5 Revival, Revolution, and Reform 63
The humanists have openly told us their views of final reality. The Humanist Manifesto I (1933), page 8' says
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.
Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modem science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.
And Carl Sagan indoctrinated millions of unsuspecting viewers with this humanistic final view of reality in the public television show Cosmos: "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." The humanist view has infiltrated every level of society.
If we are going to join the battle in a way that has any hope of effectiveness-with Christians truly being salt and the light in our culture and our society-then we must do battle on the entire front. We must not finally even battle on the front for freedom, and specifically not only our freedom. It must be on the basis of Truth. Not just religious truths, but the Truth of what the final reality is. Is it impersonal material or is it the living God?
The Humanist Manifestos I and II both state that humanism is a religion, a faith. [Manifesto I: pages 3 and 7; Manifesto II: pages 13 and 24.].Manifesto I, page 9, very correctly says: "Nothing human is alien to the religious." Christians of all people should have known, taught, and acted on this. Religion touches all of thought and all of life. And these two religions, Christianity and humanism, stand over against each other as totalities.
The Humanist Manifestos not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other nontheistic religions.
On page 19 the Humanist Manifesto II says: "It [the State] should not favor any particular religious bodies through the use of public monies...." Ironically, it is the humanist religion which the government and courts in the United States favor over all others!
The ruling of the Supreme Court in the Torcaso v. Watkins case in 1961 is instructive in another way. It shows that within the span of twenty-eight years the Supreme Court turned radically from a Christian mem ory to the humanistic consensus. In 1933 in the United States v. MacIntoch case about conscientious objection, Justice Hughes stated in his dissent:
The essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation. . . . One cannot speak of religious liberty, with proper appreciation of its essential and historical significance, without assuming the existence of a belief in supreme allegiance to the will of God.
In 1965 in United States v. Seeger, also about conscientious objection, the Court held that the test of religious belief is a "sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those admittedly qualifying for the exemption." This, of course, is a drastic change away from the position of 1933.
The case Torcaso v. Watkins in 1961 takes the final step. Here, theistic religions, nontheistic religions, and pure materialistic humanism as a religion are all equated. And the change was complete in twentyeight years from 1933 to 1961.
We live in a democracy, or republic, in this country which was born out of the Judeo-Christian base. The freedom that this gives is increasingly rare in the world today. We certainly must use this freedom while we still have it. There was a poll done by a secular group a few years ago which looked across the world to determine where there were freedoms today out of the 150 or so nations. Less than twenty-five were rated as today having significant freedom. We still have it. And it is our calling to do something about it and use it in our democracy while we have it.
Most fundamentally, our culture, society, government, and law are in the condition they are in, not because of a conspiracy, but because the church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture. It is the church's duty (as well as its privilege) to do now what it should have been doing all the time-to use the freedom we do have to be that salt of the culture. If the slide toward authoritarianism is to be reversed we need a committed Christian church that is dedicated to what John W. Whitehead calls "total revolution in the reformative sense."2
Some of us may perhaps have some questions about the Moral Majority and some of the things they have said. But I would say one thing we certainly must do is get our information about anything like the Moral Majority not from the secular media, which so largely have the same humanistic perspective as the rest of culture has today. If we are going to make judgments on any such subject we must not get our final judgments uncritically from media that see things from this perspective and see it that way honestly. Most of the media do not have to be dishonest to slide things in their own direction because they see through the spectacles of a finally relativistic set of ethical personal and social standards.
A good example of this lack of objectivity is public television. One of the public television program directors we approached in Washington, D.C., refused to watch the film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, or even to consider it. As soon as she heard of the position it took concerning abortion, she made the excuse, "We can't program anything that presents only one point of view."
At that same time public television was running Hard Choices, a program totally slanted in favor of abortion. The Study Guide which accompanied the series Hard Choices speaks clearly for the total view of a materialistic final reality:
The vast majority of people believe there is a design or force in the universe; that it works outside the ordinary mechanics of cause and effect; that it is somehow responsible for both the visible and the moral order of the world. Modern biology has undermined this assumption. Even though it is often asserted that science is fully compatible with our Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, in fact it is not. . . .
To be sure, even in antiquity, the mechanistic view of life-that chance was responsible for the shape of the world-had a few adherents. But belief in overarching order was dominant; it can be seen as easily in such scientists as Newton, Harvey, and Einstein as in the theologians Augustine, Luther, and Tillich. But beginning with Darwin, biology has undermined that tradition. Darwin in effect asserted that all living organisms had been created by a combination of chance and necessity-natural selection.
In the twentieth century, this view of life has been reinforced by a whole series of discoveries... .
Mind is the only remaining frontier, but it would be shortsighted to doubt that it can, one day, be duplicated in the form of thinking robots or analyzed in terms of the chemistry and electricity of the brain.
The extreme mechanistic view of life, which every new discovery in biology tends to confirm, has certain implications. First, God has no role in the physical world... .
Second, except for the laws of probability and cause and effect, there is no organizing principle in the world, and no purpose. Thus, there are no moral or ethical laws that belong to the nature of things, no absolute guiding principles for human society. . . .
The mechanistic view of life has perhaps only one tangible implication for ethics: we should feel freer to adapt our morality to new social situations. But we are already fairly adept at that. . . . As a result, ethical choices are likely to become more difficult, not because people are less moral but because they will be unable to justify their choices with fairy tales.3
Here is public tax money being used not only in favor of abortion but to teach the whole view of a materialistic, mechanistic universe, shaped only by chance, with no final purpose and with morals (and law) purely a matter of social choice. The Judeo-Christian view is pushed into the category of "fairy tales."
How much this sounds like the Humanist Manifesto II, page 13, which said:
As in 1933 [the date of the Humanist Manifesto I] hu manists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.
Once again we are reminded of public television's airing of Cosmos by Carl Sagan which teaches as dogma that the impersonal cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.
In this setting we must indeed not expect objectivity from the media.
Even the most respected commentators are affected. On the eve of Walter Cronkite's retirement as anchorman on the CBS Evening News he gave an interview in Monte Carlo to Jeffrey Robinson of the International Herald Tribune, featured in the February 18, 1981 issue. In it, Walter Cronkite questions whether, with television, democracy is any longer a suitable political philosophy-whether we can still be sure that democracy can work. Reporting on the interview the Tribune observes:
He [Cronkite] seriously suggests that under the high technology circumstances of today, there might be some questions as to whether or not democracy is a suitable political philosophy.
The article continues, quoting Cronkite directly:
"I'm not saying that the answer should immediately come down on the side of no. I support democracy. I'm simply saying that there is a question. I think there is a hell of a lot of explaining to be done before we can be sure that democracy can work."
The media and especially television have indeed changed the perception of not only current events, but also of the political process. We must realize that things can easily be presented on television so that the perception of a thing may be quite different from fact itself. Television not only reports political happenings, it enters actively into the political process. That is, either because of bias or for a good story, television so reports the political process that it influences and becomes a crucial part of the political process itself. A good example was Walter Cronkite's part in orchestrating the Gerald Ford candidacy for Vice-President at the 1980 Republican Convention.
We must realize that the communications media function much like the unelected federal bureaucracy. They are so powerful that they act as if they were the fourth branch of government in the United States. Charles Peters, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly, in his book How Washington Really Works, 4 writes that the media, instead of exposing the "make believe" of the federal government, are "part of the show. "
Television (and the communications media in general) thus are not only reporting news, but making it. Their ability to change our perception of any event raises serious questions concerning the democratic processes.
The solution is not the one Cronkite gives in his interview-perhaps changing to a political philosophy different from democracy. The solution is to limit somehow television's power to use its bias in "the editorial" reporting of events,5 and most specifically to keep it from shaping the political process.
In the midst of all this Christians must certainly not uncritically accept what they read, and especially what they see on television, as objective. This is especially the case when the subject under consideration is one we know to be different from that which their world view normally causes them to champion.
Returning to the Moral Majority, we must realize that regardless of whether we think the Moral Majority has always said the right things or whether we do not, or whether we think they have made some mistakes or whether we do not, they have certainly done one thing right: they have used the freedom we still have in the political arena to stand against the other total entity. They have carried the fact that law is king, law is above the lawmakers, and God is above the law into this area of life where it always should have been. And this is a part of true spirituality.
The Moral Majority has drawn a line between the one total view of reality and the other total view of reality and the results this brings forth in government and law. And if you personally do not like some of the details of what they have done, do it better. But you must understand that all Christians have got to do the same kind of thing or you are simply not showing the Lordship of Christ in the totality of life.