the individuals in the writing of these interesting (and at times, sobering) vignettes.

HAROLD B. SMITH, Managing Editor

Cover illustration by Paul Turnbaugh, with reproduction of The Vision of Death by Gustave Doré