CT noted that Ronald Reagan, sworn in on January 20 to a second term as president, has “won more popular votes than any other President. … Religious issues appeared to play directly into Reagan’s reelection.” Editors also reminded readers that “winning isn’t everything.”
Conservative moral forces are having more influence in the councils of government than in a generation. … We are pleased by these advances, but we see potential for trouble ahead. Gospel values triumph ultimately when they are victorious in the hearts of the lost, not when they advance in the courts and the halls of Congress.
Fired by the fuel of righteous moral anger, the Christian political lobbies are sure to prosper in skill and stamina. As they grow, the tendency will also arise to equate legislative accomplishment with spiritual victory. We trust this will not happen, but we fear it might, and so we raise the caution. …
The church’s mission is to bring the lost to Christ and to equip the saints for valid Christian living, regardless of the government’s friendliness toward the church. Is it possible that the evangelical cause will find growing success as a political lobby—and still fail in its primary mission?
CT published a 32-page supplement on Christian citizenship in 1985 and caught up with congressman Paul Henry, a newly elected evangelical representative from Michigan who was also the son of CT’s first editor in chief, Carl F. H. Henry. The congressman voiced concern about Christian hubris:
If anything is needed now, particularly in the evangelical community, it’s a call for caution and also for humility—a recognition that one of the fundamental Christian virtues is humility.
As we seek justice and mercy, as we seek Christian accountability or Christian values in society, we need to be sure that we are not doing some of the same things others are doing—masking greed under the banner of the Cross. I think the real danger at this point in the evangelical community is not the mistaken notion that Christians ought not to be involved—we’re coming through that. Now the danger lies in how we’re being involved and whether we’re listening and following, as it were, the promptings of the Spirit, or simply manipulating religious symbols. …
In my primary, the local Moral Majority chapter sent out a letter opposing me. … There are people out there speaking for the broad evangelical Protestant community who in fact are pretty far removed from it.
The magazine devoted substantial space to abortion in 1985, highlighting a “Walk America for Life” campaign, Mother Teresa’s speech at the National Right to Life convention, and efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade in the courts. CT also reported on evangelical doctors’ responses to the widely publicized medical decision to let an infant with a birth defect and Down syndrome die:
Baby Doe has figuratively taken America by the shoulders—and given us all a good shake. He asks us to confess how we really feel about our fellow human beings. He prods us into revealing whether or not we are the friends of the helpless, the weak, the hurt, the injured, the troubled. Indeed, he challenges us all.
Baby Doe reminded the medical establishment that while we cannot always find a cure, we can offer patients something else just as valuable. We can offer genuine care. Our patients may still need us as people, even though we can’t do very much for them as physicians.
That’s an important message. But it is a demanding one. It demands that we lay aside our medical texts, sit down, and work through those questions and answers that are spun out of the depths of our conscience. My considered judgment, worked out over some years, tells me we ought to do those things that give a person all the life to which he or she is entitled, but not to do anything that would vainly extend that person’s act of dying.
CT also reported on violence against abortion clinics, including three fire-bombings in Pensacola, Florida.
Prolife organizations regularly denounce bombings and arson attacks on abortion clinics. But they have not always distanced the prolife movement from the fringe benefits the violence brings. Those benefits include the temporary closing of some clinics and the focusing of national attention on the abortion issue.
Evangelicals protested pornography—winning major concessions from 7-Eleven convenience stores.
More than 5,000 convenience stores nationwide have stopped selling pornographic magazines, according to [National Federation for Decency] president Donald Wildmon. …
Steven French, associate pastor of youth at First Baptist Church in Wheaton, Illinois, said his congregation got involved after a parishioner alerted him to the magazines being sold at a nearby 7-Eleven store. In September, French and the church’s senior pastor, David Murdock, asked store manager Frank Hudock, Jr., to remove the offensive magazines. When negotiations failed, the church organized a picket and a boycott of the store. Three other churches joined the effort.
The store manager said sales immediately dropped “dangerously low,” costing him $300 a day in lost business. By December, Hudock had removed all 30 porn magazines from his store.
In 1985, CT reviewed the great range of Christian music, publishing pieces on Johann Sebastian Bach, Franciscan troubadour John Michael Talbot, and an evangelical group putting out heavy-metal music on a secular label.
A new heavy-metal band is shattering the stereotypes. … The band’s members—wearing costumes adorned with chains and metal studs—look like members of other popular heavy-metal groups. Stryper’s latest album was released by the same record company that launched Motley Crue and Ratt. But that is where the similarities end.
The lyrics to Stryper’s songs, and the band’s on-stage performance, distance it from its secular counterparts. During concerts, the four-man band throws Bibles into the audience. In a song called “From Wrong to Right,” Stryper sings: “So many bands give the devil all the glory—it’s hard to understand. We want to change the story.” …
“When you’re in court, both sides have an attorney,” said Michael Sweet, the band’s 24-year-old drummer and spokesman. “But in rock-and-roll or the entire secular music business today, no one tells God’s side of the story. Nobody stands for what’s right. The number one thing for us is to tell people about Jesus—especially the young kids—in a way they can understand.”
The biggest controversy in Christian music was Amy Grant’s secular crossover success.
Grant’s increased popularity has attracted the attention of several television and radio programs, and major publications—including Time, Newsweek, People, and USA Today. Her fame has also given rise to questions about Christian singers who try to appeal to a secular audience. …
An article about Grant in Rolling Stone magazine gave rise to complaints from some readers. In the article, Grant said she had gone sunbathing in the nude, and was quoted as using an offensive phrase when discussing sex. According to Grant, the offensive phrase was used by the interviewer when he asked a question. She said she merely quoted the phrase while answering his question.
Grant has also been criticized for what a Washington Post writer called “a confusingly sexy image from an avowedly spiritual singer.” She has said she does not consider her leopard-print jacket or her barefoot appearance on the 1985 Grammy broadcast as signs of sexual sin. Instead, she is trying to present a strong but modern female Christian role model to young people who confuse lust with love.
Don Finto, pastor of Nashville’s Belmont Church, which Grant and her husband, Gary Chapman, attend, said he feels she is doing God’s will.
“She’s not always wise in the way she says things,” Finto said. “But I really do believe she’s where God wants her to be. Amy desires to be a full person—to be sexual in a godly sense. She doesn’t want to be a sex symbol, but wants sex to be seen as a good thing, a godly thing.
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Another evangelical scandal erupted when Gordon College professor and former CT columnist Thomas Howard converted to Catholicism. CT published a three–part investigation.
He apparently was attracted by an almost-ethereal vision of the physical presence of the Catholic church evolving in time and yet remaining mysteriously constant.
He is particularly impressed by what he perceives to be the infallible doctrine that the pope and the teaching office of the church pronounce and defend. During an interview with Christianity Today, he repeatedly indicated that his beliefs were in line with whatever the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church ultimately affirmed. If he did not know how to answer a specific question or how to harmonize alleged discrepancies in Catholic tradition, he assured his questioner that somewhere a faithful Catholic teacher knew the correct response.
Once attracted to the edifice of the church, he apparently could not envision how the claims of the church might ever be falsified. Whatever intellectual or spiritual objections might exist, in Howard’s thinking they yield before an important premise: essential church teaching is infallible. The question of how this premise is related to the obvious diversity of belief in contemporary Catholicism does not seem to trouble him.
Evangelicals should respect the sincerity of Howard’s convictions. But they undoubtedly will balk at his belief in the infallibility of the Catholic magisterium.
American evangelicals were very concerned about civil wars in Central America—but divided on the best response. When Catholics and mainline Protestants started offering sanctuary to people not eligible for “refugee” status, evangelicals opted not to get involved.
“I do not want to condemn anyone in the sanctuary movement,” says Don Bjork of World Relief, the relief and development arm of [the National Association of Evangelicals]. “They have come up with some very convincing biblical and historical arguments to justify their actions.” Bjork adds, however, that he does not encourage evangelicals to join the movement. He says that respecting the U.S. government will produce more fruit.
Legislation being considered by Congress could make the sanctuary movement unnecessary. Authored primarily by U.S. Rep. Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.), it proposes that Salvadorians be allowed to remain in the United States for at least two years while the Congressional General Accounting Office studies the situation. Bjork calls the measure “a positive bill” and says it would solve the problem.
Some evangelicals were speaking out about the need to minister to people suffering with AIDS. CT profiled a chaplain in Los Angeles.
The Kaiser/Permanente Medical Center … first admitted patients with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) about two years ago. At the time, chaplain Robert Bird avoided those patients.
“Homosexuality—and homosexuals—were abhorrent to me,” he says. “But as I read the Bible, I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t just avoid these men if I’m a follower of Christ.’”
Bird, an evangelical, now spends much of his time with people who suffer from AIDS. … “These people are going to die, and I’ve never seen such ugly deaths. In addition to the physical discomfort, they face tremendous psycho-social anguish, and, mostly, they die alone.
The magazine also reported that “a growing number of Christians who are struggling to overcome homosexuality affirm that the behavior is learned and can be unlearned.”
Last month 180 people, most of them ex-gays, attended the tenth annual conference of Exodus International, a coalition of some 50 ministries to former homosexuals. This is more than double the number that attended the conference just two years ago. Exodus executive director Alan Medinger, himself a former practicing homosexual, said the number of ministries to people struggling with homosexuality is growing rapidly. …
In dramatic contrast to gays who celebrate their homosexuality as a gift from God, those associated with Exodus affirm that heterosexuality is God’s plan for humanity. … Evangelical thinkers like [Richard] Lovelace and [John R. W.] Stott are calling for the church to give a higher priority to ministering to homosexuals. …
Stott writes that “at the heart of the homosexual condition is a deep loneliness, the natural human hunger for mutual love, a search for identity, and a longing for completeness. If homosexual people cannot find these things in the local ‘church family,’ we have no business to go on using that expression.”
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