Let’s start with a quick quiz. Name this book:
The United States is in great peril because it has abandoned its Christian roots and is being taken over by people who are immersed in a humanistic worldview which is antithetical to God. The result will be a tyranny which will oppress Good Christians everywhere.
Trick question, obviously. There are thousands of books fitting that description. Even more books fitting that description will be published in the next six months. And the six months after that. And after that…
Truth be told, I truly wonder why people keep reading these books. They are insanely repetitive. The anecdotes illustrating the thesis get updated every year, but the basic argument is the same. Pick up one of these books from the early 1990s and switch the names “Al Gore and Jesse Jackson” to “Joe Biden and AOC,” and you have the 2020s version.
If you want to read a book in this vein, then you might as well read the template. Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto was published in 1981. It was a sensation—so much so that those thousands of writers in the last four decades have simply been rewriting it. How big was this book? From the back cover, we have Joel Belz, founder of World magazine (which is basically just Schaeffer’s book in a biweekly news magazine): “Go to any evangelical Christian gathering and ask 20 people the simple question: ‘What single person has most affected your thinking and your worldview?’ If Francis Schaeffer doesn’t lead the list of answers, and probably by a significant margin, I’d ask for a recount.”
“The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years…” That is the opening of A Christian Manifesto. No soft sell here. You, dear Christian, have a problem. A big problem. What is the problem? You “have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.” You notice that this thing in society over here is a bit problematic (fill in your own anecdotes). Oh, and that other thing over there is also a problem. And there is that other thing going on that just seems wrong. And you just heard that story that you have a hard time believing could actually be true—surely nobody would do that.
Enter Schaeffer, in effect saying, “All those things you notice: they are all connected!”
There is a war going on in the country (and remember this was written in 1981) between two worldviews. The Christian Worldview and the Humanist Worldview. “The term humanism…means man beginning from himself, with no knowledge except what he himself can discover and no standards outside of himself. In this view, man is the measure of all things, as the Enlightenment expressed it.”
Now obviously, Schaeffer wants all his readers to join Team Christian Worldview, but he does not think this is simply a lighthearted game of checkers. “Humanism, with its lack of any final base for values or law, always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of authoritarianism to control the chaos. Having produced the sickness, humanism gives more of the same kind of medicine for a cure.” This is a serious battle for the future of society.
As I said, change the anecdotes, and this book could have been published in 2024 with zero change in the underlying structure of the argument. Why should that be so? How is it possible that the framework of this battle has not altered at all in half a century? Neither side has won. Both sides stare at the enemy from their trenches. Is there any reason to think things will be different in 2081? What could possibly happen that will enable a victory in this cold trench war?
Just when the realization that A Christian Manifesto is just the original battle cry of the Christian soldier hit, I got to the part which was obviously coming where Schaeffer notes, “the bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state.” Yep, here we go.
The next sentence: “Of course, this is scary.” Ya think?
Then came the surprise. The scary part wasn’t just what those other guys were going to do when Christians start disrupting the social order. The really scary part is what Christians on the Christian side will start doing. Suddenly, the book turned into a prophetic warning about what could happen to Christians as they engage in this culture war.
“First, we must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of a theocracy.” Now, everyone these days denies that they want a “theocracy.” But Schaeffer elaborates: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”
Christian nationalists have no place in Schaeffer’s army of the good. Suddenly, this book doesn’t fit in with the copycat books being written in the 2020s. How to explain how a movement born with an explicit argument against wrapping Christianity in the national flag emerged into a movement that does exactly that?
We must say that speaking of disobedience is frightening because there are so many kooky people around. People are always irresponsible in a fallen world. But we live in a special time of irresponsible people, and such people will in their unbalanced way tend to do the very opposite from considering the appropriate means at the appropriate time and place. Anarchy is never appropriate.
Now that is most certainly not the sort of thing that is commonly said by Team Good Christian in 2024.
A Christian Manifesto thus stands not as yet another example of the type of book that litters the political sections of bookstores today, but rather as a useful corrective to those books. The Christian nationalists and the irresponsible people have grown in numbers over time. The effect has been that the central message of Schaeffer’s book is lost in one social media firestorm after another.
The real reason to read or reread A Christian Manifesto is not because you want to see a historical version of a common contemporary theme, but because you want to find a way out of the current morass. Schaeffer stands there like a marker showing where you entered into the mire. Sometimes the best way to get out of a swamp is to go back to your starting place.
Related Posts
Schaeffer, Francis The Church Before the Watching World “The World is Watching the Church”
Sowell, Thomas The Vision of the Anointed “Conflicting Visions”
(Mandatory Note: I am not sure if Team Humanism or Team Christian doubts my sincerity here, but one of the other has made it my legal obligation to tell you that Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it.)
