Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Daniel Silliman
In 1958, CT pushed evangelicals to engage important moral issues even when they seemed old-fashioned.
Christianity Today took a moment in 1958 to reassess the repeal of prohibition after 25 years. Was the relegalization of alcohol good for America? Or had the teetotal Christians and fundamentalist moral crusaders of the 1920s been right to try to ban beer and liquor?
Alcohol industry leaders didn’t think there was any question that Americans should celebrate their quarter-century of accomplishments.
This year the brewing industry proudly notes many of its accomplishments since the time of its rebirth, 25 years ago. The distilling industry also joins with the brewers in celebration of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, an occasion “which should be meaningful not only to brewers (and distillers) but also to millions of others who have benefited from relegalization.” So spoke the president and chairman of the U. S. Brewers Foundation, E. V. Lahey, a few months ago.
He pointed out that the national economy at the time of repeal in 1933 was suffering the “deepest depression of the century” and that relegalization of the liquor traffic had brought billions of new taxes to the government, and billions of dollars to American farmers and workers. Beyond this, he implied, the industry should be grateful that 22 per cent of the beer customers are women, that the tavern is now a respectable place, that the tavern operator is “a good citizen and a credit to his community,” and that “a good job has been done in keeping the public sold on the premise that the operation of breweries and taverns is compatible with the American way of life.”
CT thought a biblically informed evaluation of the impact on American life would lead to a very different conclusion.
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Frightening and terrifying are mild words to describe the tragic existence of 5,000,000 alcoholics who are in helpless bondage to strong drink. This is a distressing situation, not only to be weighed in terms of a personal hell being endured by alcoholics alone, but more, by the anguish, suffering, shame and tears of those who are related to them. To that staggering number of alcoholics, however, must be added also the appalling number of some 2,000,000 others who are today problem drinkers, verging on alcoholism and whose indulgence is wrecking cars, ruining lives, and destroying homes. Who actually can estimate the moral damage that is resulting from a habit which the liquor industry in a thousand ways is endeavoring to call, “the American way of life?”
Reaction to this deplorable, distressing social problem finds expression in the question Cain once asked: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” … There is a hardened unconcern on the part of the public which accepts the damage resulting from the liquor traffic and absorbs, without a protest, the consequent financial toll. And despite the havoc being wrought and the powerful forces promoting such liquor sale, efforts to stem this evil seem pitiful and inadequate.
Another major moral issue that concerned evangelicals was the increasing availability of pornography. In the spring of 1958, CT investigated how easy it was to buy obscene material, even in Washington, DC.
Two young women learned that the “best” literature in the nation’s capital is readily available to them, even though they are ministers’ daughters.
On a special research project for Christianity Today, they found easy access to the magazine stocks of three newsstands in downtown Washington. One of the girls is the daughter of a Dutch Reformed minister, the other the daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman.
Within three blocks of the White House, they were able to buy:
—The May issue of Hush-Hush, which features “the inside story of the nude model who pinch-hit for Princess Meg.”
—The April issue of Ace, which includes the story of “a voluptuous wench.”
—The spring edition of Sunbathing Review, with more than 85 pictures of nude women and children. One series of photographs portrays the activities of two teen-aged girls in a California nudist camp.
—The March edition of Night and Day, carrying several advertisements that offer by return mail pictures of women posed to order.
—Three undated publications, all of which have pictorial sequences of nude women.
CT called on Christians leaders to pay attention to the issue and speak out against “Sex and Smut on the Newsstands.”
A virulent moral sickness is attacking American society. Its obvious symptoms may be seen at any newsstand in large cities or small. American society is becoming mentally, morally and emotionally ill with an unrestrained sex mania.
For two years we have been independently—and in the last six months cooperatively—studying trends in popular magazines and paper-backed books. We have watched, appalled, as scores of new titles have made their appearance in the magazine field, many of them violating every standard of decency which has hitherto been recognized in the publishing field.
We are convinced that the only reason there has not been an indignant outcry from our nation’s religious leaders is that few have been advised of the extent to which standards have plunged. We ourselves are incredulous as we survey from month to month some of the cartoons, jokes and stories that appear in the so-called “men’s entertainment magazines.”
It is high time that our churches awaken to the kind of material being circulated to teen-agers and young adults of both sexes, sold openly at drug stores and newsstands under the guise of sophistication and respectability.
CT also looked at the issue of education in 1958, delving into concerns that secular pedagogical theories were undermining Christian faith in public schools.
Largely through John Dewey’s influence, the twentieth century injected a naturalistic-evolutionary philosophy into professional education. This was a speculation that denied the reality of the supernatural, rejected changeless truth and moral standards, and spurned the relevance of historic Christian theism for the crucial problems of thought and life. Whatever worked was considered “true” until constantly changing society determined something else more workable, “more true” and tenable—until it, too, was replaced, and so on ad infinitum.
This philosophy first penetrated into teachers colleges. It spread among professional administrators, then it captivated large groups of teachers, and finally, it infected thousands of American school children exposed to its direct or indirect influence in the classroom. It was a professionally calculated leavening of American education that involved dismissing eternal spiritual and moral entities to extracurricular classification or even to the circular file.
Although American public education did not fully live and move and have its being in this naturalistic philosophy, it nonetheless contracted the disease of secularism on an epidemic scale. American public education during the past generation has not been religious in character, it has not encouraged training in religious subjects, nor has it given subject matter a religious orientation.
While public education seemed to succumb to “the disease of secularism,” private religious education faced its own challenges. Many evangelicals wondered, “Can the Christian College Survive?” CT invited Wheaton’s president to tackle the question.
For the Christian college, the storm warnings are out. The academic barometer is unsteady, even lowering, with hints of possible hurricanes on the distant horizon.
There is no assurance of uninterrupted prosperity such as we have seen in the past decade. Prudent college trustees and administrators are considering carefully the possibilities of economic depression beyond recession, with attendant unemployment for both parents and students. Likewise there is always possibility that the present cold war may turn hot, and that “brush fires” on limited frontiers may unleash unlimited nuclear warfare. Christian colleges face the warnings of increasing costs of operation, and likewise the general trend of enrollment toward publicly supported colleges and universities.
But foreboding as the storm warnings are, it is well to remember that Christian colleges are sturdy crafts which have weathered severe storms in past generations. Colleges have a way of riding out a hurricane; and though battered severely, they still sail on.
The magazine also endeavored to assess the social impact of revival. Looking back 100 years at a historical example, a Lutheran minister and evangelist argued that great awakenings not only save souls, they transform culture.
The indirect results of the revival, for communities and nations, are not so easy to trace fully. But they were as distinct and far-reaching as leaven working on the whole lump of society. The effects touched the social circles of community life, education, government, new institutions, various reforms, cultural standards, and new organizations whose enterprises belted the globe. …
Once again in history God had demonstrated the amazing capacity of prayer in pathfinding all his purposes. The prayer meeting gave us the great revival, and with it, a new Christian unity. The revival, in turn, gave us many social by-products. These, all taken together, put new leaven into our liberties and salt into the whole of our society.
After these hundred years, when living is so fluffy, praying so feeble, and much preaching so flabby, nothing is more renewing than to contemplate the wonders that God can work in all the earth through his simplest organic structure—the prayer meeting.
Without revival, people would pursue alternative answers to life’s problems. That seemed to be what was happening in Latin America, CT reported.
1958 was communism’s year in Latin America. Facts apparent at year’s end: Stepped up activity of Soviet agents in Hispanic countries, and alarming indifference of public sentiment. In 1958 the Communist party (1) was legalized in Chile, (2) joined a coalition to elect a conservative president in Costa Rica; (3) helped oust a dictator in Venezuela; and (4) threw Argentina into a state of ferment.
Mexico is Latin America headquarters of Soviet infiltration. All Red satellite countries maintain large embassies in Mexico. The Russian embassy alone boasts a staff of over 900 trained operators. No one can guess how many agents are scattered throughout the continent. But their espionage and indoctrination are backed by a tidal wave of literature and propaganda. …
And the naturalism of Marx, tangible, here-and-now, seems to offer what modern man needs. He wants potatoes, not platitudes. The earthy religion of the Reds cannot be fought, therefore, with the empty trappings and dead traditions of Romanism. Only an evangelical, supernatural faith can save Latin America—a faith which is not afraid of its social conscience, nor of sacrificial discipline, but which is essentially a regenerating miracle—in short, a New Testament faith.
In the US, many of those who were concerned about freedom were interested in an emerging political movement: the libertarians. CT gave readers a primer on the movement and its relationship to Christianity in a piece titled “Christ and the Libertarians.”
From the point of view of the average businessman, the New Deal launched America on the path of “creeping socialism.” By the mid-1950’s over one hundred “business sponsored” organizations opposing the New Deal’s political philosophy of interventionism began to appear. Many welcomed the name “libertarian” to distinguish themselves from the political liberals who accepted Big Government as a necessary instrument of social progress.
Although differing on many points, libertarians have, since their beginning, shared one common apprehension: the steady growth of government and the corresponding decline of individual responsibility and freedom. They have been driven by a very real fear, the fear that a government which controls the economic life of its citizens today will control their thoughts and souls tomorrow. To the libertarians, the “democratic process,” which many trust as an adequate safeguard against tyranny, supplies no sufficient guarantee against a tyrannical majority. They have read American history and know that the architects of our Constitutional system, who were aware of the danger of tyranny by the majority, tried to prevent it by specific checks which later political developments either weakened or destroyed.
Three libertarian organizations that have had the most to do with the religious community have been the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York; Spiritual Mobilization, Los Angeles; and the Christian Freedom Foundation, New York City.
But the real problem in America, according to CT editors, was not the New Deal, secular education, pornography, or alcohol. The problem underlying everything was actually the church.
Pronouncing judgment on America is no longer an exclusive franchise of a few weeping Jeremiahs. Nor is it peculiar to evangelists constantly reminding the nation of its spiritual decline, its neglect of a great Christian heritage, its whoring after false gods of money and ease. Many pulpiteers are indeed swift to show that despite America’s religiosity no sweeping repentance and faith, no decisive change of heart and life, places social forces in our great cities conspicuously in the service of the living God. Billy Graham readily admits this even of New York City. Religious analysts are finding America spiritually and morally second-rate. …
Today not Nero but the churches fiddle while Rome burns. The churches have even approved leaders who support socializing and collectivistic trends in the name of the Christian community, and have permitted them without protest to speak for Christian conscience. …
But absolutes do not cease to be absolutes, imperatives do not cease to be imperatives, because of failure to recognize them as such. Biblical theology and ethics give little credence to the modern notion that God does not articulate permanent principles. Unless the Church accepts her biblical heritage and enunciates the great ethical principles that sustain our tradition of freedom, her own liberties may vanish together with those of the nation she fails. There may not always be a U.S.A., but there will always be a Church. As the believers in Russia can eloquently testify, however, the Church sometimes is chained and imprisoned not alone for her courage to affirm the superiority of spiritual over limited political loyalties, but as penalty also for her silent and unprotesting subjection to the power-state.
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