Archives: Articles

The Morality of Single-Issue Voting



On what basis should we as American voters make our choices in major political races? Since the winning candidates will have to make decisions on many complex matters during their term of office, is it reasonable or right for us to choose them because of their stand on a single issue? In the aftermath of the 1980 election, in which several Senate races are thought to have been decided by single-issue voting, we may also want to know whether such. a practice is likely to have good effects on our political processes and on the shaping of national policy.

These questions are easier to put than to answer, in part because single-issue voting is not so simple a phenomenon as pundits would have us think.

In the first place, single issues often travel in packs. These packs may be held together by logical bonds or by cultural affinities. Both candidates and constituencies can link together opposition to abortion and support of prayer in public schools, or gun control and nuclear disarmament, or opposition to nuclear energy and support for wilderness preservation. A variety of issues can be seen as contributing to more fundamental or comprehensive values, such as defense of the traditional American way or respect for life or protection of the environment. Any one issue may also be linked with different issues by different groups. Thus opposition to abortion can be combined with opposition to pornography or with opposition to nuclear weapons, depending on whether the fundamental value at stake is considered to be chastity or the protection of life.

Also, single-issue voting is only one part of the larger phenomenon known as single-issue politics. This includes lobbying, fund-raising, demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns and propaganda. In a democratic society, these may all rely in some way on the implicit or explicit threat of single-issue voting. But they present special problems of their own, particularly with regard to possibilities for manipulation of people and ideas and for the misuse of funds. Our society wants to encourage the widest possible expression of popular opinion on issues of public concern, while at the same time protecting the human and civil rights of all citizens and preventing harm to the fundamental values of truth and civility. Just how public regulation, journalistic investigation, informed criticism and organized opposition are to be mixed so as to keep the political forum open to all comers on a fair basis is a difficult problem for American society in both theory and practice.



Without dismissing the importance of the wider problems raised by single-issue politics, I would like to focus on single-issue voting as a choice that can confront the individual elector. By single-issue voting, I mean casting a ballot for a candidate with whom one is in substantial disagreement on major issues of present public concern, or whom one judges to be inferior to an alternative candidate in character or competence, because one is in agreement with the candidate’s views on a single issue which one judges to be of overriding importance. This definition is vague in many ways, but I would argue that such vagueness is a necessary result of the imprecision with which issues are delineated, the varying weights that different people at different times accord to various values, and the plurality of viewpoints that have to be considered in a democratic political process. It is not helpful to get a purer definition: candidates with whom a voter agrees on one and only one issue would be very hard to find.

The question that I want to explore is whether it is reasonable or morally justifiable for a person to vote on the basis of a single issue. Here we should observe that the issue does not have to be primarily a moral one, though nearly all significant political issues will have some moral aspect to them. The overriding issue for a voter could be the size of the defense budget or the possibility of a grain embargo. He or she may be voting on the basis of interests rather than moral convictions. The single issue that is potentially overriding for the individual voter may or may not be an issue that is treated by the media as a “single issue.”

A hypothetical case from the past may help to make some of these points clearer. Consider the presidential choice confronting a Jewish Republican lawyer in 1940. He has some reservations about Roosevelt’s character as devious and manipulative, he deeply disapproves of the court-packing scheme, he thinks the economic policies of the New Deal are muddled and ineffective at best, he is opposed to a third term on principle, he thinks Henry Wallace is a lightweight -- but he also judges that Roosevelt is the candidate best equipped to stand up to Hitler and to protect the Jewish people.

Few of us would, I think, object to this man’s voting for Roosevelt in such circumstances, even though one might disagree with any or all of his specific positions and even though, in his motives, one could not sharply distinguish between an interest in personal and group survival and a principled opposition to racism and aggression. In this case, at any rate, it seems right and reasonable for a voter to make his decision on the basis of a single overriding issue. But we should look at the case for and against single-issue voting in more general terms.



The case for single-issue voting is roughly this. First, it is the exercise of a right by the individual elector, who makes a free decision on the basis that he or she freely determines. The individual voter is free both to vote and to offer any further views in explanation or justification of the vote. No one should lay down laws for the autonomous exercise of this right.

Second, single-issue voting is an effective and important means of communicating the desires of the electors to officeholders. It “sends a message” to Washington or Springfield or Sacramento, especially when an otherwise favored candidate is defeated. It is a way of indicating intensity of feeling on an issue, and it offers an opportunity of cutting through the loose and undefined connections between candidate, party platform and policy decisions.

Third, it represents the triumph of conscience and principle over interest and image. Instead of voting one’s pocketbook, or following old lines of ethnic loyalty or patronage, or responding to the images of a soft-sell campaign and a visually attractive candidate, the voter makes a decision on the basis of where the candidate stands on a matter of principle.

Fourth, single-issue voting is sometimes a clear necessity. Sometimes the evil threatened or brought about by a particular group or policy is so great that it must be opposed, no matter what the possible cost to other values. As Churchill said after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, “If the Führer invaded Hell, I would have to say a good word for the devil in the House of Commons.”

The case against single-issue voting can be put in parallel terms. First, single-issue campaigns can be set up to persuade voters to go against their overall interest. Thus a white worker can be urged to vote for antiunion candidates on the ground that they oppose school busing. Voters may not be really autonomous but may be manipulated for ends not their own.

Second, single-issue voting destroys the spirit of compromise and the respect for conflicting points of view, which are necessary for the preservation of an open and democratic society. By encouraging some voters to attach overriding importance to the resolution of one problem -- a resolution which is usually very controversial and which often accentuates existing racial, religious and class divisions -- single-issue voting damages the fabric of democratic society and dissolves the broad political coalitions necessary for effective government in this country.

Third, when single-issue voting is practiced, divisive “social” issues on which people feel passionately shape the pattern of politics more than do reasonable calculations of interest. The temperature of political debate goes up, and clarity of political vision is lost. Democratic stability and civility are imperiled, and we witness not the triumph of conscience over interest but the overwhelming of reason by the passions.

Fourth, in certain instances, at least, single-issue voting is counterproductive and may very well be wrong. Voting for an antiabortion candidate who favors vastly increased spending on nuclear weapons may not be a net gain for the sanctity of life. Voting for a states-righter because he will “keep blacks in their place” seems just plain wrong.



Where do these two sets of considerations leave us? Do we have a standoff between two equally strong views? Do we lapse into a relativistic silence? Do we leave the matter open to individual decision? Do we say, sometimes Yes, sometimes No? If so, on what basis do we judge when to say Yes to single-issue voting and when to say No?

We can look at the question of single-issue voting in three different ways (at least), which we can call the first-person, second-person and third-person approaches. The third-person approach is the one usually taken by political scientists who write about voting or, as they call it, electoral behavior. Their main task is to explain or predict how people have voted or will vote. From statistical data (election returns, polls), along with personal interviews and observations, they attempt to isolate the significant factors that influence the way people vote.

Such research is important for answering questions about how widespread single-issue voting is, what groups of people are most likely to practice it, and with regard to what issues. Journalists and political commentators can help us to understand the different ways in which this phenomenon is perceived by other participants in the political process: Together with reflective politicians, they can give us a sense of how single-issue voting alters the direction and sets limits for the practice of American politics; and they can help us to estimate what some of its consequences may be in the current political context.

Studies of electoral behavior by political analysts and reporters can also serve to correct the tendency of ethicians and preachers to think of voting and the political process in highly moralistic and rationalistic terms -- terms that apply to a Kantian moral agent or a Thomistic theologian rather better than they fit a Houston oil executive, a Youngstown steelworker, or a Las Vegas waitress. Political scientists and observers do not usually set out to answer the first-person question about what I as a voter ought to do; the information they provide can be helpful and enlightening, but is not morally decisive in itself.

The first-person question is one that we as individual voters must resolve for ourselves. No amount of expert guidance or exhortation can absolve us from the responsibility and the opportunity of free, conscientious decision. To vote or not to vote, to vote according to party or moral principle or expectation of advantage, to vote in the belief that there are no significant moral differences among the candidates or in the belief that these are a matter of character and personality rather than policy -- all of these are possible options for us as citizens in a democracy. The fundamental position here, one which would be agreed on by most religious and nonreligious moral theorists alike, is “Let your conscience be your guide.” No moral system that I know offers comprehensive rules for weighing all the factors that are relevant to moral decisions and for overcoming all the differences in perception and interpretation in a way that would give a unique right outcome for each case.

Moral systems and some generally accepted moral principles do rule out certain possibilities as immoral and irresponsible when these are described in general terms; for instance, voting for an overtly racist candidate. But one can readily imagine situations where the choice is between two racist candidates or not voting at all. In such a situation one can reasonably argue that the wise thing to do is to vote for the less obnoxious racist or the one likely to do less harm. But one can also reasonably argue that it is better not to vote than to give support to a candidate of evil principles. The complex specifics of the situation and the mystery of human freedom and responsibility combine to leave each of us with the burden and the glory of answering the first-person question for ourselves.

Is there then nothing more to be said? Not at all. Moral philosophy and theology and the shared moral reflections of people of experience have a great deal to say on such matters -- a great deal that can be both relevant and instructive. Most of this material falls into a second-person mode of discourse that is distinct from both the reports of political experts and the wrestlings of personal conscience and that cannot be replaced by either of them.

Most moral discourse, however abstract and lofty it may be, has a second-person edge to it which enables us to move from “It is wrong to lie and cheat” to “You should not lie and cheat.” Moral instruction can be starkly imperative (“Thou shalt not”) or subtly persuasive (“Consider what an impartial benevolent spectator would approve”). But it never loses this second-person edge. It deals not merely with what I think right, but with what is right for us, for both you and me. In using moral language I am committing myself on matters of principle, but I am also offering norms to guide you as well -- which is one reason why some very polite people shy away from moral discourse altogether.



What, then, are the principal reflections that a moral philosopher or theologian can offer to voters in this second-person mode of discourse? There are three principal themes that should be addressed. For one thing, we should notice that the question before us is not a primary or basic moral question about what it is right or wrong to do in a given class of situations, like, say, telling the truth under oath or treating defective newborns. Rather, it is a higher-level question about how much weight to accord a position on a specific issue in comparison with other values, concerns and positions. How we make up our minds on this higher-level question is very likely to be influenced to a great extent by our views on the more specific items that will surface as single issues. Thus a person with strong views for or against abortion may well have correspondingly strong views against or for single-issue voting.

But the higher-level question is considerably more general, and our attitudes may well fluctuate when we realize the diversity of single issues that can fall under it. Thus in our past history abolition and prohibition and opposition to the Vietnam war served as single issues; we can readily imagine situations developing in which gun control, the survival of Israel, nuclear disarmament could serve as single issues energizing large movements and affecting American political life profoundly. This diversity of concerns is one of the things that make the morality of single-issue politics hard to discuss in abstract and general terms, especially if what we really want is for voters to come out with the “right” answer on each of the particular issues.

But this diversity should also suggest to us a first step in handling the problem; namely, that there is no way to avoid making up our minds on the primary question of principle or policy. The single issue must first be examined on its own moral merits. Thus, if a candidate has in the past urged voters to make the preservation of segregated institutions the single issue, he deserves rejection because of his stand on the primary or basic issue even before we get to the level of reflecting on the propriety of responding to single-issue appeals.

In saying this, I want to oppose a certain agnostic tendency in American political, legal and philosophical discourse which says in effect that on really important moral questions we have to agree or disagree; that it is illegitimate or illiberal to allow substantive moral positions to shape decisions in a democracy; and that on fundamental moral questions we are simply expressing nonrational preferences or emotional attitudes. Such agnosticism is, I would argue, in the long run destructive of the moral fiber of a democratic community. In effect it attempts to rest the values of personal freedom and diversity on a skeptical or even nihilistic basis. It dismisses the moral concerns of most Americans as irrelevant and puts them outside the sphere of public debate.

Such agnosticism is inconsistent with the value we ascribe to standing steadfast on matters of principle. Despite all the uncertainties of both theoretical and applied ethics, we can reasonably affirm that certain human interests are fundamental, that certain principles are necessary for our living together as social beings, and that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” More specifically, we can recognize the overriding importance of those principles and rights which protect what is necessary for personal and communal survival. We can affirm that it is appropriate for people to take stands of principle to protect basic human rights, whether their own or those of others. This very general consideration is one that can be appealed to in arguments for single-issue voting on a diversity of topics: abortion, nuclear disarmament, El Salvador and Guatemala, the survival of Israel.

 

Another principal consideration is the fact that even if we grant both the inadequacy of moral agnosticism and the necessity of examining the specific issue on its moral merits, we have still not resolved the question of single-issue voting. For the measures to be acted on by political officeholders, the concrete policy decisions to be taken, are rarely so clear-cut as defending or attacking a fundamental human value or right. Therefore, one has to look closely at the fit between the problem and the solution, between the value to be protected and the measures that are proposed for its protection.

This question of the fit may arise with regard to the competence of the candidate who appeals to the issue. Thus, candidates have been known to argue strongly for capital punishment even when, if elected, they will not be in a position to prosecute criminals, to grant or withhold executive clemency, or to enact relevant legislation. For a voter to make the candidate’s views on such an issue the overriding consideration would be an exercise in gullibility. For in such cases the issue serves the candidate, whereas in matters of high principle the candidate is to serve the issue.

The problem of a fit on a more general level arises with regard to the issue of abortion. Even among those who agree that abortion is a grave evil, there may well be disagreement about the effectiveness of legal prohibitions and criminal sanctions in actually protecting innocent lives, given the depth and intensity of conflicting opinion on the issue and the inherent difficulty of police activity in such intimate matters. As Thomas Aquinas pointed out, not every evil is appropriately forbidden by human law. Questions of fit are not answered simply by reaffirming the basic values at stake but require a careful look at the circumstances, at plausible alternative ways of safeguarding these values, and at the sincerity and competence of those who are appealing to the single issue. These questions can be answered in different ways by people who are in agreement on basic moral principles.

The question of fit is distinct from the question of electoral success. Certain evils are worth opposing, even if the struggle against them is unlikely to be very successful. The question of success does become morally significant when serious damage to other important values is likely to result from pursuing single-issue politics.



Finally, both for voters and for candidates who believe that a single issue should be decisive, there are further tests that have to be met if such a belief is to be held in a morally responsible way. These tests apply primarily to the individual moral subject, but they have a great deal to do with preserving the integrity and the persuasiveness of the appeal to a single issue and with protecting it from the dangers of fanaticism and cynical manipulation. They involve three “others.”

First, other actions. What other things besides voting can I do to show my effective concern for the issue? If I really believe the issue is of overriding importance, shouldn’t I be doing something more about it than simply casting a vote for or against a candidate because he or she is right or wrong on the given issue? Without the readiness to do other things, to undertake new actions, single-issue politics can collapse into sullen and passive resentment.

Second, other issues. Granted that there is good reason in these particular circumstances for making my political choice on a single issue, can I allow my moral and political horizon to be narrowed to a single issue on a lasting basis? Clearly not, I think. There must be a willingness to -- consider negative consequences for other issues as I make my decision, and a readiness to move beyond this issue to collaborate with others in dealing with the multitude of evils that afflict our society and humanity in general. A single issue should not degenerate into a monomania.

Third, other persons. As a citizen of a democratic society and as a believer in the God of biblical faith, I am committed to showing respect for the consciences of other persons. This does not mean endorsing their views or approving their actions. But it does mean that, especially on matters of profound moral conviction, we treat each other with patience, with honesty, and with charity. To paraphrase St. Ignatius, “Every good citizen ought to be more willing to give a good interpretation to the statement of another than to condemn it.” This frame of mind is especially necessary when we are making a case in moral terms which, as we have seen, puts demands on other persons.

To come back to our original question after this some-what sinuous survey, I answer that single-issue voting, lobbying and campaigning can in some cases be morally justifiable and even required. Single-issue voting can in some cases be an appropriate expression of the politics of principle. But it must be undertaken for a goal which is theoretically an attainable and fitting objective for the political process, and it must be conducted in a principled way.

Garrison Keillor’s ‘Prairie Home Companion’: Gospel of the Airwaves



It has been decreed in my neighborhood that every week all serious work ends at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, when Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” comes on the air. There might be laundry to do or dishes to wash; a letter to write or bills to pay; or perhaps simply a book or magazine to peruse, with a glass of sherry or a beer at hand -- but that is all peripheral. The radio is what matters. It is turned on, and we’re comfortably settled on the couch listening to a news wrap-up or the end of a pledging drive. Then after a station identification and a few moments of silence, somewhere in St. Paul, Minnesota, Butch Thompson picks out single, carefully spaced notes on the piano, and a deep, friendly voice begins to sing:

Well, look who’s coming through that

     door,

I think we’ve met somewhere before –

     Hello Love. . .

 

There is a special intimacy about radio. It is a companion for one’s quietude, whether one is at home on a Saturday afternoon or alone on the freeway late at night. We are vulnerable with radio in a way that is impossible with television -- TV is somehow too public, too visual; our defenses rise too easily against it. But radio at its best comforts as well as entertains. And, like the ideal weekend guest, it makes few demands. It allows the mind to wander, explore, go for long walks alone. You can close your eyes and not miss a thing.

More than television, radio is a marker of time for us. It fixes time, and not just in the announcement of the hour or half hour, or simply in our awareness that it’s 3:00 in Seattle when “Prairie Home Companion” comes on or 6:30 when “All Things Considered” is over. It fixes voices, which are our own past. I think of a broadcast by FDR on December 7, 1941, or of the crash of the Hindenburg, reported to a startled nation by an announcer who broke into tears. Similarly, Garrison Keillor (“Companion” host, writing in the liner notes to the anniversary record album) comments that his own earliest memory of radio, from his childhood in Anoka, Minnesota, is “sitting on my uncle’s lap, his arm around me, my head next to his, as a tiny band played, and a man in New York said it was true, the war was over.”

Radio freezes these moments better than a snapshot can: every year, 1945 gets a little further away. And that receding moment, once so vividly present and still so apparently alive (in part because of radio), is just like this moment, this Saturday afternoon, with its new show, coming to us live from Minnesota, where people right now are watching the red light in the World Theater in downtown St. Paul, waiting for the moment when it all begins again.



Time means everything in live radio; time is what makes it so special. Every week you get just one chance. If you are caught in the grocery store, on the bus or the ferry, at a meeting, or at your daughter’s soccer game, and you neglected to bring your radio, they won’t hold the show for you until you get home; it comes on precisely at 3:00 and will not wait. Of course you can have a friend tape it for you, but that’s cheating -- victory is compromised. It’s not the same as being ready. The “Companion,” as Keillor says, down deep in its heart in a gospel show, and if the Bridegroom comes while you’re at the hardware store buying oil for your lamp, he’ll just start the music without you.

I have wondered at times whether it isn’t this old anticipation of the Kingdom that explains Keillor’s childhood fascination with radio (a subject he returns to frequently in his New Yorker stories, published recently by Atheneum under the title Happy to Be Here). Radio presents a child’s-eye view of the Bridegroom’s approach, and the waiting is almost as much fun as the coming itself. Keillor recalls Fibber McGee looking around his home at 79 Wistful Vista for his coat “or his ukulele or his canoe paddle,” and finally saying to Molly, “Maybe it’s here in the closet, kiddo,” and “he opened the door and out came the avalanche.” Keillor never grew tired of this routine -- he waited for it every week, knowing it would come, wanting it to come, and experiencing the fulfillment of expectation when it did. Such stellar moments from childhood were like being held in your uncle’s lap while a jazz band played somewhere 1,500 miles away. It was all mysterious and marvelous, and yet as comfortable as home and family. Perfect radio casts out fear. You could always count on it, every evening, every week. Radio was the good news.

It was from such moments (specifically from thinking about the “Grand Ole Opry”) that Keillor got the idea of doing a show of his own. As well as writing short fiction, he had been on the radio since 1960. The “Companion,” clearly, was an ideal way of combining his two loves. He didn’t have to write about radio anymore; he could be radio. So “Prairie Home Companion” was launched on Minnesota Public Radio on July 6, 1974, moving from Macalester College to successively larger theaters, finally finding a permanent home in 1978 at the 630-capacity World Theater in St. Paul.

The World Theater, as Keillor comments in his liner notes, was in 1910 a legitimate theater; it switched to movies in 1933, and in the late ‘70s it almost became a parking lot before it was saved by the “Companion.” This outcome seems appropriate: much of Keillor’s work can be seen as a rescue operation, saving memorable places from the erosion of time for as long as he can.

The “Companion” is broadcast live every Saturday, as I witnessed for myself last December. Tickets, I was surprised to learn, aren’t especially expensive or hard to come by. It’s rather like seeing the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field (itself a survivor from another era), where tickets for the bleachers and grandstands can always be purchased on the day of the game, even in those rare years when the Cubs are pennant- contenders. (Keillor, come to think of it, should have been born a Cubs fan, if such a person can exist in Minnesota. His heart would go out to a team that last won a pennant at the close of World War II.)

The show is broadcast at 5:00 in Minnesota. Keillor comes on stage briefly at 4:00, says hello, and the music starts informally (it’s rather like watching batting practice). At 4:45 the host returns. A music stand has been placed near the front of the stage, close to Butch Thompson’s piano -- and on the stand Keillor puts his notes and memos, and the messages the audience has written out before the show or has mailed in. These messages, as any listener knows, are not hip, coy or desperate; often funny and always honest, they suggest that someone out there wants to say hello to someone somewhere else by way of the airwaves. The messages are not simply time-fillers; they are, in miniature, the point of the show, rather like the opening song itself, with its hint of surprise, delight and easy familiarity: “I’ve missed you so since you’ve been gone, hello Love . . .”

Keillor reminds the audience that the broadcast is live, encourages audience reaction (laughter; no cue cards), and comments that since this is live radio with only one short intermission, musicians often have to set up while other musicians are performing. As you hear Stevie Beck, the queen of the auto-harp, the audience is watching the crew set up for a seven-piece marimba band or for Stoney Lonesome, the local Minneapolis bluegrass band.

Watching the show from a seat in the balcony, one rarely forgets that time determines it all -- it must all come home at 5:00 -- which is one reason I would just as soon be at home, hearing it on the radio. We need a few illusions. I don’t know what you think the World Theater, or downtown St. Paul, looks like, but my guess is that it doesn’t look anything like you think it does. Which, when it comes to radio, is just the way it should be.



Someone told me that the first time he heard the show he pulled out his Rand McNally atlas and looked up Lake Wobegon in the index, expecting to be able to drive to this small midwestern town where all the women are strong, all the men good-looking, and all the children above average. Someone else I know -- not a transplanted midwesterner -- thought Minnesota itself was fictitious, a creation of Garrison Keillor. I’m willing to go along with both of these notions. Both Keillor’s Minnesota (like his commercials for “Hotel Minnesota,” a chain found in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where all the guests bring their own fruit salad and deviled eggs) and his small hometown are real -- they do exist somewhere in the imagination. We believe in that world, recognize it. Like the narrator of the “Companion,” who was brought up in Lake Wobegon, we too left it years ago but have never completely escaped.

At their best, the stories at the heart of the show are not sentimental -- or at least not only sentimental or nostalgic. If Keillor spends ten minutes illuminating a Dandelion Wine -- style vision of small-town Minnesota on a warm summer evening (the porches, screen doors, rocking chairs, lightning bugs and baseball games called on account of darkness when the batter gets hit in the leg with the ball or the infielders start to complain about invisible grounders), he will invariably be telling us something also about the simple and terrible passing of time, those last rare minutes of daylight early on a Saturday night.

The show is not simply on the radio, like the older shows Keillor admires so much, and upon which the “Companion” is loosely modeled; it’s also about radio. And radio, for Keillor, teaches us something about the nature of time itself -- especially how quickly it all seems to go. And so the every-week celebration of birthdays is not merely a gesture; it’s a key to the center of the show. With each Saturday we mark the passing of time. Recently, at the end of the show, Keillor did a tribute to all the new 40-year-olds, those people born in March 1942, sung to a rewritten Gettysburg Address with the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the background. As so often with Keillor, it was funny, well-written, well-timed (5:00 was just around the corner) and poignant.

Death comes even to Lake Wobegon. A child falls through the ice one quiet December afternoon, and years later the father still can be found late in the evening at the Side-Track Tap studying his loss. The other men just let him be, sitting there with his memory as he tries again to make it all come right, tries to be there, miraculously, at just the right instant to pull his boy from the water.

Keillor himself turns 40 this year; he has a 12-year-old son of his own. He knows well the treachery of time: what may seem comfortably solid and frozen and safe turns out to be slick and dangerously thin. It takes only a moment. But boys and girls skate anyway.



The stories in Happy to Be Here are not Lake Wobegon stories -- fans of the radio show should be forewarned. But they will not, I think, disappoint those fans. Keillor has a keen ear for parody, and makes use of it in unlikely ways, as in the marvelous “Your Wedding and You” with its explanation of the “alternative wedding” (only Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” has caught this ‘60s and ‘70s language as accurately), and in his more recent homage to punk rock in “Don: The True Story of a Young Person.” Anyone familiar with the more intellectual forms of pop criticism (whether of music or film) will recognize it as a parody of the Rolling Stone critic -- a parody so good that, for a moment, one is almost convinced the piece is the real thing:

Actually, “punk rock,” as it is called, has brought about some useful changes in popular music, as many respected rock critics have pointed out, and its roots can be traced back to the very origins of rock itself, and perhaps even a little bit farther: “It goes without saying,” Green Phillips has written in Rip It Up: The Sound of the American Urban Experience, “that punk rock is outrageous. Outrage is its object, its raison d’être, stupid, self-destructive, and a menace to society. But that does not mean we should minimize its contribution or fail to see it for what it truly is: an attempt to reject the empty posturing of the pseudo-intellectual album-oriented Rock-as-Art consciousness cult of the Post-Pepper era and to re-create the primal persona of the Rocker as Car Thief, Dropout, and Guy Who Beats Up Creeps.”

As any rock critic knows, the very notion of analyzing the stuff is a direct violation of the message of the music itself. This doesn’t, of course, stop the sort of verbal posturing that Keillor so nicely captures here. Comedian Woody Allen often goes for an easy laugh by inserting various outrageous statements into a parody, such as his takeoff on Kafka’s Journals: “Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me. But why? I kept imagining I saw shadowy forms, and at 3 A.M. the underwear I had draped over a chair resembled the Kaiser on roller skates.” Keillor in contrast plays it very close, getting humor not only by the shifts in diction (from “primal persona” to “Guy Who Beats Up Creeps”), but also by forcing the reader to pay attention to the small details and even to the very shape of a sentence in order to catch the put-on. “Its roots can be traced to the very origins of rock itself and perhaps even a little bit farther.” That “little bit” signals the parody -- the rest of it could easily be for real. It’s close enough and yet exaggerated enough to be absurd.

The setting and subjects of many of the stories are what fans of the “Companion” might expect. Except for the political satire (a side of Keillor rarely exhibited on the radio), they are generally midwestern, and celebrate baseball, small towns, “shy rights” (“why not pretty soon?”) and, of course, radio. WLT, broadcasting “The Friendly Neighbor Show,” features Walter “Dad” Benson:

We heard the WLT chimes strike twelve, the organ play Dad’s theme (“Whispering Lilacs”) and the announcer’s voice say “and now we take you down the road aways to the home of Dad Benson, his daughter Jo, and her husband Franck, for a visit with the Friendly Neighbor, brought to you by Midland Fire and Casualty Insurance. As we join them, the family is sitting in the kitchen around the table where J0 is fixing lunch . . .”

Again, for someone raised on Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver, this sounds pretty authentic, even while it pushes the type to its extreme. But Keillor’s affection here, and in other stories on the subject of radio, is clear. In “WLT (The Edgar Era)” he writes: “Oh the days when radio was strange and dazzling! Even the WLT performers could not quite believe it. To think that their voices flew out as far as Anoka, Still-water and Hastings!” This is not far from the voice Keillor uses in the liner notes to his record, A Prairie Home Companion Anniversary Album, where he compares his show to his memory:

On the living room floor of my boyhood, I stretched out and heard those old shows for all they were worth. It’s seldom I feel that ours matches up, though perhaps if I were eight and listened to this show with by brothers and sisters stretched out beside me, knowing that I had to go to bed ‘when it was over, I’d like it more.



I suspect that not many of Keillor’s listeners are eight years old; yet this knowledge of bedtime approaching lingers in all of us. Time for listening to the show is time taken out. Responsibilities are at an end for two hours; it’s like the Sunday afternoons of our childhood. And much of the beauty in such an experience, as Keats told us long ago (and as Horace told us long before Keats), lies in our knowledge of its transience. Five o’clock is always nigh.

This may be why my favorite stories in Happy to Be Here, and the two that seem closest to the spirit of certain features of Lake Wobegon -- “Powder Milk Biscuits,” “The Chatterbox Cafe,” and “Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility” -- have little to do with radio. They are the last two stories in the book. The first, the title story, was originally published in the New Yorker as “Found Paradise.” The story is about writing, about the yearning for the quiet country life, and, of course, about our problems in locating paradise and describing it once we’ve been there. It is also, along the way, a fine parody of various latter-day Thoreaus. Out on the farm, the storyteller keeps a journal (“forty-eight animals seen today before lunch, of which all but six were birds, most small and brownish”), and begins to “experience

What I was beginning to experience, I later learned, was “the being of being” that J. W. Spagnum, the prairie transcendentalist, describes as “the profound fullness of spirit that renders the heart immovable.” In The Wisdom of the Plains, he writes, “The first and highest paradise is our heavenly home and the second is the Garden of Eden, shown on the Chart of Time (inside front cover) as a sunny sky and a grove of trees. . .”

What he finds (not to spoil the surprise) is what one usually does find if one spends some time on a Minnesota farm during the winter. His “stories” (one paragraph each) begin to sound like Reader’s Digest condensed versions of E. B. White’s essays. And his experiences become equally simple: that hunger for myth and symbol evaporates.

In the old days of novel writing, my son’s birthday, on May 1st, would have made me think of the coincidence of revolution and spring, and the death-rebirth motif. This year it didn’t, and we had a good time. He received a sandbox, a tricycle, a toy farm, and a fifty-dollar savings bond. At end of day, I did not find myself brooding about my own sandbox experiences. I went to bed early.

To talk about it at all, as in rock criticism, is inherently paradoxical, as the flat, simple statements attempt to suggest: “Found Paradise. I said I would and by God I have. Here it is and it is just what I knew was here all along.”

The other story, the last in the book, is called Drowning 1954. It is, again, in part about time, about making one fatal slip and envisioning all of your life suddenly lost: “One misstep! A lie, perhaps, or disobedience to your mother. There were countless men . . . who stumbled and fell from the path -- one misstep! -- and were dragged down like drowning men into debauchery, unbelief, and utter damnation.”

His lie had to do with swimming; the protagonist hated his swim instructor and skipped classes, going instead to the WCCO radio studio in Minneapolis to watch “Good Neighbor Time.” Then years later, as the story ends, the narrator watches his own seven-year-old son learning to swim:

Every time I see him standing in the shallows, working up nerve to put his head under, I love him more. His eyes are closed tight, and his pale slender body is tense as a drawn bow, ready to spring up instantly should he start to drown. Then I feel it all over again, the way I used to feel. I also feel it when I see people like the imperial swimming instructor at the YMCA -- powerful people who delight in towering over some little twerp who is struggling and scared, and casting the terrible shadow of their just and perfect selves.



This is close to the voice we hear every week over the radio, and in that last sentence we hear as well some of the perfectionism that makes the show a success. Details are kept to a minimum (what do we really know about the inside of the “Chatterbox Cafe”?); the voice is personal, reflective; often it is strikingly moral, and equally often it suggests something of the “Wistful Vista” of Fibber McGee. Vulnerable himself, the narrator sees vulnerability everywhere -- in shy people, in all that is passing, growing up and growing older. He sees that we can do little to help each other out -- even our own defenseless children. Sometimes the best we can do is send messages over the airwaves. Or tell the stories.

Are the stories as good as the show? If you don’t like the show, will you like the stories anyway? Probably. Like the show, the stories are hit or miss, and if you like Keillor, or the man Keillor is in many of his stories (whether in print or on the air), you’ll appreciate even the misses, because even when the right word doesn’t quite come, or when the timing is just a shade off, the tone usually survives -- something lingers in the air, making us feel at home, comfortable, happy to be here. Found Paradise. And with bedtime always approaching, you may find one Saturday a story or message you need to pass along (listeners of the show make great evangelists). But I’ll let Garrison Keillor have the last word, and let his own review of the show stand for the book as well:

Occasionally it’s very good. And it’s the only show I hear that reminds me of the old Zenith. We are in the position of a man who lives in a town with no Chinese restaurants and has to make his own Moo Goo Gai Ding. It’s almost impossible to make it right, he doesn’t have a recipe, and Super Valu doesn’t stock the right herbs and spices, but every so often he pulls off a Ding that brings back memories of the Dings he used to know. For a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s as good as it gets.

Why Peace Movements Fail



Peace movements thrive, an English writer has observed, when there is both optimism and pessimism: optimism, because there must be hope that shooting can be averted, that steps can be taken toward a more peaceful world; pessimism, because there must be clouds of war to spur interest in peace issues, to move us out of our normal preoccupation with more pleasant topics.

If this analysis is correct, then Europe’s peace demonstrations might mark the renewal of a strong peace movement on that continent. And we might see a reinvigorated peace movement in the United States. Americans are chronic optimists; that requirement is easily met. Pessimism comes harder for us, but the Reagan arms buildup, events in Poland and Central America, and press attention to nuclear war have made the dangers more obvious.

So assume for the moment that current conditions allow the peace movement here to become prominent, to be heard. Assume that 1982 brings everything peace activists could hope for. Assume that the Catholic bishops say what they are expected to say at this fall’s meeting. Assume that we have a few large street demonstrations. Assume that there is a new concern for peace among the leadership of women’s organizations and Protestant denominations. Assume that frightening federal deficits force reductions in the rate of increase in Pentagon spending for the next fiscal year. What then? What will become of this prospering American peace movement?

If the present peace movement follows the pattern of past peace movements, this one will affect some policies and will move some people, but it will ultimately fail to avert war or to build a broad peace.

Peace movements, of the 20th century generally have been unable to achieve their immediate objectives, and have had even less impact on long-term public policy. Wars ultimately end, but rarely because of the work of peace movements. These movements in the United States and Europe have failed because they lack numbers, influence and access to power, or because they lack the programs to hold both popular and elite support. Why is this so?



Some problems facing national, peace movements, I would argue, are unavoidable and thus not worth much attention. One is their inability to reconcile the fact that they are asking a nation for action with the fact that the action has international dimensions. There is no way around this problem, but it confronts proponents of military solutions as well. A second inevitable weakness of peace movements is their factionalism. I see no cure for this ill; it must be endured where it is troublesome, and exploited where it is helpful. Third, it is claimed that the peace movement is all heart and no head, that it is weak on realistic analysis. Peace activists should avoid the purely sentimental and the wildly hyperbolic. Regardless of their efforts at rigor, however, peace activists will ultimately call on people to make decisions with their hearts as well as their heads.

A look at seven possibly avoidable causes for the failure of peace movements might suggest new approaches for the future. The first two are the extremes of the continuum of consonance with national values. The third is the time perspective. The last four relate to appeals and symbols used by or forced on the movement.

1. Peace movements fail because they are not seen as reflecting the basic values of a society. This was the case with the pre-1914 movement in Germany, widely identified as foreign in its spirit and impetus. This hazard can never be entirely eliminated, because peacemaking is foreign to some values of all nations. There are indigenous peace themes in the history of the English-speaking countries that did not exist in Germany, but the American and English themes are those of a tolerated minority rather than of the dominant culture.

2. Peace movements fail because they identify with such widely approved national symbols and themes as to deny themselves a clear identity. This situation describes the pre-1914 peace movement in the United States. Presidents Taft and Wilson and five secretaries of state between 1905 and 1914 were members of peace societies. Yet in 1917, when the United States entered the European war, only a small number of socialists, social reformers and religious pacifists maintained that a peace movement must of necessity oppose war.

3. Peace movements fail because they focus on the past, the present or the distant future, rather than the intermediate future. Each time perspective has its own hazards. But I am asserting, without benefit here of evidence, that the focus should be on the intermediate future: later than next year, sooner than the withering away of the state.

Leaders of peace organizations, like military generals, often prepare to fight the previous war. The American peace movement of the 1930s benefited from a retrospective distaste for the Great War of 1914-1918. William Allen White spoke for many Americans in the ‘30s when he warned: “The next war will see the same hurrah and the same bowwow of the big dogs to get the little dogs to go out and follow the blood scent and get their entrails tangled in the barbed wire.” Yet, even as the movement restated the evils of the Great War, some peace elements came to feel that they were irrelevant to the European situation of the late 1930s, while others found themselves uncomfortably allied with isolationists at home. The peace testimony of the churches was muted. Soon the war effort was attracting many a William Allen White.

Movements with immediate goals sometimes achieve those goals. American opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing helped make possible the 1963 partial test-ban treaty. So much of the energy of the movement had focused on that immediate goal, however, that when the treaty was ratified, public support could not be mobilized for a next step. Immediate goals often are modest ones, and the linkage with larger goals may not be clear.

Furthermore, linkages with immediate and intermediate goals may not be clear when a peace movement’s focus is on the distant future, as in the pre-1914 European socialists’ opposition to “capitalists’ wars.” The European socialists had not sufficiently considered the power of nationalism, nor had they built mechanisms able to withstand that power. The opposition to war evaporated in 1914, and soon French proletarians were killing German proletarians and vice versa.

4. Peace movements fail because they are unable, or unwilling, to convince people that wars hurt economies. “Business pacifism” was part of pre-1914 peace sentiment in the United States and western Europe. Norman Angell, in The Great Illusion, argued that wars destroy prosperity, even for the victor. As the president of the National Association of Manufacturers (U.S.) commented, “Dead men buy no clothes.” After World War II, which stimulated the American economy and created jobs, “business pacifism” was almost obliterated in America, and President Eisenhower’s identification of a “military-industrial complex” seemed to confirm that war is good for business. Yet the Vietnam war severely damaged the American economy, and by 1968 radical proposals on Vietnam were appearing in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Peace activists of the 1960s were slow to argue that war, although it benefits some, has a negative net effect on the economy. Perhaps they were reluctant to appeal to people’s self-interest, or perhaps they were slow to believe that economic self-interest could work against war.

5. Peace movements fail because they fail to bridge class and ideological divisions. The class and ideological characteristics of peace activists are well known. Activists usually are from the middle class; in the United States they tend to be white, from the northeast or from large cities in the west and midwest; women, college students and “modernist” Protestant clergy have been conspicuously represented. In political ideology (except for pre-1914 America), peace movements have drawn disproportionately from the radical left. None of these characteristics is inevitably associated with peacemaking. All are cause and effect of the minority status of peace movements.

6. Peace movements fail because they become identified with threatening symbols unrelated to peace. By 1967 the antiwar movement in America had become stereotyped as a band of long-haired, profane, pot-smoking kids in revolt against the older generation and its institutions. Whereas participants in the civil rights movement a few years earlier had combed their hair and, curbed their tongues to present a positive public image, the antiwar activists sought to shock and in some cases to offend. The result was that while the Vietnam war was unpopular, the antiwar movement was even less popular -- and the style of some activists may have deterred working-class and rural Americans from moving to an antiwar stance.

7. Peace movements fail because they become identified with appeasement of national adversaries. This charge often is made unjustly, but it remains a difficult one for peace activists to deal with. The pre-1914 German peace movement, when it was noticed at all, was attacked as a stooge for the English. The appeasement charge was particularly unjust at the time of World War II, for American peace activists had been outspoken critics of Hitler and of the Munich agreement. But if it was unjust to link peace work and appeasement in the ‘40s, the suspicion was more understandable in the ‘60s, when some American antiwar activists made no effort to conceal their sympathies for an authoritarian regime in North Vietnam.



So much for what may be empirically verifiable. Other flaws in peace movements can be evaluated only subjectively. I am identifying two that frequently concern peace advocates. To the extent that these flaws exist, they are, I suggest, the most serious ones; however, they are now widely recognized. My first assertion below is conventional wisdom in 1982 in some circles, and the second reflects one of the oldest articles of Christian faith.

1. Peace movements fail because they work for a “peace” too narrowly defined. Too often in the past, peace has been defined as order -- as the absence of conflict, even as the absence of change. Given the inevitability and in some instances the desirability of conflict and change, this concept of peace fails on both empirical and normative grounds. The pre-1914 French, German and American peace movements all possessed an unduly legalistic notion of what peace involved. The same could be said of the more respectable elements of the post-1945 movement in the U.S. A better concept would be some variation of “peace with justice” (amply discussed in available literature).

2. Peace movements fail because they dwell on fear rather than hope. Just as peace movements need both optimism and pessimism to thrive, it is inevitable that in their appeals fear will be mixed with hope. But introducing fear in popular appeals is like introducing poison gas to a battlefield on a gusty day. Fear produces unstable and unpredictable results. In America in 1938-1941, for example, fear of war generated support for such disparate goals as peace, isolation and military involvement.

The recent discovery of nuclear war by television and mass-circulation magazines, and efforts to publicize the consequences of nuclear war through Ground Zero and university teach-ins, have brought war concerns to a wider audience. The risk is that this attention will encourage fear without giving grounds for hope, that it will stimulate anxiety without providing a constructive, release for that anxiety.

The fact that peace movements persist despite their failures is a tribute to the capacity of peace activists to sustain hope. Nonetheless, a study of the history of peace movements challenges one’s ability to be optimistic. This review, loosely in the tradition of Lasswell’s Garrison State and Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Future, uses historical trends to suggest the future that awaits us if we do not mend our ways.

I do not believe that we are in a unique era in which the past is irrelevant. The argument has been made that, just as the nuclear age has transformed the ways in which weapons can be used in pursuit of national interests, so it has altered the prospects for peace movements. However, nuclear weapons have not yet transformed our way of thinking about weapons, and so I doubt that peace movements can use this reason to ignore their past.

The tasks remain the same as always. People still need to be reached, still need to be convinced, to be moved. Worldwide vulnerability due to nuclear weapons does not in itself reach, convince or move people. Such efforts are the tasks of peace movements.

The Soul of Christianity

If we had been living around the eastern Mediterranean in the early centuries of the Christian era, we might have noticed, scratched here and there on the sides of walls and houses or simply on the ground, the crude outline of a fish. We would probably have dismissed it as innocuous graffiti, for these were mainly seaport towns where fishing was a part of daily life.

Had we been Christians, however, we would have recognized these drawings as the logo for the Good News. The head of the fish would have pointed us toward the place where the local Christian group held its clandestine meetings -- underground in catacombs, and in the back rooms of shops and homes. To be known as a Christian was to risk being thrown to lions or gladiators, or turned into a human torch. A cross would have been a giveaway symbol, so a fish was substituted for it, for the Greek letters for the word fish are also the first letters of the Greek words for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." So the Good News was depicted in the crude outline of an ordinary fish.

The people who heard Jesus’ disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed -- men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquility, simplicity and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered. Here were people who seemed to be making a success of the enterprise everyone would like to succeed at -- life itself.

Specifically, there seemed to be two qualities in which their lives abounded. The first of these was mutual regard. One of the earliest observations by an outsider about Christians that we have is, "See how these Christians love one another." Integral to this mutual regard was a total absence of social barriers; it was a discipleship of equals. Here were men and women who not only said that everyone was equal in the sight of God but who lived as though they meant it. The conventional barriers of race, gender and status meant nothing to them, for in Christ there was neither Jew nor gentile, male nor female, slave nor free. As a consequence, in spite of differences in function or social position, their fellowship was marked by a sense of genuine equality.

Their second distinctive quality was happiness. When Jesus was in danger his disciples were alarmed, but otherwise it was impossible to be sad in Jesus’ company. And when he told his disciples that he wanted his joy to be in them "that your joy may be complete," to a remarkable degree that objective was realized.

Outsiders found this baffling. These scattered Christians were not numerous. They were not wealthy or powerful, and they were in constant danger of being killed. Yet they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was uncontainable. Perhaps radiance would be a better word. Radiance is hardly the word used to characterize the average religious life, but no other word fits as well the life of these early Christians.

Paul offers a vivid example. Here was a man who had been ridiculed, driven from town to town, shipwrecked, imprisoned, flogged until his back was covered with stripes. Yet here was a life in which joy was the constant refrain: "Joy unspeakable and full of glory." "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory." "In all things we are more than conquerors." "God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts." "Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift." The joy of these early Christians was unspeakable. As the fifth chapter of Ephesians suggests, they sang not routinely but from the irrepressible overflow of their direct experience. Life was not challenges to be met; it was glory discerned,

What produced this love and joy in these early Christians? Everyone wants those qualities; the question is how to get them. The explanation, insofar as we are able to gather one from the New Testament, is that three intolerable burdens had suddenly and dramatically been lifted from their shoulders.

The first of these was fear, including the fear of death. We have it from Carl Jung that he never met a patient over 40 whose problems did not go back to the fear of approaching death. The reason the Christians could not be intimidated by the lions and even sang as they entered the coliseum was that Jesus’ counsel, "Fear not, for I am with you," had gotten through to them.

The second burden they had been released from was guilt. Recognized or repressed, guilt seems built into the human condition, for no one lives up to their ideals completely. It is not only that we behave less well toward others than our consciences dictate; we also fail ourselves by leaving talents undeveloped and letting opportunities slip by, so we have a hard time living with ourselves. We may manage to keep remorse at bay while the sun is up, but in sleepless hours of the night it comes through,

the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and

been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the

awareness

Of things ill done and done to

others’ harm

Which once you took for exercise of

virtue. (T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding")

Oppressive guilt reduces creativity. In its acute form it can rise to a fury of self-condemnation that shuts life down. Paul had felt its force before be was released: "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

The third release the Christians experienced was from the cramping confines of the ego. There is no reason to suppose that prior to their new life these men and women were more self-centered than the next person, but this was enough for them to know that their love was radically confined. They knew that the human curse is to love and sometimes to love well, but never well enough. Now that curse had been dramatically lifted.

It is not difficult to see how release from fear, guilt and self-centeredness could feel like rebirth. If someone were to free us from these crippling impediments, we too would call that person savior. But this only pushes our question back a step. How did the Christians get free of these burdens? And what did a man named Jesus, now gone, have to do with the process that they should credit it as his doing?

The only power that can effect transformations of the order we have described is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine -- the imago dei, the image of God that is within us. And it too can be activated only through bombardment -- in its case, love’s bombardment.

The process begins in infancy, when a mother’s initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and, as the baby’s coordination develops, elicits the flickerings of its answering smile. The process continues into childhood. A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love takes root in children only when it comes to them. (When the activist folk singer Pete Seeger was asked by an interviewer for advice as to how to raise children, he said, "Pour in the love and it will come out from them.") Love is an answering phenomenon. It is, literally, a response.

An actual incident may help to bring this point home.

He was a diffident freshman in a small midwestern college when one morning the instructor (who was his role model and whom he idolized) opened the class by saying, "Last evening as I was reading the papers you turned in last week I came upon several of the most significant sentences that I can recall ever having read." As he proceeded to read them the student could hardly believe his ears. His heart leapt into his throat, for he was hearing his own words being read back to him. He recorded the incident in his journal: "I don’t remember another thing that occurred during that hour, but I shall never forget my feelings when the bell brought me back to my senses. It was noon, and when I stepped outdoors October was never so beautiful. If anyone had asked me for anything, maybe even to lay down my life, I would have given it gladly, for I wanted nothing for myself. I ached only to give to a world that had given so much to me."

If a young man found himself thus changed by the interest a human being had shown in him, perhaps we can understand the way the early Christians were changed by feeling certain that they were totally loved by the ultimate power in the universe. Imagination may fail us here, but logic need not. If we too felt loved -- not abstractly or in principle but vividly and personally -- by one who unites all power and all goodness, the experience could dissolve fear, guilt and self-concern dramatically. As Kierkegaard noted, if at every moment both present and future I were certain that nothing has happened or can ever happen that would separate me from the infinite love of the Infinite, that would be clearest reason there is for joy.

God’s love is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They had experienced Jesus’ love and had become convinced that Jesus was God incarnate. Once that love reached them it could not be stopped. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt and self-centered-ness, it poured through them like a torrential stream and heightened the love they had hitherto felt for others to the point where the difference in degree became a difference in kind. A new quality, Christian love, was born. Conventional love is evoked by lovable qualities in the beloved, hut the love people encountered from Christ embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.

Paul’s famous description of Christian love in 1 Corinthians 13 ought not to be read as if he were describing a quality that was already known. His words list the attributes of a specific person, Jesus Christ. In phrases of unparalleled beauty, it describes the divine love that Paul believed Christians would reflect toward others once they experienced Christ’s love for them. The reader should approach his words as if they define a novel capacity which, as it had been fully realized "in the flesh" only in Christ, Paul was describing for the first time.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

So astonishing did the first Christians find this love and the fact that it had actually entered their lives that they had to appeal for help in describing it. In closing one of the earliest recorded sermons on the Good News, Paul turned back to the words of one of the prophets, who in turn was speaking for God: "Look at this, you scornful souls, and lose yourselves in wonder; for in your days I do such a deed that, if [others] were to tell you this story, you would not believe it."

Evolution and Evolutionism



Not since the days of Clarence Darrow and the “monkey trial” has America been so caught up in the debate over human origins. Now as then the issue has polarized our nation. It did so conspicuously this past winter, when spokespersons for mainline churches, the scientific establishment and the universities lined up behind the American Civil Liberties Union. Together they knocked out of Arkansas’s statutes the bill that would have required creationism to be taught alongside evolution in the public schools.

I rooted for the ACLU during that trial, but my rejoicing over its victory was more subdued than that of most of my friends. Because the issues are important and unresolved, I wish to explain my response.

Between the creationists’ claims concerning human origins and those of neo-Darwinists, truth is more evenly divided than our nation realizes. The creationist notion that our planet is no more than 10,000 years old is so strained that I have difficulty taking it seriously; on this point I side solidly with the liberals. But what the liberals do not see is that the neo-Darwinist account of how we got here is not much stronger.

In addition to being logically flawed, neo-Darwinism has unfortunate psychological consequences. Yet it is being taught as “gospel truth”; the lip service being paid to science’s fallibility does little to lessen neo-Darwinism’s impact. The upshot is that the civil liberties of those who disagree with the theory are being compromised. Of this situation the ACLU and its backers seem to have little inkling.

Before I proceed to the central issue, three short quotations will set out the psychological consequences of teaching neo-Darwinism.

First, “If anything characterizes ‘modernity,’ it is loss of faith in transcendence” (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 1978).

Second, “There is no doubt that in developed societies education has contributed to the decline of religious belief” (Edward Norman, in Christianity and the World Order [Oxford University Press, 1976]).

Third, one reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin’s own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that “more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution . . . than to anything else” (Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1970).

The Civil Liberties Union’s handling of the creationist case abets the historical drift these quotations point to with logic that runs roughly as follows:

Major premise: Creationism is religion rather than science; therefore, according to the principle of separation of church and state, creationism may not be taught in public schools.

Minor premise: The science which is and should be taught our children “must be explanatory [and] rely exclusively upon the workings of natural law” (ACLU’s witness Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher of science, as quoted in Civil Liberties, February 1982).

Unspoken conclusion: The only explanation for human existence that public schools may teach is a natural-law theory which precludes in principle, as we shall see, even the possibility of (a) purpose and (b) intervention in the workings of the observable universe.

Restated to bring out its practical import, the ACLU position is that it is science’s responsibility to explain things by natural laws. The alternative to such natural explanations is supernatural ones. Thus, insofar as religion involves the supernatural, church-state separation requires that only irreligious explanations of human origins may be taught our children. Already we may be wondering if this is what our forebears intended by the First Amendment. The irony is that evolutionists have no plausible theory to pit against religious accounts of human origins. Their discoveries show a history of evolutionary advance but do not explain how or why that advance occurred.



This brings me to my central point. The notion of evolution harbors an ambiguity which moderns have finessed rather than faced. On the one hand, the word “evolution” describes life’s advance; on the other, it claims to explain that advance. If these two meanings part company, with which should the word side?

As description -- of the fossil record and of the age, continuities and discontinuities in life forms that the record discloses -- evolution is true and creationism mistaken. But as an explanation (let’s call this evolutionism), neo-Darwinism is largely a failure, and one that has the important psychological consequences noted above. This crucial distinction is not being drawn today. As a result we witness a standoff, a shouting match between the scientific establishment and the fundamentalists, each of which has hold of a half-truth and a partial error.

Neo-Darwinism’s proponents do not present it as a mere description of life’s journey on this planet; they claim that it is a theory explaining that journey. Specifically, neo-Darwinists claim that natural selection working on chance mutations accounts for what has occurred. But “natural selection” turns out to be a tautology, while the word “chance” denotes an occurrence that is inexplicable. A theory that claims to explain while standing with one foot on a tautology and the other in an explanatory void is in trouble.

Take “natural selection” first. The phrase encapsulates the argument that the pressure of populations on environments results in the survival of the fittest. But as no criterion for “fittest” has been found to be workable other than “the ones who survive,” the theory is circular. As the late C. H. Waddington wrote, “Survival . . . denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection . . merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology” (The Strategy of the Genes [Allen & Unwin, 1957]). E. 0. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) reiterates this point and updates the support for it.

As for “chance mutations,” chance is the opposite of having a cause; something that happens by chance admits of no reason or purpose for its occurrence. A scientist would be happy to discover a “reason” that would replace chance, but he or she is debarred by the rules of the scientific enterprise from introducing one that is intelligently purposive. For, in the words of Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity, “The cornerstone of scientific method is . . . the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of. . . ‘purpose.’” The determination with which evolutionists insist that chance be read as the opposite of purpose can be seen in the way they speak of “blind” and “pure” chance, when there are no such things in science itself. In science, chance is a number.

If we step out of the strictures of science, however, there is an alternative to this nonpurposive view of chance: it could be an occurrence whose cause lies outside the world of discourse in which the event is considered. If a bird found birdseed sprinkled on the snow only when a forest ranger passed its way and the ranger came only at night while the bird was asleep, the bird would doubtless attribute the seeds’ appearance as “due to” chance. (Note the way “due to” seems to produce a cause where none is offered.) According to this second reading, the combination of chance and necessity -- that is, of random mutations joined to natural selection -- “is precisely just the necessary and sufficient condition required for any who would wish to assert that the evolutionary process is . . . purposive,” as physicist and Episcopal priest William Pollard pointed out in his “Critique of Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity” (Soundings, Winter 1973).

“The introduction of probability [as the specification of chance’s perimeters] into scientific description constitutes the one case in which science expressly renounces an explanation in terms of natural causes,” Pollard went on to say. But evolutionary theory then faces the statistical improbabilities that pepper life’s ascent. It used to be argued that geological ages are so interminable that they allow time for anything and everything to happen. That notion required getting used to, but as long as it was thought of in single numbers (analogous to the number 26, say, turning up on a roulette wheel exactly when it was needed in a given evolutionary thrust), it could be accepted.

But we now see that significant organic changes require that innumerable component developments occur simultaneously and independently in bones, nerves, muscles, arteries and the like. These requirements escalate the demand on probability theory astronomically. It would be like having 26 come up simultaneously on ten or 15 tables in the same casino, followed by all the tables reporting 27, 28 and 29 in lockstep progression; more time than the earth has existed would be needed to account for the sequences that have occurred. Moreover, the number of generations through which a large number of immediately disadvantageous variations would have had to persist in order to turn reptiles into birds, say  -- scales into feathers, solid bones into hollow tubes, the dispersion of air sacs to various parts of the body, the development of shoulder muscles and bones to athletic proportions, to say nothing of conversion to a totally different biochemistry of elimination and the changeover from coldblooded to warm -- makes the notion of chance working alone preposterous. As Professor Pierre Grasse, who for 30 years held the chair in evolution at the Sorbonne, has written:

The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Dürer’s “Melancholia” is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecules leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it [Evolution of Living Organisms (Academic Press, 1977)].



Professor Wickramasinghe of the department of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff, Wales, did not take the stand for the creationists in Arkansas out of sympathy for their alternative scenario. A non-Christian from Sri Lanka, the professor said that it was for him not a question of the Bible’s inerrancy; he didn’t believe in the Bible at all. He testified for the creationists solely because he felt it was important to puncture neo-Darwinism’s pretenses. “Some 2,000 or so enzymes are known to be crucial for life,” he reported, and continued:

At a conservative estimate, say 15 Sites per enzyme must be fixed to be filled by particular amino acids for proper biological function. . . [T]he probability of discovering this set by random shuffling is one in 1040,000, a number that exceeds by many powers of 10 the number of all atoms in the entire observable universe [Science News, Vol. 121 (January 16, 1982)].

If we want to retain our belief in chance, obviously something is going to have to intervene to reduce it to conceivable bounds. This area is where the search goes on today. Vocabularies proliferate as repressor genes, corepressors and aporepressors, modifier and switch genes, operator genes that activate other genes, cistrons and operons that constitute subsystems of interacting genes -- even genes that regulate the rate of mutation in other genes -- are invoked. Anything to narrow unlimited chance to chance within conceivable proportions. On a different front, with the displacement of Darwin’s gradualism by the “punctuational” model, it is now conceded that the “missing links” between most species will not be found. It all happened too fast. “Most change has taken place so rapidly and in such confined geographic areas that it is simply not documented by our imperfect fossil record,” according to Steven Stanley (“Darwin Done Over,” the Sciences, October 1981).

From The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, which can be taken to summarize intellectual orthodoxy at the time of its publication in 1979, one would gather that neo-Darwinian theory is as settled as Newtonian theory. The Britannica tells us that “evolution is accepted by all biologists and natural selection is recognized as its cause. . . . Objections . . . have come from theological and, for a time, from political standpoints” (Vol. 7). Who would suspect from this statement that biologists of the stature of Ludwig von Bertalanffy had been writing: “I think the fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds”? Or that Arthur Koestler’s investigation into the subject led him to conclude that neo-Darwinism is “a citadel in ruins” (Janus: A Summing Up [Random House, 1978])? Koestler compares Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity to Custer’s Last Stand. Even Harvard’s spokesman for evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, concedes in the April 23 issue of Science that “neither of Darwinism’s two central themes will survive in their strict formulation.”

As the creationists continue to press differently nuanced bills in 20 or so state legislatures, we can expect social pressure to continue to bear on the evolutionism issue. The pressure buttresses certain errors, but in doing so forces others into the open. The civil libertarians have not recognized the problem: by their lights, the liberties of the creationists and others who hold other-than-naturalistic views of human origins are not being infringed upon because only scientific truth is arrayed against them.

The creationists, with all their literalist excesses, are performing a public service for us. It is as though an excess on the science front -- scientism, that over-extrapolation from the findings of science which Nobel laureate Elias Canetti says has “grabbed our century by the throat” -- has given political leverage to an opposite excess on the religious front: fundamentalism.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica article cited above tells us that “Darwin did two things; he showed that evolution was in fact contradicting scriptural legends of creation and that its cause, natural selection, was automatic, with no room for divine guidance or design.” Do biologists really want to take on issues like “creation,” “divine guidance” and “divine design”? It is time that the negative theological conclusions implicit in the neo-Darwinism I have here called evolutionism -- and the shaky status of that theory itself -- be brought into the open and separated from what the fossil record actually shows: that in the course of millions of years on earth, life has indeed advanced.

Recovering Healing Prayer

Go back and tell John what you are hearing and seeing: the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life and the Good News is preached to the poor. How happy are those who have no doubts about me! [Matt. 11:4-6].

Even after baptizing Jesus, John the Baptist was not convinced that he was the Messiah. When John sent his disciples to ask, Jesus held up his ministry of physical healing as clear and emphatic proof. The ministry of physical healing therefore stands in the center of our Christian faith. And yet though the Gospels are filled with stories of healing, and the church itself is born through an act of healing (Acts 3), most church people seem anxious to dismiss these stories, as though they embarrassed us.

This business of healing bodies through prayer seems to upset us. But why? It is central to Jesus’ ministry, and we claim to be the modern-day body of Christ. Could it be that we do not take Jesus’ healing ministry seriously because we are simply too proud or afraid to enter the unfamiliar territory of the spiritual world, where we feel inexperienced and without control?

To believe in healing prayer, one must first believe that the spiritual world is real, that powers in the spiritual world affect things in the physical world. We believe that the Word of God has become flesh in Jesus Christ, that God reaches to us from the spiritual dimension with power to change our lives in the physical world. We proclaim this in the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

But because the realm of the spirit is at once powerful, largely unknown and beyond our control, it threatens us. Perhaps no frontier has challenged our pride more than physical illness. We can make a space shuttle land on a dime after circling the heavens, but we have no cure for the common cold; the strongest athlete can be struck down by an invisible microbe.

Certainly our rational intellect is a gift from God, intended to help us remove suffering from the world. Scientific medical research is an important avenue by which God’s healing power can enter this world. But it is not the only way. Anyone who has experienced “butterflies in the stomach” before a momentous task knows that there is more to illness and healing than germs and pills. The doctor can set the bone, cut out the tissue, or administer the drug, but only the mysterious life force itself can join cells back together again and restore chemical balance.

Magazine editor Norman Cousins, in his best-selling Anatomy of an Illness, narrates his struggle against the medical establishment and his eventual “self-healing” through a curious mixture of megavitamins and sustained belly laughter. The book’s introduction speaks of “the natural defense mechanisms of the patient, which are the indispensable agents of recovery,” and concludes:

The only trouble with scientific medicine is that it is not scientific enough. Modern medicine will become really scientific only when physicians and their patients have learned to manage the forces of the body and the mind that operate in vis mediatrix naturae.

A theology of healing prayer amplifies this notion in stating that human hands can set, cut and administer -- but only God can heal. When we forget this, medical science becomes a headlong attempt to reinforce our human pride.



But even if God can heal, we must ask, “Does God want to heal?” Most often we reason, “Since God is all-powerful, sickness is God’s will. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that it exists?” Yet a Christian can never say, “Everything that exists is the way God wants it to be.” For Jesus came to us precisely because the world did not exist according to God’s will.

The will of God is clearly described for us in the biblical ideal of the Kingdom of God: peace, justice and mercy -- when the captives are set free, the oppressed liberated, the blind healed, the poor ministered to. Surely this does not describe the world as it exists. Because some people kill others does not mean that it is God’s will; in fact, God has commanded us not to kill. Similarly, because sickness exists does not mean that it is God’s will; in fact, Jesus has commanded his followers “to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9:2). God’s will for this world has been set forth in the life of Jesus Christ, and through him God has commissioned us and given us the power to transform the world as it exists into the world God wants it to be.

Once a leper came to Jesus:

He threw himself down and begged, “Sir, if you want to, you can make me clean!” Jesus reached out and touched him. “I do want to,” he answered. “Be clean!” At once the disease left the man [Luke 5:12-13].

J. B. Phillips translates Jesus as saying here, “Of course I want to.” Healing prayer is not an effort to change God’s mind, which has already been revealed to us in Christ. Rather, it is an effort to change our minds, to draw us closer to God and make us more willing to receive what God has already given to us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Healing prayer also threatens us because we fear losing faith and losing face if it doesn’t “work.” Underneath our misgivings about healing prayer lurks the fearful question. “What if we pray and the person is not healed?” Translation: “We wouldn’t want to find out that, as we have quietly feared, God’s promises are just our fantasy; God does not really care about our needs, and either does not want to heal us or has no power to do so. Better to stay comfortably ignorant and just go through the motions, praying in eloquent generalities, so you can never tell if your prayer is heard or not.”

This fearful reasoning assumes that we have no role in God’s healing process. Episcopalian Agnes Sanford, perhaps the most widely acknowledged authority on healing prayer, notes in the opening chapter of her 1947 classic The Healing Light:

If we try turning on an electric iron and it does not work, we look to the wiring of the iron, the cord, or the house. We do not stand in dismay before the iron and cry, “Oh, electricity, please come into my iron and make it work!” We realize that while the whole world is full of that mysterious power we call electricity, only the amount that flows through the wiring of the iron will make the iron work for us. The same principle is true of the creative energy of God. The whole universe is full of it, but only the amount of it that flows through our own beings will work for us.

For Christians, faith is not simply believing that God exists. That is a fact. Rather, Christian faith is believing that God is good and ultimately powerful, and acting accordingly, even when events are going badly. That is the faith which led Jesus to the cross, and to resurrection. As Sanford continues:

When Thomas Edison had tried some hundreds of times to find a wire that could transmit a continuous flow of electricity, and had failed some hundreds of times, he did not say, “It is not the will of electricity to shine continuously in my wire.” He tried again. He believed that it was in the will, that is, in the nature of electricity to produce this steady light. He concluded, therefore, that there was some adjustment to the laws of electricity that he had not yet made, and he determined to make the adjustment. For more than six thousand times he tried again. And he succeeded in making electricity shine continuously in a wire. That is faith.

Similarly, if our prayer for healing does not work, we must re-examine and reset our procedure yet another time, and try again. It is childish to blame God for every misfortune; we must begin to take responsibility for our part in the cooperative venture of healing through prayer.

God does not will sickness but does allow it -- perhaps because, like any lover, God wants us to respond of our own free will. In this interim age, when the Kingdom has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ but not yet fulfilled in the resurrected body for us all, our prayers for healing will not always work. But God’s success increases as we study, practice and persevere with all the tools of our faith: from the Bible and our own experience to the written reflection and experience of others to communities committed to bringing God’s Kingdom to earth.

Medical research itself reflects the agony of living in this interim age. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman has written of one surgeon who, after comparing respective survival rates, decided to stop doing radical mastectomies altogether, in favor of lumpectomy and radiation. “What do you tell the women you performed radical mastectomies on in the past?” Goodman asked the surgeon.

If they hear that I’ve changed and ask, [he replied,] I tell them that I did what I believed was best at the time. . . . What should I do? Go on performing new mastectomies because I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the women who have had them?

Goodman sighs:

Life and death can be a matter of timing. . . . If Ted Kennedy Jr., had contracted his form of cancer any earlier, he might well have died of it; if be had contracted it a few years later, they might have excised the bone area instead of amputating the leg. . . . The doctor who elicits trust now isn’t the one prescribing certainty, but the one who acts as a guide through the thicket of difficult scientific information -- forcing and helping us to be partners [Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1980].

Similarly, the minister who elicits trust in healing prayer isn’t the one promising perfect results, but the one who acts as a guide through the thicket of the spiritual world -- urging and helping others to accept their responsibility to work as partners with Jesus Christ, who respectfully and lovingly stands at the door and knocks, but waits for us to open.

The continuing presence of sickness in this world is a sign not that God is uncaring, weak or absent but that we human beings have been unfaithful. Still, failure is not something we need fear as those who have no hope for restoration and renewal. At every Sunday morning worship, we confess that we have missed the mark set for us in Jesus Christ, and we are assured of God’s pardon and power to go back out and try again with renewed strength. To someone who sees sickness as God’s will, this notion of human responsibility is cruel and burdensome; heaping guilt upon suffering. But to those who see God as a loving parent who wants our healing, our responsibility is the avenue of hope. If God is struggling to channel us power to heal, we can work to remove the obstacles in our lives, so that we are moved to act.

Furthermore, the biblical faith says that it is not precisely your own fault if you get sick. Certainly you can choose illness by smoking, eating harmful foods, ignoring stress and the like. But each of us is born into a world in which the powers of sickness and death have been given rein. The name “Adam” in Hebrew means “humanity”; as separation from God, sin and its deadly effects -- including sickness -- always have a community dimension.

For others, resistance to healing prayer may not signal a fear of losing control or face, but a fear of losing prophetic roots in peace and social justice issues. However, the Good News is that in embracing healing prayer, the Christian social activist embraces the fullness of the Kingdom of God. For the rule of God on earth as it is in heaven includes both social justice and physical healing; we are called to “set free the oppressed” and to “heal the blind.” Yet all too often, the body of Christ has become polarized: the social activists shun healing prayer as too ingrown, and those practicing healing prayer shun the activists as too worldly.

The essential connection between prayer and activism can be found in the answer to the question “Does our society value physical healing as God does?” Jesus said that where one’s treasure is, there shall one’s heart be also. Where do we spend our money as a nation? We have proposed in this year’s national budget to spend billions of dollars on weapons and arms to destroy bodies; yet those in need of physical healing go begging for handouts. Have you ever gone into a bowling alley or liquor store and seen on the counter a poster with a picture of a crippled child above a coin slot saying, “Please Give”? What if Jesus had answered John the Baptist’s disciples, “Go and tell John what you see: billions of dollars are being spent on killing and destruction, and the crippled children are begging for dimes at the liquor stores and bowling alleys”?

Of course God wants to heal us. But bodily illness continues to be prevalent because we have not chosen to make healing a priority among us -- not in our national budget any more than in our prayer life. Anyone who has struggled to bring God’s Kingdom into this world knows the bittersweet truth that God wants to heal us more than we want to be healed. Every doctor knows what that means: you can tell your patient to stop smoking, eat less, get more exercise and deal with stress, but all too often the patient just is not willing to pay the price in upsetting an established lifestyle, and chooses instead to continue in self-destructive habits. Similarly, in Jesus Christ, God has spoken the Word of power to bring both social justice and physical healing into this world, but we choose to continue in our habits of injustice, destruction and physical illness -- withdrawing from the fullness of God’s Kingdom -- because we really don’t want to pay the price of uprooting our lifestyle or entering the fearful desert wilderness of the spiritual realm.

And so healing prayer is just as upsetting, risky and prophetic as working for social justice -- because both require us to let go of control and let God reshape us in the divine image. After the church began with an act of physical healing in Acts 3, those who did it were arrested at once by the authorities in Acts 4. The powers of the world are just as threatened by God’s power to heal bodies as by God’s power to establish social justice. Unfortunately, those of us espousing the social gospel have wanted others to be upset by God’s power to establish social justice, but have not allowed ourselves to be upset by God’s power to heal bodies. We have recognized only that portion of the Bible and God’s Kingdom which reinforces our own perspective  -- the very same sin of which we accuse the oppressors of the world.

God’s power to heal bodies shatters our prejudice that healing prayer is only for the more emotional, less intelligent folks; that the Bible stories of healing are merely “symbolic” and “not really true” and that the way the world is (comfortable as it is for us) is God’s will. These prejudices are stumbling blocks to the fullness of God’s Kingdom on earth, as inimical and counter to God’s intention as any race, sex or class prejudice.

Healing prayer, in fact, falls properly under the rubric of liberation theology. For the kingdom of God means liberation from the powers o! death, freedom from the powers that squelch life -- whether through war, social injustice or physical illness. Like other facets of liberation theology, healing prayer draws upon faith as process, our own human responsibility to restore God’s rule to this world and the corporate dimension of sin.



The kingdom of God is therefore not a disconnected cluster of events, but an interconnected and interdependent whole. The absence of healing prayer weakens our faith, and thereby weakens our conviction as we Christians work for peace and social justice.

Similarly, our prayers for healed bodies are inhibited by the presence of nuclear warheads and warmaking everywhere, and by all forms of social injustice. A community willfully engaged in sin, in cutting itself off from God by investing in weapons and the power of death, or in rejecting fellow children of God, cannot expect to receive God’s full healing power. Even those who may not participate directly in the sin are deprived, just as a community that severs its water main cannot expect to have water flowing from its faucets -- not even those who disagreed with severing the main.

Years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, I had a battery-powered tape recorder which amazed and frightened the villagers where I lived. “It’s magic!” they exclaimed upon hearing their own voices mimicked by the “wheel box.” Our Western-scientific reaction is, “Tape recording is not magic; it is something we have developed by applying the laws of the universe properly.” Yet in the spiritual realm, our Western-scientific mind is patently primitive.

We tend to think of healing prayer as mumbo-jumbo. But this response is simply a defensive label meaning, “Keep out! To allow the full implications of this phenomenon into our lives would upset our securely ordered world.” We so-called modern, scientific peoples are as frightened of the spiritual realm as “developing” peoples are of scientific advances. And rightly so, for healing prayer has the same radical potential for upsetting our lives as science has upset their lives.

As one sign of God’s Kingdom, healing through prayer is no more magic than peace and social justice are magic -- and no easier to achieve. Both require the same dedication and commitment against the powers that separate us from God: the powers that Jesus Christ has overcome and which we are in the process of overcoming through the power Christ is giving us even now. God’s Kingdom will grow only insofar as we allow God’s power to work in us and through us both personally and societally. We must learn how to live in this interim age by accepting not only God’s amazing task, but also God’s amazing grace. When we are at last called before God to account for our lives, we will be asked not, “Were you successful?” but rather, “Were you faithful?” -- that is, “Did you do everything you could, given the limitations of yourself and your era, with every gift I entrusted to you?” Let us prepare to answer Yes then, by saying Yes now to healing prayer.

Comparative Study of Religions: A Theological Necessity

This is not to underestimate the knowledge of native believers -- those who understand their own religious language and no others. But theology is nothing if it does not aspire to second order, reflective knowledge; it cannot rest satisfied with the native believer’s knowledge, however proper that may be to living piety. Theological apprehension of one’s own Christian tradition requires knowledge of at least same representative number of other theologies which are not Christian.

Christian theologies are many, their tasks varied. But those tasks can be classified broadly into two groups: those in which theologians want to regard themselves as doing something special and unique and those in which they wish to affirm community with other religious traditions. One sometimes hears that ideas like the incarnation show Christianity’s distinctiveness. By contrast, in defending the teaching of theology in the universities, the claim is made that what is taught is somehow common human religious property, and not exclusively Christian. Which claim is true? In order to decide, one must be familiar with a broad set of theological claims. One may discover that a doctrine considered uniquely Christian, like the incarnation, commonly appears in the historical family or structural class of the theologies related to Christianity. Similarly, it might be that something considered common and general, like the theology taught in a university setting. actually is uniquely Christian. Whatever the case, one cannot know the relative identity of one’s theological claims without being familiar with the content of many theologies, so that one can locate oneself on thc theological map. The comparative study of religions can provide theologians with such maps.

The principle of the necessity of comparison already guides historical and structural linguistics. For instance, before English was systematically compared with other languages, one could analyze it into grammatical elements such as verbs, nouns and the rest. By focusing exclusively on English we might even have begun to recognize the oddity of our names for certain cardinal numbers such as "eleven" and "twelve." Why are these not "oneteen" and "twoteen" to match the other cardinals between 12 and 20? Yet we would not be able to understand why these numbers are as they are. To understand that we would need to see English in comparison with other languages. German cardinal numbers are similarly odd: "elf" and "zwölf," followed by "vierzehn.’’ "fünfzehn" and so on. But French and other Romance languages do not show these odd forms.

Such comparative considerations would urge us to suppose some hitherto unrecognized kinship between English and German, and thus help us to understand English better. Once it were shown that some features of a particular language could be understood only within a Comparative perspective, any attempt to claim (or deny) uniqueness for a particular linguistic feature could only he made from such a perspective Any particular claim would be vulnerable to what this perspective might reveal: to justify claims to uniqueness, one would need to appeal to a sufficiently broad comparative context. And, if the claims of certain universal grammarians be proven true, we might need to go to the broadest comparative context of all -- the human language capacity itself.

In religion, consider Christian claims about the uniqueness of notions like the incarnation or Christianity’s historicity, or neo-Hindu claims about the universality of the concept of dharma. Considerable contemporary controversy has swirled around these issues. But are incarnation and historicity really unique to Christianity, or are they more general features of certain historical families or structural classes of religion? Similarly, do all religions really boil down to the dharma of neo-Hindu interpretation, or is this belief itself a special -- even unique -- feature of neo-Hindu apologetics? The comparative study of religion could settle these matters, and in doing so would give believers pause to consider the consequences. That one could or could not place certain notions into privileged positions might make quite a difference to Christianity or Hinduism’s self-understanding. There may indeed be general historical and/or structural patterns of religions as there are of languages. Insofar as this is so, theologians would need to take them into account in order to do their jobs in an informed fashion.

This, I presume, is what William Schmidt had in mind when he called for a theology which would relate faith to the "modern world of culture," and one which would theologize "consciously and with a measure of clarity" (‘Theology: Servant or Queen?" [The Christian Century. February 1-8. l984]. p. 101). If so, I applaud Schmidt and urge us to give his words further meaning by realizing that to understand our own tradition, we will need to see it in a comparative context which includes both ourselves and others.

Why is it not sufficient for Christian theology to be understood within the context of the history of Christianity alone, rather than the history of religions at large? Why should not Adolf von Harnack be our guide here, rather than Goethe or Max Mueller? It was Harnack who, in 190l, addressed this very issue by asserting that Christian theology had no need of the history or comparative study of religions because, through its own long and varied history. Christianity had demonstrated all the variety and complexity to be found in the world religions. He put it this way: "Christianity is not a religion, but the religion. ... Whoever does not know this religion knows none, and whoever knows Christianity together with its history, knows all religions’’ (Reden und Aufsätze. Volume II [Topelmann, 1906]. p. l68; translation mine).

We need not be inordinately troubled by Harnack’s cannonade. Besides missing the mark, as even a cursory survey of the history of religions shows, Harnack’s barrage falls back down upon his own head. It is only through the advanced work that has been done by students of comparative religions that he knows that Christianity manifests (some of) the forms of the other religions. Yet Harnack might be read more loosely as raising a larger question: How indeed does one decide on the context to which one ought to refer a theological program?

The boundaries of comparative contexts will be set by various communities of scholars who, in doing so, will stamp their enterprises with whatever character they choose or are compelled to choose. We might decide -- like the Indo-Europeanists -- to compare languages only within the contexts of certain geographically and historically related families. Doing so has had its own manifest advantages. But this is no argument against other arrangements for comparison where historical contiguity may not play a part, or where we want to focus on matters other than history, as in structural or psycholinguistic research relating neurological structure and linguistic capacities and/or performance. Moreover, objectivity does not rule thought; human imagination, valuation and social location govern how we identify and classify things -- and thus, how we construct contexts for comparison.

Thus, no a priori limits can be drawn around the contexts we might invent for Christian theology to inhabit. The insistence that we treat Christianity only within its own history (and study religion only through Christianity) remains unpersuasive because it simply begs the question of the proper context for the study of religion and the doing of theology.

In addition to these arguments against Harnack and his followers, adopting his historical exclusivism would make us into a certain kind of people. Theologians must ask whether this is what they want to be. Do we want to close tribal ranks and keep out the world?

I do not say that Christians ought not proudly to study their own traditions, nor that they alone ought to be forbidden to look inward -- only that the way of Harnack and his fellows is ugly. It is cultural tribalism of the kind we sadly witnessed in television’s coverage of the 1984 Olympics. We are all free to swell our chests with pride at what is ours; but what right do we have virtually to deny the existence -- God-given, like ours -- of others’? ABC wrapped its Olympic coverage in the Stars and Stripes: Harnack and his ilk wrap their theology in the glories of the West. But what values do we espouse in so resolutely indulging our own feelings of uniqueness and superiority, while behaving as if the rest of religious creation meant nothing to us? Christian theology has nothing to fear by recognizing the existence of the rest of the religious and theological world, and of taking its place in it. Without apologizing for ourselves, we should be welcoming that world.

In 1901, Jean Reville, the head of the religious studies section of Paris’s École Pratique des Hautes Études, answered Harnack. One day "it will be more useful to understand foreign religions than to be instructed in the sects of the European middle ages.’’ he claimed ("L’Histoire des Religions et les Facultés de Theologie" [Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, Volume 44, 1901], p. 429). Can any person pondering today’s threats to world peace and harmony seriously doubt this? Reville also spoke of following world news or participating in the world economy as normal, everyday affairs. When we fret over what comparative context Christian theology should seek, we are making a definite statement about our values regarding the rest of humanity. Will Christian theology merely "report" on other religions? To avoid doing so, we will have to open Christian minds and sensibilities through the comparative study of religions.

Although the parallel is not exact, the theology of religions is like political foreign policy. But a theology informed by the reality of other religions would be more like national economic policy, formed with in the comparative context of a world market economy. Ready reference to world commodity prices is always there, because there is a world commodities market. Similarly, we live in a world market of religions and world-views. Accordingly, a theology renewed along comparative lines should be more conscious of its own situation in relation to others, understanding how it was and was not like other members of the global repertoire of world views. This renewed theology would be conscious of others in the same way that contemporary students of language keep in mind and put to work the lessons of comparative historical or structural linguistics.

Inspired by a seminar that he taught jointly with Mircea Eliade in the 1960s, Paul Tillich planned to "shake the foundations" of his own Systematic Theology in pursuit of such a renewed Christian theology:

I must say that my own Systematic Theology was written before these seminars and had another intention, namely, the apologetic discussion against and with the secular. Its purpose was the discussion or the answering at questions coming from the scientific and philosophical criticism of Christianity. But, perhaps we need a longer, more intense, period of interpretation of systematic theological study and religious historical studies. Under such circumstances the structure of religious thought might develop in connection with another or different fragmentary manifestation of theonomy or of the Religion of the Concrete Spirit. This is my hope for the future of theology [" The Significance of the History of Religion for the Systematic Theologian," in The Future of Religions, edited by Jerald C. Brauer (Harper & Row. 1966). p. 91].

Although Tillich does not give examples of what this theology renewed by the comparative study of religion might be like, we can venture to imagine what it might produce. For instance, imagine how enriched the subject of soteriology would be by the comparative contextual depth offered by Buddhism. How is it that in some contexts Jesus saves like the Buddha, and in others does not? By comparing the religious structure and historical evolution of Buddhist soteriological ideals with those of Christianity, we might better understand the bases of Christian beliefs about salvation. or even create new theological conceptions thereof. Other traditions offer ways of generating explorations into facets of Christianity illuminated by their historical experience. Consider the following example of how divine graciousness may be linked with historical concreteness.

Some Christian theologians have tended to make much of the so-called historicity of Christianity as an indication of divine graciousness. What a marvel, the plotline goes, that God should so love the world that he would send his only son to fend for himself amid the travails of human history what a loss, therefore. Christ’s death is! Yes, it was followed by his resurrection and ascension, and by the sending of the Holy Spirit. But somehow these pale in comparison with the prospect of seeing the vivid, living Lord in a new heaven and new earth.

If we look at the Buddhist tradition,. we see a similar crisis facing a primitive community, resolved in interestingly different ways. Theravada Buddhists accept the loss of the historical teacher as final -- without resurrection or eschatological return (in most cases). As a result, the prestige of the monastic community -- the Buddha’s "church" -- grows virtually to equal that of the deceased lord. In the later developments of pure-land Buddhism, the Buddha’s graciousness entails his transcendence of history and, therefore, of his own death. In some sense he never really lived, much less died. Thus, his historical existence is reinterpreted as being a manifestation of celestial Buddhas, and, the monastic community’s prestige diminishes somewhat. Historicity signals limits within the economy of salvation, and an increase in the status of the monastic institution: divine graciousness calls for the transcendence of history and dependence upon social institutions.

This comparison between Christianity and Buddhism exemplifies interesting differences and provokes thinking by creative juxtaposition. Such a comparison might compel Christian theologians to reassess their attitudes toward historicity -- an idea that may have received undue emphasis since the 19th-century rise of specifically German theories of history-writing and philosophies of history. We might want to reexamine the assumption that Buddhism’s indifference toward history signals its inferiority, and that Christianity and Judaism are superior because they are historical faiths. Further, such a comparison might stimulate us to rethink the specifically nonhistorical doctrines thrown up by Jesus death -- the ascension and descent of the Holy Spirit. For many believers, the Holy Spirit seems to play a ghostly role in Christian life and theology: at best the Spirit seems little more than a theological way of speaking about good feelings. Christian theologians might learn to theologize creatively about thc Holy Spirit by consulting a tradition like pure-land Buddhism, in which this sort of thinking seems to have been going on for more than two millennia.

Without gaining a comparative world perspective, Christian theology can neither fully know its own strengths nor strengthen its weaknesses. Indeed, it cannot know itself. It is thus for its own sake that Christian theology needs to be grounded in the comparative study of religions.

Heidegger Is No Hero



I find myself in a rather odd position writing on Martin Heidegger. I find it particularly odd writing on the relation between his political life, on the one hand, and his philosophical and methodological view, on the other. Odd because, despite my best efforts at finding the “bottom line” in his thinking, I have never been able to get Heideggerians to tell me exactly why Heidegger is so terribly important. Odd again, because, despite my best efforts to see something heroic in this man’s biography, which might explain what his prose does not, I confess to see at best what Stephen Spender referred to, in a 1979 New York Review of Books piece (March 25, p. 13) on modern German self-analysis, as “der Nebel,” the fog that “allows people to live with unbearable experiences”; the fog that made it possible to “go along” or “not know.”

If this were not sufficient to discourage some who, like me, are at best indifferent to and wearied by Heidegger’s thought, such as it is given to us to understand, it seems oddest of all that Heideggerians themselves have not, to my knowledge, taken up the problem of the relation of Heidegger’s life to his thinking -- especially as it marks the involvement of Heidegger (officially and publicly, or privately and spiritually) in the Nazi movement. I say it is odd that Heideggerians have not done this sort of analysis, because Heidegger’s thought seems to demand it. If Heidegger’s philosophy of “historicity” and “authenticity” means anything at all, it surely means that life and thought cannot be separated -- Heidegger’s least of all.

Further, if Heidegger’s reputation for attention to the “big” issues of philosophical anthropology means anything at all, it would also seem to mean that Heidegger’s “philosophy of being” cannot be distinguished from considerations about how one ought to behave -- and a fortiori how Heidegger behaved. For Heidegger, as perhaps for no other philosopher, the distinction between life and thought has meaning only if one perceives Heidegger’s philosophy itself as self-confuting: So, the task is left to me, an outsider, to raise what may really be the quintessential Heideggerian question: the relation of his life to his thought. In so doing, I do not claim the final word. I want to draw Heideggerians into a question that their own philosophy seems to demand that they ask.

This enterprise would, as we all suspect, be academic in the worst sense if Heidegger had had no part in Nazi politics and thought. Yet the question is not whether Heidegger was a believing Nazi, but what kind? What account ought to be given of Heidegger’s official and unofficial relation to Nazism and the trends of thought and belief which found culmination in the movement? Indeed, even those who would want to absolve Heidegger by seeing his official entry into the Nazi party or his Nazi Rektorat (rectorate) as a selfless attempt by him to prevent greater evils, are bound at least to accept the legitimacy of my inquiry. Whether one gives an answer complimentary to Heidegger or not, one still accepts the appropriateness of an inquiry into the character of his political beliefs and their relation to his general ontology -- all the more so, as I have argued, if one is a Heideggerian. Moreover, recent scholarship, especially by philosopher Karsten Harries (“Heidegger as Political Thinker,” Review of Metaphysics, 1976, pp. 642-69), bears out the notion that an inner relation exists between Heidegger’s general ontology in Being and Time and his Nazi-period thought and action. What is intolerable is the kind of brush-off that defenders of Heidegger, such as Walter Biemel in his biography (Martin Heidegger, Harcourt, Brace, 1976), give the question at hand.

What is more, Biemel has the cheek to misrepresent Hannah Arendt as a defender of Heidegger in the process. Citing Arendt, Biemel echoes the view that Heidegger’s attaching himself to Hitler was little worse than Plato’s mistaken regard for Dionysius of Syracuse. So foggy an analogy will not, however, do -- not as an interpretation of Heidegger, or as a reading of Hannah Arendt on Heidegger. In an October 21, 1971, New York Review of Books commentary (p. 54), Arendt does liken Heidegger and Plato in their attraction to strong leaders, but with a twist that shows how very befogged admiring commentators like Biemel can be:

We . . . can hardly help finding it striking and perhaps exasperating that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered human affairs, turned to tyrants and Fiihrers. This should be imputed not just to the circumstances of the times and even less to preformed character, but rather to . . . the attraction to the tyrannical demonstrated theoretically in many of the great thinkers.

Arendt goes on in a footnote to link Heidegger directly to certain proto-fascist trends of thought in Italy (the “Italian futurists”) which, though apparently independent of National Socialism, seem compatible enough. Regarding these Italian futurists (at once a political and an artistic movement), the Encyclopaedia Britannica quotes the following from a manifesto of Filippo Marinetti (1909): “We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, and all utilitarian cowardice. . . . We will glorify war -- the only true hygiene of the world -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill.” Biemel maintains a peculiar silence about matters such as these.

Enough perhaps for Heidegger’s ultramontane nurture. What of his mature nature? What of the way he was popularly regarded by his political peers? Was the report of Der Alemanne, dated May 3, 1933, correct in saying:

 [Heidegger] has never made any secret of his German character . . for many years he has supported the party of Adolf Hitler in its difficult struggle for existence and power to the utmost of his strength . . . he was always ready to bring sacrifice to Germany’s holy altar, and . . . no National Socialist ever knocked in vain at his door [Dagobert Runes, German Existentialism, Philosophical Library, 1964, p. 13].

Historian Peter Gay seems to think as much, noting that Heidegger was generally understood as a “philosophical fascist” as early as 1927 -- fully six years before Heidegger officially entered the Nazi party. Speaking of the Heidegger of that time, Gay says: “Heidegger gave no one reasons not to be a Nazi, and good reasons for being one” (Weimar Culture, Harper & Row, 1964). Ernst Cassirer confirms Gay’s general estimate of Heidegger as at least a philosophical sympathizer with Nazism in the late 1920s. (Perhaps we should even use Gary Lease’s analysis of Nazism as a religion and describe Heidegger as a “religious” sympathizer of Nazism.) Like Gay, Cassirer saw Heidegger as someone whose thinking lent itself to the confirmation of a world view the Nazis themselves seemed eager to sell the German people. About Heidegger’s view of human nature in particular, Cassirer says the following:

A theory that sees in the Geworfenheit of man one of his principal characters has . . . given up all hopes of an active share in the construction and reconstruction of man’s cultural life. . . . It can be used, then, as a pliable instrument in the hands of the political leaders [The Myth of the State, Yale University Press, 1964].

Even as late as 1937, four years after Heidegger was supposed to have withdrawn from the Nazi party, students at his own university thought it appropriate to protest Nazi denigration of Karl Jaspers by boycotting Heidegger’s lectures.



The conclusion seems inescapable that, though Heidegger was an official member of the National Socialist Party for a little less than a year, the movement of his thinking traveled along the same waves as other proto-Nazi thought of his day. Moreover, the depth and duration apparent in Heidegger’s attraction for fascist “religious” thinking raise questions about the meaning of official Nazi party membership: if this was a “compromise,” what kind of compromise was it? Was it, as Heidegger’s defenders claim, a compromise with the Nazi “religion,” or, as I think seems more plausible in light of what we have learned thus far, a “compromise” with officialdom?

We do not yet understand the details of the Nazi ability to seize on and unite the wide range of German opinion favorable in theory to Nazi religious thinking. Our own predominantly romantic, humanities-oriented vision prevents us from seeing the depth of Nazi romanticism; we take it for granted that the Nazis were basically “machines,” when that is only half the story. They were also in their own way radical romantics, as anyone familiar with the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl can attest. Heidegger seems to have stood at the romantic/religious edge of the historical wave that would become the Nazi movement, later moving with the wave toward the turbulent waters of officialdom, only perhaps to crash and withdraw. But this does not mean that Heidegger disapproved of the movement or indeed of those who could move with it. It may just have meant that he did not like getting his feet wet.

This, too, accounts for his apparent difficulties in sorting reality into categories, his inability to understand how his collegial relations with Jews like Hannah Arendt (student), Edmund Husserl (teacher) or Ernst Cassirer (peer) fit into what must have been his own categorical anti-Semitism. How does one square the reality of individual Jews with the anti-Semitic “religion”? Heidegger’s inability to reconcile his Nazi creed with Nazi deed is no more laudable than his inability to convert what seems to be his religious or philosophical anti-Semitism into action.

In either case we would have to deal with the religious aspects of Heidegger’s Nazism on their own terms: what are those religious views? Regardless of whether Heidegger could or would put them into action (as indeed he did during his term as Rektor of Freiburg), are these views commendable?

And here we come to perhaps the most disturbing part of the Heidegger story: the relation of Heidegger’s notorious Rektoratsrede (rector’s address) to his 1927 classic, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). So convinced is philosopher Karsten Harries that Heidegger’s turn to National Socialism “cannot be erased from the development of his thought” that Harries painstakingly exposes the network of internal relations between the Rektoratsrede and Being and Time. In outline, Harries claims that the logic of Being and Time traces a pattern leading directly to its fulfillment in the Rektoratsrede. The skeletal structure of this pattern runs something like this: Acknowledging our “guilt” as free beings requires that we “resolve” to make an authentic response to that freedom. For Heidegger, this resolve takes the form of an authentic commitment -- a commitment that occurs without assurances. But far from such an individual commitment’s entailing arbitrariness or anarchism, Heidegger notes that such resolve pushes one back into the world and community. The community can then speak to the individual through the voice of the inherited past, when recognized as worthy of repetition and sanctioned by the individual’s choice of hero. Thus one attains authenticity. Says Heidegger in Being and Time: “Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein.”

The Rektoratsrede fleshes but these somewhat abstract themes of Being and Time, which argues that “resolve demands that man know his place in the world.” In the Rektoratsrede this is accomplished through human work, which may be either freely chosen, or assigned by the “leader.” Oddly enough, however, those who freely design their own work are obliged to do so out of “openness” to the spiritual world -- a world which transcends humanity by being a “power which most deeply preserves the forces stemming from earth and blood as the power which most deeply moves and shakes our being.”

Later, as Heidegger shifts his conception of work to the “work of art,” he also shifts his model of the “leader” to the aesthetic mode. Like the true artist, the political leader must be “violent and willing to use power,” but without normal constraints -- in Heidegger’s words: “lonely, uncanny, without expedients without law and limit, without structure and order, because as creators, they themselves must lay the foundation for all this.” Harries reports finally how the Rektoratsrede “demands of the leader ‘the strength to be able to walk alone’ ”; and how six months later Heidegger would amplify his vision of the leader by declaring, “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality of today and for the future, and its law” (“Heidegger as Political Thinker,” p. 644).

But why does all this matter to religious conclusions about the methods we employ to study religion follow from my analysis? -- especially in view of the often-stated argument that Heidegger admitted his mistakes, withdrawing from all political activity, leaving the engaged Heidegger of the Rektoratsrede and Being and Time far behind, and giving us instead the “later” disengaged Heidegger.

First, it seems that Heidegger’s views about human being and knowing lack moral authority. Heidegger’s past represents his way of living his philosophy. His life is itself an object lesson in the meaning of that philosophy. As such, given the character of Heidegger’s life, I cannot see how that life recommends his proposals for how we ought to order our own lives. Indeed, the more we know about Heidegger’s attempts to live his philosophy, the less it recommends itself. To those who would defend the moral status of the early Heidegger, I can only call for the counterevidence they would present to the findings I have cited. To those who still say that such a critique is invalid, I would reply that their view is at best totally un-Heideggerian and, at worst, contrary to the results of the careful analysis of someone like Karsten Harries, whose views I have tried to present.

Heidegger’s moral stature also matters for other reasons. To the extent that his philosophy is expressed through a kind of preaching, the moral stature of the man cannot be ignored. To the extent that his philosophy consists of proposals about how to live, we are pressed to ask: By what authority would he lead us? Were Jesus a proven murderer, would we give his gospel a respectful hearing? Moreover, this point holds true for Heidegger’s authority after his so-called “turn.” Since the nature of the political and intellectual “turn” seems to me at best ambiguous, and since the facts of the earlier period still stand, by what authority does Heidegger propose to tell us about the nature of humanism, the proper attitude of humanity to technology or the sacred art of thinking? How has his retreat from worldly life shown us anything worthy of imitation? Where is the moral nobility in this apparent flip-flop from engagement? Why not active opposition instead? Why not voluntary exile like countless others?

Thus Heidegger’s turn from political engagement does not in itself settle anything. We do not yet know why he turned back upon his genuine commitment to National Socialism -- if indeed he did. Nor do we know what the turn toward political retreatism means. We do not know these things partly because we do not knew precisely what his commitment to Hitler meant in the first place. Was it a commitment to heroic, even spiritual, national leadership over against forces like those of traditional German conservatism -- a commitment that may have seemed increasingly mistaken as Hitler reconciled his revolution to the power of the Reichswehr (German military) and other established forces in Germany? If so, the philosopher’s turn represents a move along much the same axis as that of his earlier thought, rather than a reversal. The Nazis disappointed Heidegger and others like him mainly because they were not as “spiritual” as some followers had believed them to be. They settled down to administration and forsook the spiritual revolution Heidegger seemed to have welcomed in 1933.

Heidegger’s reversal, then, was not so much away from a spiritual ideology which he genuinely believed Hitler embodied, but merely away from the Führer’s failure to live up to Heidegger’s Nazi ideals. Say what one will about the dubious quality of Heidegger’s judgment here, the problem for his interpreters seems to remain one of demonstrating that his later philosophical views are any less dubious than his earlier ones -- especially as they are rooted in the manner in which he lived.

A Pluralistic Church: Collapsing Tower or Growing Vine

Pluralism is one of the great new buzz words in talk about the church. Our understanding of pluralism, however, tends to be long on sociology and short on theology. We lack the theological imagery to enable us to reflect on life in a pluralistic church.

Two biblical images of community hold promise for helping us make sense of what is happening in the church as its life in our time becomes ever more complex. They are the image of community as a tower (Gen. 11) and as a vine and its branches (John 15). The tower is Babel, which rose higher and higher. The vine, in the words of Jesus, branches outward into the life of love. Both vine and tower grow, but in very different ways. To sort out our thinking on pluralism, we need to discover whether the church grows as a tower or as a vine.

All parties to the differences that vex our common life invoke pluralism. Yet it is a two-edged word with both negative and positive connotations. Some speak of pluralism in the church with a sense of relief, for acceptance of a pluralistic church means that we need no longer pretend that all sisters and brothers in Christ are unified in belief, thought and action. Conservatives and liberals, pietists and liberationists, feminists and traditionalists, left-wing and right-wing can all affirm the existence and importance of one another as part of a pluralistic church. As unhappy as one faction may be with the other, each is spared the need for waging warfare to eliminate the opposition, once everyone has agreed that pluralism is here to stay. This is no small gain. Many affirm pluralism as one of the happier discoveries of the day.

But in another sense, all this talk of pluralism leaves us uneasy. In face of the glaring opposition and deeply felt differences, how is it possible to say that we are still one in Christ? It is increasingly hard to believe that we are one even in our own denominations. Caucuses and special-interest groups form faster than we can catalogue them, let alone integrate them. Pluralism seems to leave churches linked together by little more than participation in the pension plan. Unity in Christ seems to disappear behind the growing diversity of opinions. And no committee can put it together again.



In the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America, pluralism shows a vigor that beggars the imagination. Churches in the Third World are no longer waiting patiently for us to translate our theology books, liturgies and organizational charts into their languages. Becoming a Christian in these lands no longer requires ignoring or despising local cultural and religious beliefs and values. Indigenization of the Christian faith to local culture is in full swing.

And the dangers of syncretism that so worried Hendrik Kraemer are seldom mentioned. Among a new generation of evangelicals, following the lead of Charles Kraft, are to be found the boldest devotees of putting Christian faith in context for a myriad of tribes and cultures. Indian and Asian theologians are exploring Buddhist philosophies and reading Hindu pundits to find ways of expressing their faith in Christ. The church no longer calls upon converts to don Mother Hubbard dresses to cover their bodies or Western ideologies to blanket their minds. To this, millions are saying, “Hallelujah, Amen.”

This exuberant pluralism may be received with joy as God’s new work in our midst. But it also strains to the breaking point all claims to being one in Christ, no matter how carefully nuanced. How can faith in the one God revealed through one Lord take on such varied and contradictory forms? Pluralism seems to be a very small umbrella to cover such a vast network of differences. When does pluralism cease being Christian and become a polite word for compromising the faith?

In order to wrestle with these questions, I would like to suggest a theological starting point which, while not self-evident, certainly has a claim to plausibility. What if pluralism is not a problem for God, even if it is a problem for God’s people? Is it not possible that the Lordship of God embraces deep and, for us, terrifying differences in how Christ is confessed? The difficulties with pluralism are our difficulties, and they stem from problems of vision. We have become trapped in a misleading way of looking at how the community of faith grows.

In our view, the church through history has grown as a tower going ever upward, story by story. More appropriately, we should be tracing the growth of a vine sending out ever-new branches. The logic behind these two kinds of growth is very different. The tower, with its rigid vertical construction, leaves little room for variation. The vine, free to branch out in a myriad of directions, has rich variety. And as the Bible teaches, tower-building is perilous business if what happened at Babel gives us an indication. But in the promise of Jesus, those who abide in the vine bear much fruit and give glory to the Father (John 15:5-8).



Historians have made us aware that the Jewish Christianity of the early church gave way to the Hellenized Christianity of the church in the Roman Empire. Deep and lasting changes were made in theology, liturgy and church order. The first floor of the tower was succeeded by a new second floor which was, in turn, succeeded by the ornate Gothic floor in the Middle Ages. The tower was building.

After the Reformation, the model took on a modification. The tower church began to look like the World Trade Center in New York City with its twin towers -- Catholic and Protestant. (Actually, the wondrous tower of Orthodoxy was building also, but we were so proud of our own construction that we paid it no heed.) As Protestants persisted in sending up more and different spires, the tower became unwieldy. Even so, our attachment to the tower model remained.

The logic of the tower tells us that at any time in history the church may have only one top floor. This floor is supported by all that went before, ideally incorporating the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses of the past. At any given time, there is to be one “sound” theology, albeit broad in scope; a liturgy that is “seemly and in order”; and a limited number of ways of arranging the organizational furniture. For the tower model, pluralism is a threat. Exuberant offshoots of indigenized theologies, liturgical innovation, charismatic enthusiasms or ethnic identities will break off the top floor and collapse the tower into chaos.

Now, at the end of the 20th century, the tower model of the church has “died the death of a thousand qualifications.” It can no longer explain what is going on around us. To make matters worse, the tower church has acquired a haunting similarity to that other tower built on the Plain of Shinar. It is not surprising that so much of our talk about the church has turned to “babble.”

A more convincing model for the church is taken from the word of Jesus about a vine with its branches. “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him; he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” How the vine and its branches grow gives us a logic that can guide us through the maze of contemporary pluralism. Branches grow out in different places on the vine, not just one on top of another. Each branch responds according to its own time and place. No one branch can ever replace another, yet each draws on a common source for its life. Branches do not have the vitality to do anything on their own; as Jesus reminds us, “Apart from me you can do nothing.”

The church is a vast network of branches all joined to one vine. Its parts are not identical, nor need they be. Each has the character of its own time and place, be it the African savannah, American suburb, Asian busti, European city, or Latin American barrio. Yet these different branches are all rooted in Christ, and as they abide in him, they bear the fruit of the Spirit.

Before we sketch further, in colors too glowing, this model for the church, a strident objection must be acknowledged. Is not all such talk about pluralism the attempt of the naïve to sprinkle “holy water” on the religious localism that has already caused so much absurdity and immorality? Have we not had enough of “American Christianity,” “German Christianity” and “South African Christianity”? Does not the grafting of Christian faith onto ideologies always end in fruitless branches? Have we learned nothing from Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr about “natural theology” and culture Christianity?

The objections are well taken. But the model of the vine and branches is far from being uncritical. Jesus’ words speak starkly of judgment. The Father is the vinedresser who removes the unfruitful branches and prunes those that bear fruit. When a branch tries to produce fruit on its own, it withers, is cut off and cast into the fire. There is discernment in the model of the vine, not just comprehension.

The common confession of Jesus Christ as the source of life marks the church. There is much fruit but one source. Unless we abide in Christ, there is no fruit. The fruit of the vine is life abundant and eternal -- the fulfillment of what it means to be human. Wherever human life is distorted or denied, no matter what religious sounds are made, such a branch no longer abides in the vine. To use theological language, churches are measured by a christological and ethical norm. When localism isolates a church from Christ, it is cast forth. But where the new life of the kingdom emerges, it is because Christ is there. “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit” (Luke 6:43).

The pluralistic church cannot be guided by an insistence on only one kind of confessional language or academic pedigree for its theology. But the church is not without the power of judgment in the ongoing struggle of light with darkness. To understand how that power operates in a pluralistic church, we must first realize that judgment is against our church, not against others. It is not we who define truth; the truth in Christ defines us.

A pluralistic church makes sense when we stop thinking of ourselves as the vine and all other Christians as the branches. Christ is the vine, and all of us are branches. As Paul reminds us, one branch must not “boast over the branches” (Rom. 11:17-18). No single church lives in the penthouse atop the tower. Instead, all churches are branches called to bear the fruit Christ alone gives. In this vision, we may find the comprehension and the discernment needed to live faithfully in this time of waiting and of hope.

What Does It Mean to Be ‘Pro-Life’?

I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life [Deut. 30:19].

. . . the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it [Deut. 30:14].

Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves [Num. 30:17-18].



Of the three biblical quotations above, the first is a favorite directive of people who take an antiabortion stance and who claim to be “prolife.” It has also been widely used by religiously motivated participants in the antiwar movement, e.g., the Berrigan brothers.

The second passage implies that it is relatively easy for one to distinguish between the forces of life and death. We have within us the capacity to know, and we must merely listen to some inner voice and heed its guidance. The third text, however, should give us pause for further consideration and reflection. Since the same person, Moses, is supposed to have uttered both the third quotation and the first, one can’t help wondering whether he was really “pro-life” himself -- or whether he shared our understanding of what it might mean to be “pro-life.” On the one hand, he is telling his followers and us to choose life; but on the other hand, he is directing a policy of genocide in the aftermath of war, a policy under which the enemy’s sons would all be killed, the nonvirgin females in the enemy tribe also killed, and the virgin females used as concubines. The implication is that perhaps it is not so easy after all to tell what is and what is not “pro-life.”

While seeking to advance discussion on what it means to be “pro-life,” I do not propose a definitive solution to that question. If I were confident of the answer, the title of this article could simply have been “What It Means to Be ‘Pro-life.’” But such an article will have to be written by someone else or at a later stage of development.



I begin with the presumption that being antiabortion is not synonymous with or equivalent to being “pro-life.” This is not to say that they are incompatible or contradictory. Rather, they are at different levels of abstraction. Pro-life is a more generic, more inclusive, concept than antiabortion. Hence, the two terms should not be used interchangeably. One cannot necessarily assume that a person known to be antiabortion is “pro-life” in other respects.

Thus, being opposed to abortion can be viewed as a case in point of a more general philosophy called “pro-life.” What, then, in addition to opposing abortion, does being “pro-life” include in a modern industrialized society? While no one person can dictate the answer for others, certain suggestions can be made.  Figure 1 depicts a “pro-life” umbrella, designating positions on some of the specific issues that might be implied by an overarching “pro-life” philosophy:

Figure 1

Promote gun control

Oppose militarism and imperialism

Oppose TV and media glorification of violence

Prmote high fertility

Support medical research and preventive medication

Oppose euthanasia and infanticide

Oppose abortion

Oppose suicide

Promote physical exercise, blood donations, vegetarianism

Refrain from smoking

Promote highway safety, oppose drunk driving, speeding and other unsafe practices.

Promote conservation and redistributive domestic and foreign aid policies

Oppose capital punishment

If one begins with the premise that life is sacred and to be considered inviolate, what positions follow by implication? We need not belabor the abortion issue here; in fact, we can concede the assertion that prenatal life is innocent and defenseless and should, therefore, be a primary subject for concern and protection by people developing or pursuing a “pro-life” philosophy. These people would also be opposed to infanticide, euthanasia and mercy killing, especially when someone other than the target of the “mercy” is making the decision.

But a “pro-life” person would also regard as objectionable a situation in which the person being killed makes the decision to die, either at the hands of another or by a self-inflicted act. Then, of course, there is also the distinction between an action done with the purpose of killing someone, like a lethal injection, and a decision to let nature take its course without using the extraordinary means of modern medicine that are available to forestall the inevitable.

In addition to prenatal life (for which, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, the odds of an induced abortion in the U.S. are now nearly one in three) and the elderly, what of young children? Obviously, a “pro-life” person would support and encourage research designed to find the causes and cures of diseases that strike down young children disproportionately, such as leukemia. A “pro-life” person would obviously support efforts to reduce the rate of natal and infant mortality. Sanitation and other forms of preventive medicine are certainly significant developments which many now take for granted.

For children within quite a large age range, however, the largest cause of death in the U.S. is motor vehicle accidents. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the number of casualties in accidents could be significantly reduced if the following steps were taken: retain lower speed limits and strictly enforce them; clamp down on and stop coddling those who drive under the influence of alcohol; require use of safety features such as seat belts, sturdy infant car seats, airbags, and helmets for motorcyclists. It is hard to imagine that a “pro-life” person, knowing and understanding the facts, would not support such policies. They do infringe on the “cowboy” definition of freedom, but that they would save lives is essentially beyond doubt. The only real question is how many lives would be saved as a consequence.



In a “pro-life” society, certain basic needs would be assured, including a nutritious diet, sanitary water, decent shelter from the elements, a safe environment, and humane medical care. Programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, public housing and food stamps are assertions that satisfying these basic human needs should not be determined by one’s ability to pay. Structural violence in society occurs when people’s basic needs go unfulfilled because they are too poor to purchase goods or services.

On the matter of health, it almost goes without saying that the “pro-life” person would refrain from smoking, oppose government subsidy of domestic tobacco production and sale to overseas markets, encourage physical fitness, and donate blood for transfusions to people whose lives might thereby be saved. Also, insofar as a surplus existed, one might also expect the society to provide relief to needy people in other societies in the form of nonmilitary foreign aid, directly providing goods or teaching developmental skills.

The U.S. is a violent society, as reflected in the statistics showing the very high rate at which we kill each other and the frequency with which we go to war. We are a nation armed to the teeth, in terms of civilians owning guns and in terms of the amount we spend on the military.

At both levels there are sincere and well-intentioned people who believe that having more weapons makes for more safety, peace and security. Statistics, however, do not bear this out. There is no evidence that would indicate that a family is less likely to die from gunshot wounds if it keeps guns in the house. In fact, the contrary is true. At the international level, the best and most extensive tests of deterrence theory, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, offer very little support for the notion that one can attain or maintain peace by preparing for war. Much more support was found for the theory that nations that prepare for war end up going to war. Despite the slogan (“Peace Is Our Profession”) of the Strategic Air Command of the U.S. Air Force, which has been in charge of strategic nuclear weapons as well as the high altitude bombing of Vietnam, having more and fancier weapons will not make us more safe, and these weapons will not prevent war or save lives.

The “pro-life” person would be committed to peace, to disarmament, and to developing nonviolent means for resolving conflicts. The “pro-life” person would reject the “better dead than red” thesis, adopted by some of the more virulent anticommunists, since where there is life, there is hope. A “pro-life” person, if not a pacifist, would be very reluctant to go to war, recognizing that war is not inevitable and that there is nothing in human nature that inevitably leads to war. When a person opposes abortion but favors deployment of the neutron bomb, which would kill people through enhanced radiation but leave physical structures intact, it is a bit difficult to take seriously that person’s claim to be “pro-life.”

At the domestic level, the “pro-life” person would be committed to developing effective and enforceable gun-control laws, even if this means infringing on the “frontier” mentality to some extent. The “prolife” person would try to avoid and reduce the influence of the military and the gun culture -- the “economy of death,” as it has been called. Such a person might join campaigns to reduce the amount of violence on TV and in movies and would refuse to buy toy guns and war toys for children. Toys may seem insignificant, but they are a symbolic part of the death-oriented culture that the “pro-life” person would like to stand on its head.

The “pro-life” ideology might also include being a vegetarian, not so much to spare the lives of animals as for other health- and conservation-related reasons. For one, a patch of land can provide a full and balanced diet for more people if the people eat the food that grows on it rather than feed the food to an animal and then eat the animal. For another, the more we conserve scarce and nonrenewable resources, such as the oil used so extensively in modern agriculture and elsewhere, the less pressure there will be to engage in an interventionist and imperialist foreign policy and the wars that follow from such a policy. Gandhi suggested that the bountiful earth has enough to provide for each person’s need but not for each person’s greed.



Finally, there is the matter of capital punishment. Some view it as indicating society’s abhorrence of an act of murder and thus as an expression of its commitment to life. Some believe that capital punishment deters murders and thus saves more lives than it takes. Some argue that the potential innocence of a convicted murderer cannot be compared to the actual innocence of the prenatal lives which the antiabortion forces would protect.

However, the evidence on the deterring effect of capital punishment is not very persuasive, nor is it implausible to suppose that an innocent person could be convicted and executed, despite our extensive appeal system. Given the irrevocable nature of the sanction, it is an awesome responsibility. The “prolife” person who favors capital punishment needs to be asked what the limits are. If life is indeed sacred, it is difficult to see how a “pro-life” person could condone capital punishment.

Once people start rationalizing the deliberate taking of life, they are on a slippery slope. Before they know it, they are in a situation of having to destroy a village in order to save it, are in a plane over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Could a person in an ICBM launch control center or on a submarine, ready and willing to turn the keys that would launch the missiles carrying nuclear warheads aimed to kill over 100 million people in half an hour, possibly be considered “pro-life”? If so, then it may be futile to seek limits to the killing in which one is willing to engage.



My comments thus far reflect an effort to take seriously the possibility of a “pro-life” philosophy and to examine what that might entail other than opposition to abortion. Of course, another possibility is that antiabortion people are not really interested in developing a “pro-life” philosophy but rather are just using the “pro-life” label because it will enhance their political effectiveness. Labeling oneself as “pro-life” is a form of self-aggrandizement, in part because it casts aspersions on one’s adversaries, implying that these opponents are “anti-life.” It is very unlikely that anyone would willingly seek or accept the label of “anti-life.” In that respect, the situation may be similar to those created by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the National Right to Work Committee; who would volunteer to be the advocate of an “insane nuclear policy” or oppose the right of people to work?

While trying to take the “pro-life” claim seriously, I have not accepted it at face value, but rather have conducted research to find evidence. In part, my analyses comparing people who are pro-choice or antiabortion make use of surveys of representative samples of U.S. adults. (A number of articles on abortion attitudes which I have coauthored with Beth Granberg have been published in professional journals from 1978 to 1981.) A more direct test comes from my survey in June 1980 of almost 900 members of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

First of all, in their attitudes toward legalized abortion, beliefs about abortion, and policy preferences pertaining to abortion, the members of those two groups, not surprisingly, are almost as different as they possibly could be.

Second, the controversy over abortion has become in part a struggle over how abortion will be defined in the connotative sense; that is, how the contending forces would label the participants on both sides of the controversy (see Table 1).

Table 1.  Precentage of NRLC and LARAL members accepting and rejecting life- and choice- related labels in the abortion controversy.











 

 

Probably or

Definitely False

Don't know

Probably or Definitely True

Pro-life is an appropriate label for people who oppose abortion.

 NRLC

NARAL

2



83

1

3

97

14

Anti-life is an appropriate label for people who approve of legalized abortion.

NRLC

NARAL

17

19

6

3

77

4

Pro-choice is an appropriate label for people who approve of legalized abortion.

NRLC

NARAL

72

3

5

1

23

96

Anti-choice is an appropriate label for people who oppose legalized abortion.

NRLC

NARAL

79

10

5

3

16

87

 

 

The data indicate that NRLC members strongly accept the self-designation of “pro-life” and tend also to accept the label of “anti-life” for their opponents, rejecting the “pro-choice” definition of the situation which is preferred by NARAL members.

Aside from the obvious questions on abortion, I was curious about whether members of these two organizations would differ substantially on other matters related to life and death. In other words, is active opposition to legalized abortion associated in a distinctive way with other life-related matters? Accordingly, I included in the survey several possible or potential “pro-life” indicators, as delineated above. Table 2 (located at end of article) presents the percentage of NRLC and NARAL members surveyed who took the “prolife” position on ten items.

Items A and B in Table 2 deal with euthanasia and suicide. The euthanasia item describes a situation in which the object of the “mercy” and the family request the act of killing. The suicide item deals with whether one has the right to kill oneself when suffering from an incurable disease. The two groups were highly polarized on these two issues, differing almost as much as they did on the abortion items, with the NRLC being much more likely than the NARAL to take the “pro-life” position.

Items C, D and E deal with matters related to highway safety and associated life-saving policies. The two groups did not differ significantly on whether motorcyclists should be required to wear helmets, with about two-thirds in each group supporting such a requirement. NARAL members were slightly but significantly more likely to favor required seat belts and retaining the 55-miles-per-hour speed limit. Thus, on these two items NRLC members were slightly less likely than NARAL members to take the “pro-life” position (at least as I have defined it).

Item F in Table 2 deals in a general way with governmental efforts to relieve poverty and help fulfill the basic needs of citizens. Here, NARAL members were significantly more likely -- in fact, nearly twice as likely -- to take the “pro-life” position. Items G and R pertain to militarism and imperialism. On the former, NARAL members were much more likely to take the “pro-life” position than members of the NRLC. On the latter, the difference was in the same direction and statistically significant, though not so dramatic. The results for item I suggest that NARAL members were significantly more likely to favor gun control laws than NRLC members.

For item J, the results indicate that NARAL. members were slightly, but not significantly, more likely to oppose capital punishment than NRLC members. It might also be noted that both groups were more opposed to capital punishment than a representative sample of U.S. adults in 1980 (28 per cent opposed).

Finally, an additional possible “pro-life” indicator was extracted from the way a speaker at the annual antiabortion “March for Life” rally in Washington, D.C., was introduced: “Susan is one of ten children. Boy, that’s “pro-life.” I do not rule out the possibility that this may have been a joke, but could it mean that being “pro-life” leads to having or encouraging parents to have large families? In the survey, we asked people what they regarded as the ideal number of children for a family. NRLC’s average was 3.7, compared to 2.0 for NARAL. Further, NRLC members tended to come from larger families, and also to have more children themselves, than did NARAL members. The latter difference holds up when one controls for age and marital status; within each age group, married NRLC members have significantly more children than married NARAL members.

Within the NRLC there are differences as to whether the group ought to stick with just the abortion issue, on which its members have a relatively high degree of unity, or whether it ought to branch out and deal with such other issues as the ERA, nuclear disarmament, capital punishment and social justice. At a recent convention there was loud applause when one participant shouted, “Abortion is the only issue.” My point is that if abortion is the only issue, then the intellectually honest thing would be to acknowledge this conviction and regroup as NOLAC, the “National Opposition to Legalized Abortion Committee.” An alternative would be to acknowledge the desirability of dealing with other matters, but only after the abortion controversy has reached a satisfactory solution. A “prolife” person could reason that the right to life of the most innocent and defenseless must be assured first before other efforts can be launched.

To wear or claim the mantle of “pro-life” is a heavy responsibility. My reading of the evidence is that NRLC members appear to be relatively “prolife” in their opposition to euthanasia and suicide and in their high fertility behavior and preferences. On the other hand, NARAL members were somewhat more likely to take the “pro-life” position on the matters of highway safety, antimilitarism, anti-imperialism, gun control and social egalitarianism.

My hope is that this article may provoke some thought and discussion on what a general “pro-life” philosophy could or should cover. If it is to be meaningful or convincing, however, it must include something besides opposition to abortion.


TABLE 2.  Percentage of NRLC and NARAL members taking the "pro-life" position on ten life-and -death items not dealing directly with abortion.

                                                                                                            % Taking "Pro-life" Position























 

NRLC

NARAL

A.  When a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient's life by some painless means if the patient and family request it?  (% saying NO)

97

11

B.   Do you think a person has the right to end his or her life if this person has an incurable disease?   (% saying NO)

94

6

C.  Do you think that people on motorcycles should be legally required to wear helmets?  (% saying YES)

66

67

D.  Do you think that people in cars and trucks should be legally required to wear seat belts?  (% saying YES)

34

45

E.  Do you favor retaining the current 55 miles per hour speed limit or would you prefer that it be raised?  (% saying Keep at 55)

77

86

  F.  The government should do something to reduce income differences between rich and poor?  (% strongly Agree or Agree)

26

51

G.  Do you think the current level of military spending by the U.S. should be increased or decreased?  (% Slightly or Substantially Decreased)

13

52

H.  The U.S. should be ready and willing to use military force if necessary to assure our continued access to important resources, such as oil, which are essential for our way of life.  (% Disagree)

71

79

I.  Would you favor or oppose a law which would require a person to obtain a police permit before he or she could buy a gun?  (% Favor)

63

90

J.  Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?  (% Oppose)

57

60