All Roads Lead to...
Shiflett, Dave
BOOKS IN REVIEW 1948, just before the elections, which most people expected the CP to win. The British and Americans thought they would have to intervene to prevent an immediate coup. When I got...
...That is the conversion to Catholicism of the father of legal abortion in the United States, the Jewish-born former atheist Dr...
...Remaining chapters are quite helpful, particularly for Catholics seeking to understand the mindset of fellow Christians who are united with them on so many issues, except the fundamental ones of authority and the sacraments...
...Shiflett's book moves the case for unity in the Church forward...
...You may get people to come to those churches, and you may have church growth...
...S HIFLETT TURNS FIRST to the Episcopal Church, which was once the prototype for a traditional denomination...
...The ridiculous fuss over the Watergate "scandal" allowed Brezhnev, another bungler, to look powerful and secure in the '70s...
...Nor does this type of orthodox Christian buy into the argument that America is a shining city on the hill, or for that matter worthy of God's benevolence...
...We will have to see whether Pope Benedict and his youthful troops in the new ecclesial communities can pull off a miracle, but the intermediate prognosis is grim...
...There is not going to be a thermonuclear war to end civilization...
...After examining "celebrity heretics" such as Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, and describing their "missionary" work in deconstructing traditional Christianity, Shiflett allocates the rest of the book to the destinations of these refugees from heresy and ersatz religion...
...To gain insight into the Southern Baptists, Shiflett interviews two important and influential members: Dr...
...and popular radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham...
...Many former Episcopalians have fled to more conservative Protestant denominations, or to the more liturgically minded and doctrinally based Catholic and Orthodox Churches...
...Even the New York Times cannot duck the evidence: "Socially conservative churches that demand high commitment from their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last decade," it reported in 2002...
...All Roads Lead to...
...Bernard Nathanson...
...D ave Shiflett, described by Chuck Colson as "one of the most astute culture watchers and writers I know," has writtenExodus to explain the phenomenon summarized in the subtitle: "Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity...
...Ferguson was strongly impressed by the Church's history and consistent liturgy, while Regnery was attracted by her "commitment to principle, institutional vastness, and forgiving attitude...
...Given the drastic decline in public and private morals since 1960, the obvious question is: How can this be...
...He has overcome the world, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against His Church...
...But you will not have church impact...
...Alcide de Gasperi, one of the heroes of the early Cold War, won the election decisively, and his success persuaded Marshall Tito, across the Adriatic, to breakwith Stalin in June...
...Some Episcopalians consider this the last straw, but the same noise was heard when the Episcopal Church revised the Book of Common Prayer, ordained women, and blessed homosexual unions...
...He writes that interviewing them gives an insight into how evangelical thinkers see the world...
...Imagine a 1950s American mother waking up in 2005 and turning on the television or the radio, or picking up a popular magazine...
...I refer to the Southern Baptists and the Evangelicals...
...At the same time, he has tough words for the socalled "soft" evangelicals with their megachurches: Colson says they are purveyors of "self-centered worship...
...The great culture clashes that divide our country presently are at their root theological: They pit those who acknowledge religious authority (either biblical or exercised by a divinely guided inspired church) against those who ground their principles on the unencumbered moral right of each person to create his own personal religion, regardless of objective morality and doctrinal belief...
...I looked at the cross and realized again that what the Gospel teaches is true...
...As Shiflett puts it: When heretics make headlines, they are also making Catholics, and very good Catholics at that...
...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006...
...That brings us back to Shifiett's America...
...DID IT TAKE SO LONG.9 Gaddis does n o t eally answer this question...
...But there are lessons to learn in an easier age, especially the old one: it always pays to tell the truth, and there is no substitute for courage...
...Tens of trillions of dollars in potential production were lost...
...They are not chauvinistic for they have little hope of stopping, on a societal scale, at least, what they believe is an irresistible liberal juggernaut...
...According to Colson, "the purest form of Christianity is practiced in prison...
...Richard Land and Dr...
...Shiflett finishes his excellent survey of the exodus from Liberal Christianity to Conservative Christianity by re-telling perhaps the most dramatic conversion story of all to demonstrate the power of orthodox Christianity...
...In prison you don't have to worry about stepping on anyone's toes if you talk about sin...
...Shiflett, who classifies himself "as an itinerant Presbyterian, with an emphasis on the itinerant," demonstrates first with statistics, and then through interviews and anecdotes drawn from the northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.-area, that "Americans are vacating progressive pews and flocking to churches that offer more traditional versions of Christianity...
...Today, Christianity is growing like wildfire in Africa and Asia, while its influence is rapidly diminishing in Europe...
...Kennedy let Khrushchev off the hook of his Cuban missile crisis, an aggressive blunder of Stalinist proportions...
...There was also a constant blurring of obvious distinctions between right and wrong (just as there is now in the war against terrorism...
...McCIoskey churches but clearly favors religions that don't consider "dogmatic" a dirty word...
...But they were not needed...
...Although he does not say so, his storytelling and interviews clearly show that Christianity without a divinely instituted authority to guide and govern leads inexorably to a total reliance on private judgment and utter chaos in doctrine and morals...
...The Rev...
...Over the long term, a people's health can be measured by whom they worship, how they worship, and what difference it makes in their day-to-day lives...
...Russia shows no sign of recovering, economically or morally, though all the other victims are doing well...
...Regnery converted from Episcopalianism, as has an old friend APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 BOOKS IN REVIEW of Shiflett's, the writerAndy Ferguson, who at one time wished to become an Episcopal priest...
...Colson, who attended his baptism, recounts: "It was a sight that burned into my consciousness, because just above Cardinal O'Connor was the cross...
...Colson's story is well known-how a Boston-born, Ivy league-educated, Republican henchman under President Nixon went to jail in the Watergate era, had a born-again experience, and founded the Prison Fellowship, which evangelizes criminals with notable success...
...in Christ is the victory...
...His website is FrMcCloskey.com...
...Then Russia's luck ran out...
...When I got to Venice I was astonished to see British and American carriers anchored in the Basino, immediately beside the Piazzetta...
...Millions there lived almost their entire lives in confinement and misery...
...I daresay historians will debate forever which of the three had the most impact...
...The Cold War was a tragedy for Eastern Europe...
...The end of the Cold War confirms my belief that, while there is nothing inevitable in history, sheer luck, especially in the emergence of personalities, plays a key part...
...Chief among these, as we might imagine, is the Catholic Church...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Why is his book important...
...People go in, see a skit, listen to some music, hear a soothing sermon, and think they have done their Christian duty...
...By the time he lifted it in May 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was already in existence, and Konrad Adenauer, another hero of the time, launched his brilliant bid to create the German miracle...
...The ecological damage was colossal and largely irreversible...
...Albert Mohler...
...She would probably suffer a fainting spell, if not cardiac arrest, from the assault of deeply immoral attitudes toward marriage, family, and sexuality...
...They are entering the exact precarious position the mainline found itself in in the sixties and seventies...
...This rapidly showed the world, in the shape of a two-system Germany, the difference between capitalism and Communism: in the west, freedom and prosperity...
...The United States emerged from the testing decades remarkably well and ready to shoulder the new burden of being the world's only superpower...
...The reason is that church becomes increasingly like the culture...
...A recent survey shows that the United States, unlike Europe, continues to hold steady as a nominally Christian country, with over 80 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Christians...
...To cap matters, the Soviet system produced a clever fool in Gorbachev, who honestly believed that Communism could be reformed and proceeded to push it into freefall...
...John Paul II's greatest goal of unity among all Christians was not accomplished in his lifetime...
...Before many more decades pass, those who fear Catholic power may find themselves pining for the days when all they had to worry about was a tunnel connecting the Vatican to the White House...
...Robert G. Hertherington, an Episcopal priest: "He called for broad-mindedness, justice, quality, equality, and hospitality...
...Shiflett also discusses other highMany former Episcopalians have fled to more conservative Protestant denominations, or to the more liturgically minded and doctrinally based Catholic and Orthodox Churches...
...Stalin was making clumsy errors of judgment throughout 1946-49: his last one was to try to blockade Berlin, thus provoking the successful allied airlift, one of the great propaganda triumphs of the age...
...In his section on the Catholic Church, Shiflett interviews converts such as Alfred Regnery, the wellknown scion of a famous conservative publishing house and now publisher of this magazine...
...There were too many middle-of-the-road politicians in Western Europe, and indeed in America, who were scared of using the full resources of capitalism to expose the ever-widening gulf between the productive capacity of the two systems, whether in arms or consumer goods...
...To capture the liberal loyalist's position, Shiflett presents the thinking of Rev...
...The truth is they fitted in together perfectly and turned the 1980s into a decade of astonishing Western self-confidence...
...By mid-1949 it was already clear that the West would not lose the Cold War, and fairly evident it would win it in the end...
...An extraordinary conjunction put Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in the key positions at the same time, and together they had the courage and vision to do what the West could have done decades before-to push the Communist dominoes until they fell over...
...They a r e n ' t triumphalistic--quite the opposite...
...The fact that we are now worrying about Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, though these problems are serious enough, underlines the difference between the early 21st century and the horrors and perils of the 20th...
...profile converts, such as Judge Robert Bork...
...in the east, dictatorship and poverty...
...Shiflett devotes considerable space to the Episcopalian membership drain provoked by the ordination of an openly practicing homosexual, Gene Robinson, as bishop (an event that continues to roil church members worldwide...
...An accomplished journalist and long-time contributor to this and other conservative publications, Shiflett writes in a breezy and personal style from a perspective that fairly represents the liberal Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity by Dave Shiflett (SENTINEL, 196 PAGES, $23.95) Reviewed by Rev...
...Some take a long while to reach Rome, but once there they have joined not only the ancients but also the rapidly expanding Catholic population of the Southern Hemisphere...
...McCIoskey is a priest of Opus Dei and research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute based in Washington, D.C...
...As they say, the hangman's noose concentrates the mind...
...possible presidential candidate (and Evangelical turned Catholic) Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas...
...One reason as sheer nervousness and cowardice, fear of "provoking" the Russians...
...he made it clear that the contemporary virtues of openness, inclusion, hospitality, and tolerance have won over biblical admonition, especially regarding sexual sin...
...M OVING ON TO THAT BROAD GROUP of generic Christians that come under the umbrella of "evangelicals," Shiflett profiles Chuck Colson, for whom he once served as speechwriter...
...Perhaps we Catholics who lived through the last 40 years in the United States know exactly what he means, as our own drop in church attendance demonstrates...
...The reason this can happen in a nominally Christian country is that the definition of "Christianity" in America has changed, and this is the story that Shiflett's book tells...
...However, that project continues and where else could it end except in returning home to Rome...
...dean of Washington columnists Robert Novak...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
