June, 1996

Dear ICE Subscriber:

I have finished Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. I have sent it to the printer. I have also finished Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers. It will go to the printer as soon as the dust jacket is finished. I am probably a third of the way through Deuteronomy. I may be able to finish it in 1997.

I have already written about the evangelism opportunities offered by the Internet. But that is only one information breakthrough. There is also a big technological breakthrough in CD-ROMs that will arrive later this year: the DVD disk. It will hold a movie on one regular-sized CD-ROM. It will also hold at least nine gigabytes of data. The two-sided disks will hold twice this when they arrive, probably in 1997. Nine gigabytes is the equivalent of 4 million pages of text, or 16,000 volumes of books. That's a lot of books.

What eats up disk space is an image. A black and white image of one page of a book takes about 25,000 kilobytes. A CD-ROM today will hold about 20,000 images, or 20,000 pages of books. That's about 80 250-page volumes. With the one-side DVD technology, this will be 1,500 volumes, fully indexed electronically. This means that the original book or magazine's pagination can be transferred to the disk for printing out, yet the images' text will be converted into electronically indexed text. The reader will be able to print out the book just as it was originally typeset, yet do complex word searches to find key ideas. The researcher will be able to cite page numbers from the original text for academic purposes, yet he will also have the power of full indexing. This is an academic revolution.

Any book 75 years old or older becomes eligible: public domain. Also, any book first published in the U.S. prior to 1964 whose copyright was not renewed in the 28th year after its year of publication is also the public domain. That 28th year rule is fixed: not 27th, not 29th. This offers tremendous possibilities for reprinting long-forgotten and suppressed books. For revisionist history, it will be a bonanza. One reason why these books went out of print was inventory taxation. A CD-ROM can be printed economically in runs of 500 ($2 each). So, the inventory cost of keeping them in print is negligible.

This offers a tremendous potential for alternative education programs. Whole libraries on a disk will be able to be handed to students for a few dollars. This is the end of the states' restrictions on licensed high schools: 1,000 books in a library. Now each student will have that big a library on a disk. The Library of Congress is reprinting U.S. history documents. All of these are in the public domain. These documents can legally be downloaded onto a CD-ROM disk. Every student will be able to access them for historical research.

Public education is eroding fast. The new technology does no good for a school system in which moral values are considered relative and discipline is considered a violation of the students' civil rights. The modern established church — the public schools — is losing ground daily. A long-term victory for Christian education is now visible. Yet four decades ago, this would have been considered a pipe dream by Christian educators. (ICE makes available my 45-minute speech on this transformation: "Head Starts: Christian vs. Non-Christian." It can be used by Christian educators as a fund-raising device. For a donation of $100, your school will receive unlimited, royalty-free reproduction rights for non-commercial uses. Please contact ICE if you're interested.)

I often use the slogan, "You can't beat something with nothing." This has been Christianity's problem since the Enlightenment began three centuries ago. But as the Enlightenment's moral capital has visibly begun to play out, the "something" appears less formidable. Simultaneously, there are signs that a return to the Bible is taking place in areas outside church and home. This development has been spearheaded by the Christian Reconstruction movement. Our law-based methodology is still anathema in Christian circles, but our slogans have begun to catch on, such as "Christian world-and-life view," "the myth of neutrality" and "secular humanism." These slogans are wedges. They open gaps in the antinomian defenses of modern conservative Protestantism.

We find ourselves caught between two trends: a moral breakdown in humanistic society and a revival of interest in the Bible as a guide to moral action. You probably sense this. The humanist worldview is visibly disintegrating. The liberal humanist optimism of John F. Kennedy's Camelot has been gone for a generation. The public schools have been visibly declining since Kennedy's era. Actually, they have been declining since at least Roosevelt's day — Teddy's. Doubt me? Read five pages in the sixth McGuffey reader: pre-Roosevelt by a generation. Today's college students would have trouble reading them.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to exercise Christian leadership. So, what signals does the evangelical church send out to put things back together? Mixed.

It sometimes sends yuppie evangelism signals. The most successful Protestant churches in the United States have little to say theologically and less to say culturally. David Wells' 1993 book, No Place for Truth: or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans), tells the story in all its pathetic details. The evangelical churches have become mainly entertainment and therapy centers for the up-and-outers.

Fundamentalist churches are split: some going the cell group, church growth way; others are sticking with tried and true altar calls; but almost none doing traditional fundamentalist evangelism: door-to-door "canvassing" (Evangelism Explosion is an exception), passing out tracts (when was the last time you saw a tract?), rescue mission work, and visits to old people's homes. When was the last time you saw a Witnessing Made Easy book (always a lie, as everyone knew) in a Christian book store? I'll tell you: the last time you were in a Christian book store that sold only books.

Mainline denominational churches are liberal and shrinking. The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Northern) and the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (Southern) had a combined membership of 4.3 million in 1965. They joined together in 1983. Today, they have 2.8 million members. At the present rate of decline, this joint church will not exist in the middle of the next century. Most other mainline denominations are experiencing similar losses.

Charismatic churches are growing, based on their unique doctrine of the liturgical trinity: guitar, keyboard, and drums. If you gave the average charismatic pastor a choice between abandoning tongues and abandoning overhead projector praise music, he would abandon tongues. A lot of them already have.

Is there a common theological thread running through them all? Yes. Several.

First, the belief that Old Testament law does not speak authoritatively and specifically to the affairs of this life.

Second, that assertion that the church will be culturally victorious in history (if at all) only when Jesus comes again to set up His visible kingdom.

Third, that politics must be religiously neutral as a matter of religious principle. (Dispensationalists would add: "Except in the State of Israel, where legal discrimination against Christians is legitimate in order to keep Muslims suppressed.")

Fourth, that true science must be religiously neutral. (Six-day creationists are not exceptions here: they base their books and teaching materials on a supposedly neutral model. These materials refuse to use the word "God" because six-day creationists desperately and futilely seek acceptance by the public school system, which is legally based on the myth of religious neutrality.)

Fifth, that as any field becomes more scientific — desirable — it must also become religiously neutral. (Fundamentalist six-day creationists are not exceptions here: they are deliberately silent on matters of creationism and social theory or the arts, for they are antinomians with respect to biblical law, and mostly premillennial or amillennial pessimists regarding the future.)

The common theological thread is ethical dualism: Christianity as relevant in personal emotional life, family life, local church life, and (says a minority) education up to grade 12. For everything else — that is, for civilization — Christianity is regarded by Christians as, at most, just one more legitimate voice among many, just one more special-interest viewpoint, just one more faction.

There is supposedly one law for Christians in their non-public lives — New Testament ethics, never spelled out in any handbook or theological treatise — and common law for Christians and everyone else in their public lives. This is the doctrine of "equal time for Jesus," which in a religiously pluralistic society means about ten minutes a day, maximum — and not during working hours or prime-time TV.

If I ever write my book, Equal Time for Jesus, the cover will feature a pair of hands, each holding a stopwatch. One of the hands will be three-fingered and red.

There is a huge problem with the "equal time" doctrine: as humanism extends the myth of neutrality, the public zones of State authority expand, and private zones contract. There is no equal time for Jesus. There is far more than equal time for New Age mysticism in the public schools. And there is lots of time for Darwinism.

A minority of fundamentalists now chant a new mantra: "Neutrality is a myth. Neutrality is a myth." This mantra matches the older one: "The Bible has answers for every problem." But when you ask a fundamentalist what the biblical answer is to some social problem, you are told: "Jesus is coming back soon." But what about now? "Jesus is coming back soon." But what should I do now? "Didn't you hear me? Jesus is coming back soon!"

What they really mean by "Neutrality is a myth" is this: "Neutrality will be a myth when Jesus comes back. Until then, however, it's a waste of time for Christians to bother themselves about seeking explicitly biblical answers to social problems. And anyone who does is a Christian Reconstructionist, which as Dave Hunt says, is almost New Age." Once again, we see medieval ethical dualism: one law (unspecified) for Christians, another law (natural) for society.

This dualism is the Devil's most successful sociological lie, an outworking of "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil [autonomously]." Yet even here, what contribution have Protestant Christians made to the theory of natural law? Since about 1700, the answer is clear: none. They have been cemetery stone-cold silent. They have allowed humanists and a tiny handful of Roman Catholics to frame the theoretical and judicial issues. After Charles Darwin blew away the supports for natural law theory with his theory of purposeless evolution and evolving law, most of the humanists gave up. The natural law tradition is confined today to a few tiny circles: Roman Catholics, humanistic conservatives, libertarians, and Randian Objectivists.

This is a tremendous opportunity. I pray we don't miss it.

Sincerely,