So many good Christians are just being neutralized. Part of our problem is that the preachers are just neutralizing their people so they won't do anything. Nothing pleases the enemy more than to have his opposition neutralized so they won't recognize him, so they won't be willing to confront him, won't be willing to deal with him. This whole program of neutralizing is the result of false propaganda and the peace line and the false use of love and all these things that are put together to bring a man to a place where he's just neutral. Now I say here in this pulpit that we are very near to what they were in Red China. A man led a separatist movement at 18 and he started the independent Presbyterian church in Beijing. And what happened? The communists came in. The man was taken prisoner because he was a preacher. And that's the same thing that's gonna happen to your pastor and to others before very long if something doesn't stop.
On a whim I recently picked up Philip Yancey's memoir Where the Light Fell while at the library with my kids. I've struggled to put the book down since bringing it home. Part of that is down to Yancey's skill as a writer, no doubt—he seems to me to represent the absolute best of his generation of evangelicalism. (If you want to read something that will both make you hopeful and break your heart, read his farewell column at Christianity Today.) But another aspect of the appeal is that I was surprised and dismayed at how the book managed to feel so remote in some ways and yet, as I read more, quite contemporary in others.The world of his early childhood feels impossibly far gone. His father, who had made plans to travel as a missionary to Africa, died in his early 20s when Philip was a baby after contracting polio and choosing to leave the iron lung that was keeping him alive. When he died, his death was covered in both the local Atlanta papers where the Yanceys lived and in the Philadelphia papers where Philip's mother lived. It's hard to imagine virtually any of that today.
Yet other aspects felt much closer. True, you need to account for shifting details between the evangelicalism of the 1960s when Yancey was coming of age and our own era. And those details are sometimes significant. Yet even so a great deal of what Yancey struggles with throughout the memoir actually bears a remarkable resemblance to the things that contemporary exvangelical memoirists are lamenting and raging against. (Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir felt contemporary to me in quite a similar way, actually.) I'll share just one example, because it is part of a broader point I wish to make.
The quote shared above, which in many ways doesn't sound that far from the rhetoric of figures involved in the Christian Nationalist movement, comes from the presbyterian fundamentalist Carl McIntire in a sermon he gave in May of 1971.
McIntire pops up several times in Yancey's book, always saying things like that. At one point Yancey reports that McIntire led a loud campaign against admitting Hawaii to the Union on grounds that it would be an easy access point for Chinese communists to infiltrate America. Recall that Hawaii was admitted into the union in 1959, which places the time of McIntire's anti-Hawaii campaign to the mid 1950s—15 years before the sermon quoted above. The man had a schtick, it would seem. (It goes without saying, I hope, that 53 years on and America still hasn't had anything like the Communist China-style jailing of preachers that McIntire predicted "before very long.")
But the reason McIntire caught my eye is not simply because I'd heard his name before, but because of the context in which I heard his name: in my reading on Francis Schaeffer, a man who is a personal hero of mine and something of a spiritual grandfather, given that my tutors during my time at L'Abri were both students of his who loved him deeply. In the 1930s Schaeffer had been quite captured by McIntire. Schaeffer was something of a Presbyterian fundamentalist himself at the time, and when McIntire led a group to break off from J. Gresham Machen's Orthodox Presbyterian Church over prohibition and premillennialism, Schaeffer joined him and became one of the first graduates of the denomination's new seminary. It was not until he had spent time in Europe, experienced his own crisis of faith, and befriended the Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaker that Schaeffer began to shake loose from McIntire's fundamentalism. And not long after he did God began to do a great work at the ministry that grew out of Schaeffer's wrestling and struggle—that work would eventually be given the name "L'Abri."
Of course, in the 1950s I imagine if you had told anyone that in the 21st century many American Christians would know the name "Francis Schaeffer" and remember him as a great evangelist to the beatniks and the counter culture that came out of them, they would not have believed you. If you'd also told them that McIntire would be entirely forgotten, a footnote in histories of 20th century American Christianity and no more, I suspect that might have surprised them too. But then that is precisely what has happened.
McIntire gave his life to a heavily politicized faith, an aggressive faith, a faith defined and shaped by politics and culture war more than doctrine, and he has been forgotten. Or, perhaps, rather he has been replaced by the latest flavor of the day to attempt the same basic project with, one expects, no more success (or prophetic accuracy) than McIntire. But that eccentric man in the mountains of Switzerland who left his fundamentalist missions agency, broke away from his fundamentalist denomination, and sought to preach the Gospel to the people the church had forgotten or alienated or simply hated? God blessed that man's work and it has echoed down through the decades since, charting a different sort of Christian sensibility in the American church, one marked by a robust belief in the goodness of creation, the necessity of hospitality, and the integrity of Christian truth.
There's a story I remember hearing as a child about another missionary, Amy Carmichael. As a young woman Carmichael was walking in the street when she suddenly heard a voice say,
Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is
That passage from St Paul framed Carmichael's life henceforth. And it drove her to a single-minded devotion not unlike what one would later see in the Schaeffers. That missionary tradition of Carmichael and the Schaeffers, a tradition ably summarized in the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement class, and a tradition that was carried back into America by figures like John Stott, Tim Keller, and Yancey himself, that tradition is still alive to us today.
Given the choice between the straw of McIntire's politically constituted faith or the gold of that other tradition, I know which one I think we should build on.