Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators

...I thought I was in a time warp...

...now that it had been repudiated in the big leagues in the following decade the evangelicals were ready to take a second look at it...

...That kind of invective is just not done in polite publishing circles...

...Falwell is as sure a sign of the new orthodoxy as hauling off at Old Nick used to be of the old...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Both the authentic tradition and the history of the short-lived stability of the fifties suggest that the present status may be only temporary...

...It may be too early to send the jury out of the box for a decision...

...Most of us had political instincts that were on automatic pilot, and the coordinates fed into the apparatus were such as to lead to the middle-of-the-road Americanism that later gave the era its reputation...

...In the Eisenhower years they still had not emerged as the academic powers they aspired to be...

...A major reversal in the thinking of an important segment of our population has taken place, and we read almost nothing of it in the press...

...Then in 1984 Sider produced a second edition of his book, purporting to respond to his critics...

...This book shares with numerous others written by Rushdoony, North, and other Reconstructionists the disadvantage of being produced away from the mainstream of the publishing industry and thus outside of the normal distribution channels...

...Thus bad theology wedded to bad economics swept away all before it...

...Sojourners and the Other Side are two magazines that have taken an avowedly conservative approach to biblical Christianity and wedded it to a strident appeal for the repudiation of both capitalism and the major themes of U.S...

...Sider wrote a blockbuster in 1977, published jointly by an evangelical and a Roman Catholic press, entitled Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study...

...The question was, what form would the movement take once it woke up...

...Martin's Press $16.95 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 35...

...More than twenty years later, I heard him explain to a foreign visitor at a private dinner that the college, which he was still heading up, was "orthodox Herbert Schlossberg is the author of Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson...

...Washington, D.C...

...William Safire, columnist New York Times "Reading Ben Stein about Hollywood is pure PLEASURE, Heller "Ben Stein is a master chronicler of that most seductive OBSESSION of all: Hollywood...

...Second, he was completely uncritical in assuming that the biblical ethic concerning the poverty-stricken is to be fulfilled by the mandates that had become commonplace in American politics in the preceding generation...

...They learn in their new environment the theories of the respective disciplines, but they've never been taught how to subject those theories to the Scriptural searchlight which the colleges where they will teach—often the colleges where they studied—advertise to parents as the guiding principle of study...

...The naive masochism that passed for radicalism on the big campuses in the sixties had largely bypassed the evangelical colleges...

...Nowadays the faculty at my alma mater probably boasts a percentage of doctorates hardly less imposing than nearby Behemoth U. (known locally as the U.) from which a goodly portion of those doctorates (my own as well) came...

...He treats similarly Sider's misapprehensions of such principles as economic equality and the Jubilee...

...Thus, to fail or to be made to appear to fail in this area meant that the whole moral foundation for one's life and indeed the whole society was shipwrecked...

...O "Her Only SI N is unequivocally the most gripping, best written novel of Hollywood in American literature...

...Rousas John Rushdoony, trained in theology, had created the Chalcedon foundation in California...

...The bland turn into Erasmus...

...How better to rid oneself of the taint than to throw darts at the fun-dies and at anything that is popularly associated with them...

...The policies so hesitantly begun under the New Deal, carried to their logical conclusion, would bring us to the promised land...

...Before we try to answer that, let's think about another way these institutions have changed...

...More moderate in presentation, but similar in content, is the work of 'Ronald J. Sider, a Yale-trained historian at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia...

...For Sider they seemed to sum up the entire biblical ethic...

...This response was due largely to the efforts of Gary North, an early disciple of Rushdoony's who had paid his dues by earning a doctorate in economic history at one of the sisters of Behemoth U. North induced David Chilton to write Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, and the title conveys an accurate impression of the kind of bite the book contains...

...Chilton published a slightly revised edition in 1982...

...Here was a book that said that the U.S...

...One thing that will have to change for that to happen is the style with which these sharpies skewer their opponents...

...Only Israel can oppose Soviet hegemony over the entire area...

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...It's not very difficult to figure out once you know the rival traditions from which evangelicalism wished to show its differences...

...How could such blandness come from a perspective that emphasized its biblical dimension and its consequent distinctiveness, and therefore its separation from the ways of the world...

...These institutions were conscious of the theological distinctions that separated them from the mainstream...

...Check payable to: Policy Review 214 Massachusetts Ave., N.E...

...This was not only a personal political preference, either...

...But Chilton, in a third edition, identifies ten critics to whom he failed to respond, including Chilton (and also including this reviewer...

...foreign policy since World War II...

...The new respectability that these institutions exemplify is as far from the authentic biblical tradition as is the old conventionality...

...My own college had become a four-year institution as recently as 1948, and it was not accredited by the regional agency until I was a junior in 1958...

...Or perhaps into the Schwaermer...

...The first was that the teachings on the poor were abstracted from the biblical texts as if they were the whole story...

...EVANGELICAL A WAKENINGS PRODUCTIVE CHRISTIANS IN AN AGE OF GUILT MANIPULATORS: A BIBLICAL RESPONSE TO RONALD J. SIDER David Chilton/Institute for Christian Economics (Tyler, Texas) $9.95 paper Herbert Schlossberg We now have a political phenomenon that a few years ago would have been thought impossible...

...The adherence to reformed Christianity meant that, unlike both the fundamentalists and the evangelicals, the Calvinists believed that the biblical mandate required them to affect the world's institutions instead of merely adopting a personal Christian ethic...

...The great strength of Sider's book was that finally there was an alternative to the blandness of the fifties, an at-tempt to capture the prophetic brilliance of the biblical witness while avoiding the pagan insanity that had almost destroyed the universities in the sixties...

...It couldn't have been timed better...

...Joseph Wambaugh From Benjamin Stein, the story of a woman who went from terror in her own BEDROOM to control of the most powerful studio in Hollywood . . . an insider's view of how Hollywood really works...

...A few years ago, the British evangelical sociologist Os Guinness expressed concern that the evident trends might lead to a refueling of the old social gospel cycle of a century ago...

...On the one hand, the "orthodox" part of the school's self-perception derived from its separation from the major denominations, in which the liberal wing had emerged victorious from the battles that racked those bodies earlier in the century...

...But he also failed to respond to the arguments of P.T...

...This includes the moral and emotive aspects of the sub-culture in which the training takes place...

...But the fact that these opinions are being expressed and listened to is itself a sign, and not the only one, that the battle for the souls of these institutions is still continuing...

...Getting off a good one at the Rev...

...I refer you instead to the journals published by the evangelical scholars...

...Sider's second edition was apparently too much for the prolific Chilton to bear, and his third edition of Productive Christians appeared in 1985...

...He is a prodigious scholar, and he patiently compared the two editions of Sider's work, keying his analysis to both...

...Consequently when the book appeared in 1981 it was under the imprint of the Institute for Christian Economics, the nonprofit foundation that North directs...

...The president of our college told us students on more than one occasion that while we were orthodox in theology, we were nevertheless irenic...

...The ethos also has to be transmitted—all the explicit rules but also the nuances that are seldom expressed and may not even be consciously considered...

...The wonder is that their somnambulism lasted as long as it did...

...Sider's book is a treatise on theology and economics, and Chilton takes after him on both accounts...

...but irenic...

...OlLY'W3~)1 St...

...AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE i NOVu°F...

...Why is it that conservative Protestantism, which has avoided political involvement for at least a couple of generations, is now getting so interested in politics that Norman Lear and his friends are going into fits of hysteria...

...Although for the most part its sup-porters do not hold academic positions, the movement includes a number of people of rather ferocious intellectual capacity, the sort that a woolly-minded effort like Sider's would not be able to withstand...

...One would have thought that a Christian movement that so emphasized the biblical component of the faith would have recognized earlier the starkly radical nature of that component, the prophetic voice that would not—could not—tolerate the increasing strength of the paganism of the broader society...

...That's the setting...

...At Behemoth and its rivals, the graduate faculty teaches its academic apprentices faithfully, and thereby imparts to them, not biology, history, sociology, psychology, public health, and so on, as much as naturalism, historicism, statism, pantheism, and a variety of other religious perspectives that are buried in the "studies" produced by the disciplines...

...Third, in dealing with a subject that cries for economic analysis, along with the theological reflection, Sider hadn't bothered to learn anything about economics...

...But the ethos included more than theology...

...How are we going to explain why conservative Protestantism is on the way from ignoring politics to supporting a serious candidate for the highest office in the land...

...This irresponsibility alone ought to be enough to discredit Rich Christians...

...Here we have colleges whose faculties have received the typical American undergraduate education, which is to say most of them arrive at the graduate school without knowing much of anything...

...I also learned how not to run a country...

...Thus Chilton deals with the Exodus in its covenantal con-text, as good reformed theology would always do, and is thereby able to avoid the misapplications to which both Sider and liberation theology are drawn...

...The irenic apostle John may have been "evangelical," but the Pauls and the Luthers make things happen...

...That was changing while I was there, and the trend accelerated after the surge in teaching jobs petered out, making it easy to obtain freshly minted Ph.D.s in the 1970s...

...Now if Sider is above responding to ordinary writers he considers unworthy of his attention, that is one thing...

...What happens when these scholars hit the evangelical campus with their new degrees and their new sophistication...

...In fact, Chilton is unable to find a single critic to whom Sider did reply...

...after 1980 it became essential...

...How about that earlier question that we left unanswered...

...On the other hand, the "irenic" attitude derived from its separation from the fundamentalists—or, as they were often unkindly called, the fundies, or even the fighting fundies—who had been booted out of the ecclesiastical structures or had left voluntarily to found their own denominations, Bible schools, and liberal arts colleges...

...Pat Robert-son, usually uncritically lumped together with that genre of personalities known as television evangelists, is beginning to have a serious following as a presidential candidate: a following much more serious than Jimmy Carter's at a similar stage of his journey to the quadrennial event...

...I could give you some autobiographical material to demonstrate this, but it's too embarrassing...

...What is worse, they haven't been given the tools to discern the assumptions that power the ideas of the graduate faculty...

...Now that evangelicalism in its academic expression has awakened from its fifties-like torpor, does it still look like the family from which it sprang...

...As far as I know, they haven't yet endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini's view that their country is "the great Satan," but sometimes they don't seem far from it...

...Recently the chairman of the English department at Calvin College, one of the more academically rigorous of the evangelical institutions, published an article in the Reformed Journal which asks for a reconsideration of the dogmatic leftism that has become so dominant on those campuses...

...Yet it was not until four years after the publication of Rich Christians that a book-length response was forthcoming...

...These evangelical colleges, likealmost everything else, did not emerge unchanged from the 1960s...

...America's Covenant With Israel, by Senator Jesse Helms From Mao I learned how to fight and win a guerrilla war...

...Why are fundamentalists split down the middle, with Bob Jones III calling Jerry Falwell the most dangerous man in America...

...The one-sided "liberation" emphasis of Sider's theology is easy meat for him, and since Sider knows no economics that task is even easier...

...was niggardly in providing foreign aid because it preferred to spend money for arms, and it exemplified repeatedly the implications of the title: we're rich and all over the world people are starving...

...Bauer, a world-class scholar at the London School of Economics who has revolutionized the study of development economics...

...Well, for one thing, the witlessconservatism hanging over from the fifties seems deadening when they compare it with the dynamic political activism of Behemoth's tenured savants (which, truth to tell, is usually fully as witless...

...One interesting new ingredient thrust into the current evangelical mixture is the rebirth of the left wing of the reformation wearing the guise of the prophet...

...Sider was saying that this is what the Bible teaches...

...There is evidence that Chilton now understands this, inasmuch as his recently published book on eschatology, Paradise Restored (Reconstruction Press, alas), is written much more acceptably...

...The colleges also embodied a subculture that made them distinctive in the spectra of both religious institutions and educational institutions...

...Many leaders of the Christian right have been reading Rushdoony for years, and if their premillennialism seems inhospitable soil for the reformed emphasis on Christian faith transforming society, as a number of critics have pointed out, that inconsistency hasn't stopped Rushdoony's perspective from beginning to make a difference...

...Chilton's book, especially if the harbingers of a more broadly acceptable style do not deceive us, is a token that the opposition is not prepared to give up easily...

...Bill me later Name Please begin my subscription with: ^ current issue ^ next issue Zip As VISA/American Express/Mastercard Number Expiration Date Signature 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 weaknesses to the Sider approach...

...Second, there is that remnant of fundamentalism that must be shaken off—remember, we're irenic, not to mention learned...

...His work makes a hash out of Sider's analysis of Third World poverty, and Sider is content to make only the absurd allegation that Bauer is unhistorical...

...The American Spectator "I LOVE the way Ben Stein writes about Hollywood...

...Younger scholars like Chilton are now coming to the fore, and if they can break into the publishing mainstream they are likely to have increasing influence...

...Even then, the faculty was populated largely by holdovers from the old days...

...It isn't that academicians have sins more grievous than, say, architects or merchants, but rather that the long period of apprenticeship within a subculture produces an unconscious bonding that creates special problems for the unwary...

...Although these volumes have been narrowly influential, they have cut very deeply where they have reached...

...Now, if apprentices of any kind learn only technique from their masters, the training has failed...

...But there are much more important and interesting questions to be addressed...

...North tried to get one of Sider's original publishers, InterVarsity Press (the publishing arm of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus organization), to co-publish the Chilton manuscript with him, but to no avail...

...Still little known, although Newsweek a few years ago referred to it as the think tank of the Christian right, the Christian Reconstruction movement, as it calls itself, combines a classical Calvinism with the presuppositional philosophy advocated by retired Westminster Seminary professor Cornelius Van Til...

...The War Against Soviet Colonialism, by Jonas Savimbi Also featured in this issue: Edwin Meese, An Answer to My Critics Edward Koch, The Mugger and His Genes Dinesh D'Souza, Feminism's New Agenda WINTER Add $5.00 per year for foreign air-speeded delivery...

...No doubt much ink will be spilled in explaining how a man of this calling could attract that kind of attention for the presidency...

...The answer to poverty was redistribution of income through government agencies and the United Nations...

...This association, of course, is abhorrent to all Right Thinkers, but especially to those who caught a serious dose of academic snobbery while in graduate school, and haven't yet lived through enough to shake it...

...But there were three serious THE FLAGSHIP PUBLICATION OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION cc srael is really our only reliable ally in the Middle East...

...There had existed for some twenty years prior to the publication of Rich Christians a tiny movement that had the intellectual wherewithal to interpret in its proper context what many people have come to think of as "Sider-ism...

...The result is not only a devastating critique of the book he is dealing with, but a penetrating analysis of the movement of which it is a part...

...In the 1950s, when I was a student at an evangelical college, nearly everyone in such places was an unconscious conservative of the Eisenhower stripe...

...When Rip emerges from the cave, will he be a true Van Winkle or will he be a throwback to an earlier black sheep the family has been trying to forget...

...Readers weren't intended to miss the causal implications, and they didn't...

...Thus the chronic insecurity, the constant look over the shoulder to see if anyone is gaining, the desire to be thought worthy of respect, the shunning of any attribute that smacks of naivete or credulity—in other words the latent snobbery and envy that are inherent in the academic enterprise—are absorbed along with all the theory and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 33 technique of the disciplines...

...This was attractive enough before the rise of the Christian right...