May, 1996

Dear ICE Subscriber:

In this month's Christian Reconstruction, I have written about the Christian's calling before God. This question is an important one, but not much discussed. There is a lot of confusion about callings and jobs. A calling is only rarely a job for men. For women, marriage used to be a calling, but the rise of no-fault divorce laws has transformed the wife's calling into a job. Therein lies a social revolution.

My calling is fairly easy to describe. I write an economic commentary on the Bible. I have been doing this for 23 years. The first installment appeared in May of 1973. Since August of 1977, I have spent 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year on this project. That is 500 hours a year for a little under 19 years.

But writing the commentary is not the same as finding a market for it. Writing ICE newsletters and publishing ICE books is finding a market for it. So, add the time I spend on running ICE as part of the calling. I don't know what this totals. I really don't want to know. It is more than an additional 10 hours a week, I can assure you.

The problem with callings is that they are rarely self-supporting. They have to be subsidized. To maintain independence in a calling, you must subsidize it yourself. Paul was a tentmaker. That was his job. He did this job because he wanted independence from churches. That way, he protected the integrity of his calling, both from critics inside the church and outside. I have followed his example. My main tentmaking activity is writing Remnant Review. I am now branching into another job: helping businesses to create effective advertising. I show them how to do World Wide Web pages, Yellow Pages, direct mail, display ads, etc. (I would do this for churches, but churches always want me to do this as my calling, i.e., free.)

A calling rarely pays. It is rarely a free market activity. For Christians, the only highly profitable free market activity that is also a calling that I have found is running an academic day care center. A husband-and-wife team can earn up to $100,000 a year running a day care center, with money left over to start another one. But this kind of income turns off most pietistic Christians. Day care also turns off most Christian husbands, who would be perfectly happy to see their wives put in 12 hours a day to make $100,000 in their jointly owned day care operation, but who personally want do something else more socially acceptable for men. So, only those Christians who understand that it takes a lot of income to roll out a franchise, and hard work in everything, can prosper in this calling. In short, not many Christians can do it. But for those who will, it's a bonanza.

The first law of economics is the law of scarcity: "At zero price, there will be greater demand than supply." I have said that a calling normally must be subsidized. It is a non-market activity. This is another way of saying that the output of a calling is offered to recipients at a below-market price. Thus, there is greater demand for it than supply of it. There is always someone who says: "Me, me! Do it for me! Free."

How do you decide who gets the below-market service? In the non-profit foundation world, it is easier to raise money for children than anything else. Donors have soft hearts for children. They also understand that to capture the future, a movement must capture young minds. The payoff is high if you can do this. The compounding process takes over: the accumulating output of years of dedicated service from someone recruited early.

People pay money to support old folks' homes because people have soft hearts for the helpless. But there is another reason: the donation is a kind of insurance policy. "If I give now, someone else may give later, if I'm ever in one of those places, God forbid."

It is hard to raise money for operations, or as we say in this industry, for stamps. In fact, that's where most of the money actually goes in most growing non-profit organizations: postage for fund-raising letters. Zero-postage e-mail may change this, but then our e-mail boxes will be filled with reams of junk mail. The reason ICE doesn't grow very much is that I refuse to use donations for mailings. I do not rent lists. When ICE grows, it grows by word of mouth: voluntary donations of time and reputation by ICE's subscribers.

Very few people will pay to fund ideas that are aimed at adults. Donors know that few people have either the time or inclination to read. They know how slow the payoff will be. There may be no payoff at all. It's a high-risk venture. Readers will fund such projects, but that is a declining market these days. People who have had their lives changed through reading will put money back into the system, but that is an even smaller group.

There's something else to consider: the difficulty of measuring the results. Leonard Read used to say that the mark of success of any idea is when someone quotes the idea back to its originator without knowing where it came from. He was correct, but that kind of event takes place infrequently, and is not subject to statistical assessment.

So, how to estimate in advance whether a non-profit project — a calling — is worth doing? How to estimate retroactively whether it was worth the cost? Nobody knows. It's all guesswork. It's prayerwork, too.

Targeted Audiences

Sounds like warfare, doesn't it? "I have the target in my sight, sir. Fire when ready." Well, in the battle of ideas, you need targets. The targeted audience of the Christian Reconstruction movement has been literate Christians who may become motivated by historically unorthodox applications of historically orthodox theology. This drastically limits the market. Most Christians today are defenders of a theology — Pelagianism — that has been rejected by the church since the days of Augustine, but which keeps coming back to capture the heirs of Augustine. Others are defenders of eschatologies that prophesy the inevitable defeat of Christendom in history. Still others are opposed to the very idea of Christendom: "It will lose, and it should lose!" It's a hard sell.

Christian Reconstruction began with Van Til, who was not a Christian Reconstructionist. He was a Christian Demolitionist. He blew up humanism's rationalist edifices and its irrationalist edifices, but he left no blueprints for replacements. He did not even suggest how such blueprints might be drawn.

Rushdoony surveyed the humanist rubble in 1959 (By What Standard?), and then spent the next 13 years clearing it: Intellectual Schizophrenia, The Messianic Character of American Education, Freud, The Mythology of Science, etc. Then, in 1973, his Institutes of Biblical Law appeared. This book laid the foundation and built the first storey of a new social order. The Christian world responded: "Give us back our rubble!" (If you can find a copy in a used book shop, buy Theonomy: A Reformed Critique; it's a defense of rubble: for building and for throwing.)

Beginning in 1980, I began funding a group of writers in Tyler to get the second storey in place. ("Just as we suspected," critics responded, "a second-storey job.") There are two large rooms still missing: (1) hermeneutics, (2) a systematic theology that integrates the five-point covenant model and Vos' approach biblical theology. But the Reformed world in general is also missing these two rooms.

On the whole, people can move into the second storey. Now comes the hard decision: Do we begin construction of the third storey? Also, who exactly is "we"?

I have decided not to fund the third storey. I am ready to fund the construction of the two missing rooms, but not the third storey. I know what the blueprint looks like for the hermeneutics room. It involves a pair of three-part insights. First, John Murray's sanctification outline: definitive, progressive, final. This is the biblical theology section. Second, Dorothy Sayers' trivium outline: grammar (grammatical-historical), logic (theology), rhetoric (symbol). These two insights are then integrated by the covenant model.

The house can always use more furniture. There are people out there who can write furniture-type books. The house may need an additional septic tank line from time to time to deal with uninvited visitors who come by to make a mess. But as far as I'm concerned, the house is ready for occupancy. The problem I face now is the absence of qualified buyers.

I need a new audience. This audience is made up of people who can't afford to buy yet, but maybe they'll get into a rent-to-own program. I see two groups: college students and high school students. I must design, implement, and fund two separate sales campaigns. Also, I must get the house in front of a new audience of qualified buyers.

The last will come first. I will have every ICE book, Dominion Press book, all ICE newsletters, and a pile of George Grant books on the World Wide Web by the end of the year. I will also have a CD-ROM of this material, fully searchable electronically. That will make the point: the house is built and ready for occupancy. Take a guided tour!

The college program will begin next fall, as soon as I have at least two dozen books on the Web. It will involve a weekly "Web audio" broadcast that deals with students' academic problems. It will also suggest practical service projects. The students will do most of the talking, I hope. I will also have a Web page with tons of bibliography to get them through their course work. This Web site will be linked electronically to the ICE book site.

My goal is to recruit college students to do research in their libraries to help me with the third project, the high school curriculum. I want to get the division of labor working for me. I can't do this third project by myself very effectively. So, get students interested.

There is also the possibility of my relocating to a university town. If the university offers graduate degrees in a wide range of fields, I may be able to get some of my Web show listeners to come, apprentice with me, and earn their advanced degrees. If local living expenses are low, more will be able to come. Maybe ICE can hire some of them to do research. Maybe not. The main thing is to have a place where a handful of bright college grads can come to advance their careers and also get a boost from an aging home-builder.

Ten years after graduation, these students will start building the third storey.

That's why I'm not planning to fund any more stories right now. Point five of the covenant must first be dealt with: succession.

I have an idea of a good place to re-locate: College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University. There are 44,000 students. Its economics department is free market-oriented (Phil Gramm's old department). It has 2 million volumes in the library, with 2 million more 90 minutes away (Rice University and U. of Houston) and at least 3 million more two hours away: University of Texas (Austin).

There are other possible locations: Lawrence, Kansas; Athens, Georgia; Athens, Ohio; Knoxville, Tennessee. Maybe you have another suggestion. But Texas has a huge population of college students, and Texas A&M has a conservative reputation, as well as an old-boy network for post-grad employment opportunities.

I will test the student market with the Web. The books are being scanned in now. In a year, I should have a good idea if this strategy will work. The main expense will be the cost of college newspaper advertising to get Christian students to ICE's Web site. I'll come to you for help on this next summer: each donor sponsors the campus of his choice.

Sincerely,