University of Virginia Library

Ch 4: We're Mad As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore!

I want you to get up now out of your chairs and go to the window! Open it and stick your head out and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

--Howard Beal, Anchorman,
Network

It was a glorious, if berserk, moment in Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay for Network. The rain-soaked, suicidal anchorman of a national nightly news program bellowed out the quintessential rage and frustration of America's urbanites: The country is out of the common person's grasp or control. Individuals are at the mercy of imponderable social forces and unfeeling social institutions that use them as faceless cogs. They've-we've-lost all self- determination.

Probably unknown to Chayefsky, his fictional anchorman-turned"mad prophet of the airwaves was speaking to and for the millions of conservative Christians as well. Ironically, many evangelicals and fundamentalists had long since stopped watching commercial television or attending Hollywood movies before Network reached their local theaters in 1976. But if they did see the film, their spirits must have known that Howard Beal spoke for them.

In the past several years, evangelicals and fundamentalists have also

---

56

begun to shout, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" But whereas Howard Beal symbolized raw frustration and despair, these conservative Christians are confident that they have what it takes to turn the country around. And they intend to do so.

What brought out millions of previously unregistered "born-again" voters in the 1970s and 1980s? What made fundamentalist Jerry Falwell dissatisfied with merely preaching "the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ" and inspired him to found the Moral Majority in 1979? Why did so many evangelicals and biblical inerrantists think they could resurrect their old antievolution creation theory and buck the scientific establishment?

In short, what new sentiments and attitudes suddenly galvanized evangelicals into a conservative social and political movement? What made them unwilling "to take it anymore"?

In one sense, these questions are misleading. Evangelicals have always battled both personal sin and social evil. If many groups were reluctant to commit themselves publicly to social reform for a good bit of this century, they never completely lost their zeal for changing the world by changing individuals, i.e., winning souls for Christ. And now that they are back with a vengeance, hindsight suggests that there was every reason to believe their retreat from the public arena would only be temporary.

In the past decade, a series of developments has aroused the sleeping evangelical giant. Evangelicals have witnessed public schools purging their very existence from textbooks on American history and banning their God from the classroom; they have endured journalists and editors treating them as archaic kooks; and at the hands of mainline Protestants they have experienced the ultimate insult-they have been ignored.

In the 1970s the evangelicals were as they had always been-not some shrinking remnant of crazies, but tens of millions, as the polls would show. They were a large part of the Silent Majority that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew used to talk about in the 1960s, although Nixon and Agnew never dreamed that so many of their constituents came from a distinctly religious interest group.

Contrary to media perception, says Richard John Neuhaus in The Naked Public Square,

---

57

Like all Americans, evangelicals shared the national sense of "malaise" that President Jimmy Carter spoke of during the dark days of double-digit inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. Unlike others, however, they thought they knew what had caused it, and that made them angry. Following World War I and the Scopes trial, the liberals had taken control of the dominant institutions of society. More immediately, the liberal model for America, with its naive faith in science, its welfare state, and its abandonment of biblical values, had broken down.

In Jeremy Rifkin's words, they knew that "the liberal superstructure had cracked." [2] Worse yet, the liberal economists, politicians, and educators who had led the country into this mess could not see the futility of their philosophies or the bankruptcy of their "solutions." And, further, they refused to step down from their positions in the institutions that had the power to turn the situation around.

Meanwhile evangelicals looked around and saw crime rates up, prisons overcrowded, and the criminal justice system throwing good money after bad; sexual hedonism hampered only by epidemics of AIDS and venereal diseases, with rampant drug abuse filling in where promiscuity left off; divorce, spouse and child abuse, homosexuality, and single-parent families at all-time highs; a welfare system that creates a permanent "underclass" subsidized by taxpayers; a fetish for science (or scientism) and technology at the same time that privacy, personal liberty, and environmental quality are on the decline; bloated state and federal bureaucracies that have become less efficient, less fiscally responsible, and less honest; an entertainment industry that continually escalates its commercial formula of explicit violence and sex; a public school system unable to discipline students or teach them at any level but that of the lowest common denominator; and a foreign

---

58

policy that appeases terrorists and responds ineptly to Third World bullying and Communist expansionism.

True, liberals suffered under the same social conditions, but for them it was different. Neoconservative Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus makes a very astute distinction between "sins of omission" and "sins of commission." [3] For liberals, he notes, a conservative government's faults are more often seen as "sins of omission." Liberals may complain, for instance, that a conservative administration does not provide enough aid for the poor or foreign aid to Third World nations; that it does not exert enough effort to save whales, eagles, baby seals, or other wildlife; that it does not strenuously enough advance minority rights-things "that liberals think it is the business of government to do."

But for conservatives-and evangelicals are overwhelmingly conservative politically-a liberal government's sins are more likely (and resentfully) seen as "sins of commission":

If the general failure of liberal big government-and, indeed, of liberal society itself-led many evangelicals to mobilize, at times specific issues spawned social movement organizations. Christian Voice is a classic example. It began when a ballot proposition put to California voters in 1978 would have expanded legal protection for homosexuals. When fundamentalist pastors became involved in a campaign to defeat it, the Internal Revenue Service stepped in to warn them that if they persisted, their churches' tax-exempt status would be reexamined. As

---

59

a result, they founded Christian Voice as a vehicle to continue their fight.

A number of Supreme Court rulings in the early 1960 convinced many conservative Christians that the federal government had needlessly and callously intruded itself into the community, and, by extension, the family. Prominent among them were Engel vs. Vitale in 1962, which ruled that a nondenominational prayer prepared by the New York Board of Regents violated the First Amendment's establishment clause, and Abington School District vs. Schempp in 1963, which judged the same of Bible readings in a public school.

Issues such as school prayer hung in a kind of "free-floating" readiness, waiting to be linked to others, such as the availability of abortionon- demand following Roe vs. Wade in 1973, or IRS enforcement of minority quotas in parochial schools, or government harassment over the tax-exempt status of Christian schools. No one single factor sounded the clarion call to battle, but as one issue mounted on top of another, evangelicals gradually decided that they had had enough.

And, once they were aroused, the issues that caught their attention and concern multiplied. The agenda of these newly politicized evangelicals became, as one analyst put it, "maddeningly multifaceted." To the wide range of areas noted above, add dogmatic defense of free enterprise, a sometimes-confusing but unyielding support for Israel, a lobby for a stronger national defense, and even the closure of the U.S. Department of Education.

As Neuhaus observes, "If your goal is to 'turn the country around,' you can hardly limit your concern to one or even to a dozen issues." [5] But at the same time, so many issues and so many associated causes needed to be simplified for popular consumption and mass mobilization. However much leaders argued that these were all interrelated, they could not keep their adherents' attention scattered across such an immense field of social problems. Many evangelical lacked the stamina, and others the minimal formal education, to comprehend fully so many separate controversies.

As in all significant social movements, they had to establish two simple things-a cause and an effect, a perpetrator and a victim-on which to focus their efforts. So the evangelical leadership reduced the complexities of modern American society and the sources of this "malaise" to the familiar biblical symbols of good and evil. First they chose

---

60

the hallowed family as the focal point around which virtually all other issues could revolve. Then they marked "secular humanism" as their villain.

The family has become the evangelical master issue of the 1980s. The New Christian Right has made use of sociological wisdom even as it condemns sociologists. The family is the basic unit of human societies, they note. And no culture has ever survived without the family. They also tie the family to the greatness of America. Writes televangelist James Robison in his book Attack on the Family

It follows, therefore, "that anyone who wanted to destroy the American way of life would single out marriage and the family as first priority targets." [7]

And beware, the country is filled to overflowing with sinister forces who are out to destroy America. Robison promises in his introduction to "reveal in stark detail" the handiwork of those who seek to "destroy the home and the American way of life." [8] One's first impression upon encountering Robison, or many other writers of the New Christian Right, is that one is in for a new round of McCarthyism or Red-baiting. Not so. They do speak disparagingly of "the collectivists," but collectivists are never identified as Communists, and, furthermore, they are seen as only a minuscule part of the problem. The real enemies threatening to destroy the family and bring down the country in one swoop are the Secular Humanists.

The family, notes Donald Heinz, is a primary symbol with powerful emotional significance. It stands as "a means to recover a lost meaning as well as a lost past. [9] What's more, all other issues can be subsumed under the "pro-family" label: the teaching of evolution, prayer in schools, abortion, traditional roles for women, sex and drugs, pornography, and so forth.

While each of these issues has a family-centered dimension, another critical element of the evangelical perspective is the belief that these

---

61

problems represent a loss of freedom. Freedom, say evangelicals, is not genuine unless it is matched with responsibility and discipline- biblically grounded discipline. Freedom apart from biblical values becomes promiscuity, abuse, and chaos. Evangelicals argue that the secular, relativistic type of freedom that liberals espouse has given American society nothing but fleeting, superficial pleasure and many long-term headaches. Their biblically grounded conception of freedom is thus the foundation for their attacks on the liberal drift of social mores and Supreme Court decisions over the past quarter- century.

Evangelicals decry the steady erosion of the sanctity of life since Roe vs. Wade in 1973, which has resulted in millions of abortions and a growing acceptance of euthanasia. It has hampered legal restrictions on the availability of contraceptives to teenage girls, leading in turn to widespread venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. It has even helped promote the entertainment industry's fascination with Rambo-like death and destruction.

Close to abortion on the evangelical list of evils is the systematic assault on women's traditional roles. From elementary school through the university, educators encourage students to reconsider traditional roles; the federal government actively promotes their destruction as the courts strike down discriminatory restrictions and legislators subsidize day-care programs; and the media fuel the fire with favorable coverage of everything from women's liberation to androgynous entertainers such as Boy George.

The women's liberation movement is credited by evangelicals with pushing large numbers of women into the work force while simultaneously neglecting their families. The consequences include day-care "orphans," a severe breakdown in patriarchal authority in the home, lax discipline of children, a decline in the national birthrate, and a rising divorce rate.

The family breakdown, in turn, spurs the government to try to correct the problems that it has been substantially responsible for creating; and increasing government involvement leads to the creeping danger of totalitarian government.

John W. Whitehead is an evangelical lawyer and intellectual leader in the New Christian Right Movement. Founder of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit organization concerned with educational and litigational issues relating to the First Amendment, Whitehead has

---

62

written two books that are widely circulated and influential in the movement: The Second American Revolution and The Stealing of America.

In the latter, Whitehead argues forcefully that one important consequence of the breakdown of the family is that it loses its traditional capacity to serve as a buffer between the individual and the state. The result is that the state becomes a surrogate family, ultimately exacting a heavy price in human liberty. He states:

The state usurps the rights that were once sacred within the family, and in so doing destroys the biblically sanctioned fabric of family life. For example, in the 1976 case of Planned Parenthood vs. Danforth, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Missouri statute requiring a husband's consent before a married woman can obtain an abortion. In this single ruling the Court managed to abrogate the sanctity of the life of the infant-to-be, the woman's responsibility to live with the consequences of her sexuality, the husband's authority over his wife, and his rights of parenthood. Whitehead musters case after case as evidence of how, in his view, the liberal drift of American society is responsible for a host of threats to the family.

Whitehead pins much of the blame on the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. In The Second American Revolution, he accuses the Court of usurping powers it was never meant to have and thereby creating an imbalance of constitutional power. [11] By violating the Founding Fathers' system of checks and balances, the Supreme Court justices have become de facto the nation's supreme legislators and policymakers.

Whitehead refers to the justices as "social engineers" and "an imperial judiciary," calling their body a "legiscourt" fostering "statism"- the belief that government is the total solution to society's problems. His thinking about the Supreme Court has been profoundly influential among New Christian Right leaders, including Pat Robertson and

---

63

Herbert Titus, dean of the Christian Broadcasting Network University's School of Law.

Part of the credo of the New Christian Right is the tenet that Americans have forgotten the importance of religion in the founding of the nation. Whitehead has gone further by documenting how the Supreme Court justices have lost sight of the grounding of our country's laws and Constitution in the Judeo-Christian values of the Bible. He argues that the Court has substituted relativism for a permanent set of standards, the prevailing attitudes of the justices themselves forming the basis of their rulings. Law has ceased to be anchored in higher principles. The law is now only what the justices say is law, a development stemming from a kind of encroaching Darwinism. Lawyers once learned their practice according to the texts of Blackstone, who assumed absolute biblical principles unaffected by prevailing mores. Then, in the nineteenth century, an evolutionary view of law crept into the profession, thanks to Christopher Langdell, dean of the Harvard Law School. Langdell utilized the case method of teaching basic legal principles and doctrines as products of an evolving process, which can be read in the opinions written by judges over many years. The problem with this, asserts Whitehead, is that the cultural basis for their opinions will change, like fads and trends. He refers to these new principles for deriving law as "sociological law."

Thus, the Supreme Court, caught up in the liberal climate of twentieth-century America, has moved away from the values on which this country was founded. Warns Whitehead, "This [has] meant that what a judge said was law, and not what the Constitution said." [12] Law, in other words, has become hostage to current vogue. Or, as conservative writer Herbert Schlossberg puts it, "There is no principle of justice that transcends the expediency of the hour." [13] At the same time, the Supreme Court justices are not even proper evolutionists. They have become crusading "activists" hastening the process of social change:

Instead of waiting patiently for the natural flow of evolution, the courts have become active in their development of the law. Judicial activism is now a recognized fact. The courts make law. The written Constitution has little value except as a shibboleth used by the courts to justify their intrusions into the lives of people. [14]

---

64

Conservative Christians are angry at the Supreme Court, something Pat Robertson recognizes. His much-publicized criticism of the Court in the fall of 1986-that in an elected constitutional democracy the unelected justices cannot have the final word on law-reflected a strong segment of popular opinion. In a 1986 interview, he elaborated:

In the Christian community there is rage against the Supreme Court that is so intense you cannot believe it. The people I deal with, the evangelicals, despise the Supreme Court. I use that word advisedly. I mentioned once to a group that I was going to the funeral of one Supreme Court justice, and they all started to applaud. I said, "No, this is one of the good ones that died." It's that kind of feeling. There is antipathy, tremendous antipathy. And when the people who are the most law-abiding in the society feel that the Supreme Court is their enemy, then you've got something significant." [15]

The Court is seen as the source, the author of the secular, liberal drift away from morality in modern society. Robertson noted further:

There is the feeling that the Supreme Court has trampled our schools, religious liberties, and our method of government in an egregious fashion. The Court has stood the Constitution on its ear. [16]

Whether or not one accepts the logic of Whitehead's or Robertson's arguments about the errors of the Supreme Court, conservative Christians have constructed a plausible story line. It neatly explains the process that has undermined the sacred institution of the family and indicates where changes are needed. Since evangelicals and fundamentalists have long felt the family was under siege by godless forces, sophisticated analyses like Whitehead's explain the why and the how of it.

Thus, in many ways this "pro-family" position serves an important social purpose. It gives evangelicals a target, helps focus their anger toward the government, and links government policies to the trends that most upset them.

Some of these links are frankly dubious, such as the claim that the

---

65

Supreme Court's liberal rulings on pornography have been responsible for increased incidences of rape, child molestation, and divorce. But their scientific standing is not what is important. What is important is that the family has become a rallying symbol for protest.

Now back to the arch-villain, secular humanism.

Until recently, many liberals had no idea they were Secular Humanists, and there are still many more who have yet to find out. For many, a first encounter with the concept has a familiar, and perhaps flattering, ring-something akin to "humanitarian." But evangelicals do not use the term to flatter. Secular humanism, or simply humanism, is, in their view, the underlying godless principle eroding the moral foundation of America. It is the source of all critical social problems, from government bureaucracy to pornography.

The concept of secular humanism seems to have appeared first in a legal context in the 1961 Supreme Court case of Torcaso vs. Watkins. Torcaso had been appointed to the office of notary public by the governor of Maryland but refused to affirm an article in the state's constitution that required profession of "belief in the existence of God. " Torcaso's plea was upheld in a decision written by justice Hugo Black: "Neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person `to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.' "

University of Chicago historian Martin Marty notes that constitutional scholar Leo Pfeffer argued before the Court that the Maryland Constitution was invalid because it stated a preference for theistic faiths over nontheistic faiths, "such as Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others." In his written opinion, justice Black cited Pfeffer. Therein, contends Marty, "a new name for a nonexistent denomination was born full-blown from the mind of one justice." [17] Etymologist William Safire also traces the legal use of the concept to the Torcaso case, but he attributes use of the term to an amicus curiae brief written by Joseph Blau, professor emeritus of religion at Columbia University. [18]

The concept apparently entered the vocabulary of the New Christian Right through an article written by John Whitehead and John Conlan and published in the Texas Tech Law Review in 1978. They argued a point that has since been repeated again and again by conservative Christians: The Supreme Court has determined that secular humanism, is a religion."

---

66

A parenthetical reference to secular humanism in a Supreme Court decision, even though the reference appears in a unanimous Court decision, hardly gives secular humanism a legal status. Nevertheless, from thousands of pulpits all over America, one hears expressed with supreme confidence that the Supreme Court has ruled (or determined) that secular humanism is a religion. [19]

As sociologist James Davison Hunter testified in 1986 during a lawsuit brought by 642 Alabama parents against their local school board for teaching humanism, this nontheistic perspective has, furthermore, all the earmarks of a religion. It deals with spiritual themes: the nature of the universe (or cosmology), the origin of the human race, human values, and the goals of life. It even possesses that familiar characteristic of many religious groups-the belief that its views on such profound matters are superior to other groups' ideas. [20]

The Alabama suit was brought by Mobile parents concerned that "the religion of secular humanism" was being unconstitutionally promoted in public school textbooks, while religion's important place in American history and in the founding of the nation was suppressed. Moral choices and common civics were presented to young students in texts that relativized ethics and/or tried to present situational and ethical material in a value vacuum.

Both liberal and conservative interest groups leaped into the fray. John Buchanan, chairman of People for the American Way (alternately referred to as PAW or "People For") helped arrange legal representation for the Alabama school board. Pat Robertson's National Legal Foundation provided counsel to the Christian plaintiffs.

The Department of Education, meanwhile, commissioned New York University psychologist Paul Vitz to analyze typical public school textbooks, and his results clearly buttressed the Mobile parents' case. Vitz found that many history texts failed to mention Reverend Martin Luther King's religious commitment as a civil rights leader. In one social studies book, thirty pages were devoted to discussing the Pilgrims without once mentioning religion. Vitz concluded:

Serious Judeo-Christian motivation is featured nowhere. References to Christianity or Judaism are rare and generally superficial. Protestantism is almost entirely excluded, at least for whites. In contrast, primitive and pagan religions, as well as magic, get

---

67

considerable emphasis. Patriotism is close to nonexistent in the sample. Likewise, any appreciation of business success is grossly unrepresented. Traditional roles for both men and women receive virtually no support, but feminist portrayals regularly show women engaged in activities indistinguishable from those of men. Finally, clear attacks on traditional sex roles, especially traditional concepts of manhood, are common. [21]

Meanwhile, People for the American Way mounted its own textbook review and reached a similar, if much more moderate, conclusion: "The texts too often are static descriptions of dynamic processes, ignoring questions of belief and value at the heart of people's `lives and fortunes and sacred honor.'" [22] At an April 1987 conference on "Values, Pluralism and Public Education" sponsored by People for the American Way, the organization's founder, Norman Lear, spoke eloquently about the need to inculcate values, many of them shared with religion, in public schools. Essentially, the conference attempted to coopt the conservatives' original outcry against what Richard Marquand in the Christian Science Monitor called, "the often pallid condition of moral and ethical instruction in schools." [23]

In early April 1987, federal district judge William Brevard Hand ruled in favor of the Mobile parents-asserting that secular humanism is indeed a religion-and banned forty-five textbooks in Alabama's largest school district. School officials elsewhere in the state hesitated, as the decision was immediately appealed (but eventually overturned), but in Mobile, at least, the school system began collecting the textbooks.

Ironically, in the original 1961 Torcaso vs. Watkins case, it served the interests of humanists for secular humanism to be recognized as a nontheistic alternative religion. In Alabama, as sociologist James Hunter points out, humanists wanted it the other way as well. In his opinion, "Current efforts to redefine Humanism as something other than religion should be viewed with a measure of skepticism."

Just four months earlier, in a similar case in Greenville, Tennessee, conservative Christian parents objected to their children being exposed in public schools to such things as Roman Catholicism, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, and the Wizard of Oz-all influences, the parents claimed, of secular humanism and paganism. The federal dis-

---

68

trict judge ruled in their favor, awarding the parents $50,521.29 for expenses they incurred in placing their children in other schools. Author Tim LaHaye defines humanism as "man's attempt to solve his problems independently of God." [24] John Whitehead says humanism is the idea that men and women can "begin from themselves" without reference to the Bible and can derive by reason alone standards to judge all matters. [25]

Whitehead and Conlan draw heavily upon two documents known as the Humanist Manifestos I and II to prove the existence of this nontheistic religion. The first Manifesto was released in 1933 and bore the signatures of eleven prominent educators, including John Dewey and Harry Elmer Barnes. The group's spokesperson was John H. Dietrich, a Unitarian minister from Minneapolis. [26] Theirs was a pragmatic philosophy, as reflected in the following statement from the Manifesto:

We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of the supernatural ... as nontheists we begin with man not God ... no deity will save us; we must save ourselves. [27]

The American Humanist Association was organized in 1941 and has traditionally drawn its leadership from the Unitarian-Universalist church, while remaining organizationally distinct. Its updated Manifesto, published in 1973, received little attention until it became the object of scrutiny by the New Christian Right.

The American Humanist Association's periodical, The Humanist, had a circulation of 17,000 in 1986. [28] Given that most periodicals have somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand library subscriptions, organizational memberships are usually somewhat smaller than the circulation of their publications. By any measure, the AHA can hardly be considered a very large organization, nor is it a particularly visible or active group.

But according to the New Christian Right, this is the organization that has quietly infiltrated key institutions and effectively taken over America.

Writes Tim LaHaye in The Battle for the Mind:

---

69

Much of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life. [29]

Tim LaHaye is-not well recognized outside evangelical circles, but evangelicals know him well. Among other things, he is a prolific writer with approximately two dozen books to his credit. The New York Times and other publications that take note of best-sellers don't include the sales of Christian books in their listings; if they did, Christian books would predominate. As it is, the Christian book market is a subterranean one, but it is very big. And Tim LaHaye's name is never absent from the Christian Booksellers Association's best-seller list for very long.

One of LaHaye's big blockbusters was The Battle for the Mind. Published in 1980, just as the New Christian Right was first receiving national attention in the secular media, it popularized and detailed how secular humanism has penetrated and taken over American culture. LaHaye followed up with The Battle for the Family in 1982 and The Battle for the Public Schools in 1983.

In 1984 LaHaye moved his operations from Southern California to Washington, D.C. From an office with an impressive panoramic view of the U.S. Capitol, LaHaye runs the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV), which seeks to engage Christians in the electoral process and to work for the reestablishment of traditional values as public policy. On the executive committee and board of ACTV are such prominent televangelists as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, D. James Kennedy, James Robison, Charles Stanley, and Jack Van Impe.

Down the hall, LaHaye's wife and frequent collaborator, Beverly LaHaye, heads a new organization called Concerned Women for America (CWA), which approaches public policy from a conservative woman's perspective. The LaHayes claim that CWA is the largest women's organization in America, with twice as many members as the National Organization for Women (NOW). In all probability, CWA's numerical claims are, like Jerry Falwell's, to a certain extent illusory, but there can be little question about the LaHayes' central role in warning evangelicals of the dangers of secular humanism.

Sociologist Donald Heinz's analysis of what evangelicals mean by

---

70

the term comes up with two basic tenets. First, humanism rejects any supernatural conception of the universe; there is no reality beyond this life. Second, humanism affirms "that ethical values are human and have no meaning independent of human experience." He adds that "secular humanism is characterized by godlessness, moral relativism, and permissiveness regarding decency issues." [30]

Humanism, in other words, is the absence of God, or of truths revealed in His Word, not only in institutions such as schools or government but also in individuals' daily lives. It is believing that we are accountable for our actions only to each other. It is believing that all truth is relative. For this reason, Mel and Norma Gabler, the fundamentalist textbook watchdogs in Longview, Texas, whose Educational Research Analysts organization has given that state's education officials so many headaches, oppose New Math. That some integers could have infinite or nonabsolute values is a potentially dangerous notion for a child reared in a home of religious absolutes.

Where did humanism come from? The answer depends on how far back in history you want to go. Herbert Schlossberg finds the danger of humanism first appearing in Genesis, with the serpent who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by telling her it would give her knowledge and power equal to that of God. [31] It promised her that she "would be wise apart from God." Like pride, the Fall was really a form of self-worship.

Some evangelical writers trace the roots of humanism to such medieval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas or Francis Bacon. Others start with the Renaissance, when Europeans began to rediscover classical (i.e., pagan) writers. Others focus on a Who's Who of more recent thinkers, such as Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Comte, and Rousseau. Still others implicate modern theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr or intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley.

Evangelicals are also capable of seeing one continuous pattern stretching from the Creation to today. Tim LaHaye reminds his readers that Michelangelo's statue of David is a prime example of humanism. He believes the glorification of the body is contrary to God's command that Adam and Eve wear skins. "Ever since," LaHaye says,

... there has been a conflict concerning clothes with man demanding the freedom to go naked. The Renaissance obsession

---

71

with nude "art forms" was the forerunner of the modern humanist's demand for pornography in the name of freedom. [32]

Regardless of its origins, the concept of secular humanism is critical to the emerging cultural revolution. It explains how America came to be in its present predicament, and how it can get out. It defines the enemy, and suggests how the enemy should be confronted. Humanism is the liberal, secular drift that has characterized mainstream culture in the twentieth century and permeated its institutions. It is found in the public schools, the courts, television, movies, theatre, and literature. The secular culture takes it for granted, and this incenses evangelicals. Writes Richard John Neuhaus, "They feel that they were not consulted by whoever decided that this is a secular society. And they resent that; they resent it very much." [33]

Some evangelicals see humanism as a grand conspiracy. The Humanist Manifestos and the American Humanist Association are only the tip of a gigantic iceberg, according to Tim LaHaye:

Almost every major magazine, newspaper, TV network, secular book publisher, and movie producer is a committed humanist, surrounding himself with editors and newscasters who share his philosophy and seldom permit anything to be presented that contradicts humanism, unless forced to by community pressure. [34]

With humanism's stranglehold on public education, it is no wonder that mass media and government, both local and national, have systematically excluded Bible-believing Christians from exposure and decision-making. LaHaye claims there are about 275,000 humanists today in the United States, including most politicians and media opinion-shapers. Since World War II, he estimates, approximately 600 humanists in Congress, the State Department, and the presidential cabinets have molded our country's policies along atheistic, materialistic lines.

Many humanists, LaHaye maintains, are, socialists at heart and hope that the country will ultimately become part of "one-world" government. He questions their patriotism: "All committed humanists are one-worlders first and Americans second." [35] And he contends that they

---

72

promote a bloated federal bureaucracy: "Humanists have a running romance with big government." [36]

LaHaye's solution begins at the ballot box. Evangelicals must go to the polls, with their ministers in the lead, to vote humanists out of public office and elect Bible-believers. He argues:

No humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in America-United States senator, congressman, cabinet member, State Department employee, or any other position that requires him to think in the best interest of America.... The major problems of our day-moral, educational, economical, and governmental are primarily caused by the fact that over 50 percent of our legislators are either committed humanists or are severely influenced in their thinking by false theories of humanism. [37]

More sophisticated attacks on humanism do not attempt to estimate the number of humanists residing on the Potomac or to stress a conspiratorial mindset. But, like Tim LaHaye, many evangelicals have a profound sense that secular humanism-whether through the Supreme Court or other agencies-has managed to pervert the First Amendment, completely separating God from government, the schools, even medical decisions about who shall live and who shall die. The Founding Fathers, they believe, never intended the strict churchstate separation we now have. Some, such as Thomas Jefferson, were deists; others, such as Benjamin Franklin, may have had scandalous private lives. But one thing they assuredly were not was humanist.

The danger of the humanist separation may be the state's totalitarian hand in our every affair, as John Whitehead argues. Or it may be "the naked public square," in which there is no consensus on the basis for civic morality. Warns Neuhaus, "When recognizable religion is excluded, the vacuum will be filled by ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names." [38] Demagoguery, fascism, cults-these are some of the unpleasant possibilities Neuhaus contemplates for our nation.

The cultural revolution that is unfolding in America is fueled by anger and fear. Conservative Christians are angry that a liberal, secular, humanist philosophy has made them a dispossessed people in their own country. Worse than being attacked by mainstream insti-

---

73

tutions, they have been ignored. And they are fearful of very real social problems for which the liberal powers-that-be don't seem to have any workable solutions.

That is why evangelicals responded when religion met up with the most powerful communications medium in history. That is why the marriage of evangelical Christianity and politics is not a passing fad, as some commentators would have us think. "What may well emerge in the years to come," says liberal radical Jeremy Rifkin, "is nothing short of a second Protestant reformation, one that may have as powerful an effect on the world as the first." [39]

Notes