Bilezikian recalls two aspects of his teaching about the church that were particularly influential on Hybels:

He resonated with the concept of the church as community – rather than as an institution or organization – as body, as community, as organism.

And then the second thing was the mission of the church, not to be just self-sustaining, or self-perpetuating, but to reach weekly into society and claim it for Christ.(1)

Bilezikian and his young protégé, Bill Hybels, recognized that the church had largely walled itself off from the culture around it. As a result it had marginalized itself and in so doing was perceived as having nothing to offer and therefore was simply boring and irrelevant to life.

The second major influence was a very well known and highly successful pastor in California by the name of Robert Schuller.

He [Hybels] was attracted to Schuller’s message of the “unlimited potential” of the church. In 1975, before he started Willow Creek, he attended The Robert Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership, a yearly conference that Schuller sponsors at his Crystal Cathedral in California. This experience solidified a profound influence that Schuller was to have on Hybels and Willow Creek.(2)

As pointed out earlier Schuller is not a fan of Theo centrism. In pushing that out he was very much in favor of something else as the means of reaching people spiritually. The two things he offered were retailing principles and psychology.

He [Schuller] argues, “If you want to succeed in marketing a church, you cannot ignore the retailing principles.” In his book Your Church Has Real Possibilities, Schuller claims that there are proven “Principles of Successful Retailing”(3)

At its core Schuller’s view essentially extends from the idea that the mission of the church (evangelism) is to happen within the corporate meeting of the church. This has been fairly ineffective due to the lack of non-believers there and many believers have become bored with the continual repetitiveness of a seemingly unfruitful task. Schuller’s solution was not a return to the ministry of the church, training, equipping and growing believers to perform the mission of the church in culture but to figure out a way to bring in nonbelievers. How does one best do that? Wall Street type marketing. But once nonbelievers check out this particular retail establishment what is the product that they will find? For that we must turn to Maslow and psychology. The product which Schuller proposed the Church should be marketing is the way to fulfill the customer’s hierarchy of needs. Item number three of Schuller’s “Principles of Successful Retailing” demonstrates this quite well:

3. Inventory. “You have to have what they want….Find what their needs are. You have to study psychology to know what the deep emotional needs of human beings are before you open your mouth and start talking to them…There enters self esteem psychology and theology.”(4)

By officially establishing the idea that the corporate meeting of the church is the “mission,” armed with marketing as the way to expand the market base for the church product of Jesus being the best way to meet the hierarchy of needs and armed with psychology to guide the understanding of humans and the Scriptures, the “Church Growth Movement” was born. Bill Hybels, with a genuine heart for the lost, the enculturation of the idea that evangelism is to be done in the church and armed with the tools of psychology, founded Willow Creek Community Church. There is nothing that Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church has done that is really new in a historical sense. They have just been very intentional and effective about their task. Rather than focusing on Maslow’s self-esteem element, Bill Hybels drew from the hierarchy of needs which in a practical sense transforms the gospel presentation.

Seen from this perspective, Hybel’s communication makes perfect sense as a modern update of what De Tocqueville observed pastors doing. Americans are still committed to their own self-interest. In the present context, this self-interest involves a search for fulfillment and satisfying their felt needs. If Hybels can convince [unchurched] Harry that Christianity is the best means to do this, he will get on board. Hybels has not sought to redirect the river of self-interest, but like preachers of de Tocqueville’s era, argued that he has the fastest boat.(5)

This is somewhat reminiscent of Augustine in his early writings and views:

In one of his first books, The Happy Life, Augustine argued that happiness consists in true learning and religion: “What else is it to live happily but to possess an eternal object through knowing it?” Since Augustine understood the source of happiness as knowing an eternal object, he concluded that happiness comes from a perfect knowledge of God.

Two years later, Augustine said that people can be happy only when they are good. He believed that adoption of the classical virtues would help him achieve happiness: “The function of this virtue is to restrain and still the passions which cause us to crave things that turn us away from the laws of God and of His goodness, that is to say, from the happy life.” Augustine believed that individuals could grow in virtue, they would restrain their passions and thus become fulfilled.(6)

The view of self fulfillment and meeting our needs tends to discourage sound doctrinal teaching. That is not to say that Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church and the CGM in general do at least assert sound theology if questioned. In fact, they subscribe to a very historically orthodox statement of faith. If one were to ask any of the WCCC leadership they would reiterate this point. However, that does not appear to be the grid through which they carry out or understand their mission. In fact, theology does not appear to be highly regarded within the CGM in general:

At a crowded seminar I once heard C. Peter Wagner confess that he was not a theologian, adding, only half in jest, “That is a Church Growth principle!” How sad it is that his lack of theology leads people away from the very gospel which alone can feed the multitudes.(7)

We should emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with the respective tools which were being developed to reach non-believers. There is certainly nothing wrong with seeking to appeal to the lost in words and with illustrations that they might understand. NONE of these things are inherently good or bad but are essentially cosmetic. However, the Gospel itself must never get displaced by the methodology. To rephrase a popular metaphor: The Gospel is the “Baby” that should not be drowned in the bathwater.

It is worth noting that a number of these “success” models which were popular in the 1970s have gone considerably out of fashion and some have even spawned reactions among Christians who believe that such practices sacrifice a biblical sense of the awesomeness and transcendence of God on the altar of appealing to the masses.

The Church Growth “principles” formulated by such gurus as Donald McGavran, C. Peter Wagner, and Win Arn have also begun to fall out of favor, and with good reason: they haven’t produced! According to Lutheran pastor, Curtis A. Peterson, this has not escaped the notice of the movement’s founders, who are at least honest enough to admit their failures.

C. Peter Wagner is quoted as saying, “Somehow they [the Church Growth principles] don’t seem to work.” In spite of everything they have taught and advocated, he sees the percentage of American adults attending church remaining almost the same, while Protestant church membership is actually declining.(8)

It wouldn’t be true to conclude that there are virtually no “points of light” amidst this darkness. As Peterson notes, “On the other hand, the rapid growth of several mainly independent mega churches is one of the most important developments in modern church history.”(9) But as a pastor of one of those mega churches, Bill Hybels, might say: when you “net it out,” the Church Growth Movement has over-promised and under-delivered while separating many Christians from a critical part of the church’s raison d’être: teaching.

It is not the case that the CGM intentionally denigrates Scripture, but they clearly misunderstand the proper relationship between the Bible and theology. They also have a dangerously naïve faith in the notion that what Ronald Reagan called “the magic of the marketplace” holds the key to evangelistic success. And once faithful pastors (of whom, thank God, there are still many!) begin to help their congregations sink their roots into Scripture they begin to absorb truths that call into question any marriage between evangelism and marketing. As Craig Parro warned:

Marketing solicits, woos and entertains. But the [Word of God] confronts; it calls to repentance and commitment. There is a judgment to be avoided, a hell to be fled, and thoughts to be taken captive. In the words of Lesslie Newbigin, “We must not leave our hearer’s worldview intact.”(10)

A marketing mentality, however, begins with the assumption that we can use our hearer’s worldview as the ground on which to stand as we “sell” him our “product” (which in this case, by mere coincidence, is the Gospel). It doesn’t warn him to flee from the ground on which he’s standing because that ground will be consumed by God’s judgment. Such a mentality will not risk offending the “customer” by advising him that his worldview itself is what makes him an enemy of God (Eph. 2:1-3; cf. Rom. 1:18-33), because it doesn’t want to risk losing the “sale.” And once the deal is closed and the sale is made, all that is left is to recruit the “customer” into our sales force. Thus evangelism has not only been reduced to marketing, but multi-level marketing at that! There are strong similarities between marketing evangelism and multi-level marketing:

As pastor Steve Schlissel has noted, multi-level marketing “literature is often liturgical in form. It contains praises for the company and /or its leaders, thanksgiving for its products, testimonies to the greatness of both, confessions of doubts and even songs of adoration.” He adds that for multi-level marketers “’church’ can meet in small groups (devotionals?) or large auditoriums. In the latter the atmosphere is truly reminiscent of tent revivals in both program and intensity.” Not surprisingly, the styles and techniques of multi-level marketing are mirrored in large segments of popular evangelicalism.(11)

Some may think we are being harsh in this assessment but our church culture is being more and more influenced by church growth gurus and televangelists and their marketing principles than by sound Bible teaching and solid doctrine.

…televangelists are helping to transform American Christianity from a church into a business, from a historic faith into a popular religion based at least in part on superstition. An examination of these trends indicates that marketing and ministry are now close partners. Each influences the other, and not usually for good.(12)

Despite a lot of talk about how believers should cultivate their spiritual gifts and grow in the faith, we’ve observed that many in the CGM at least act as though these goals can be pursued without a serious emphasis on teaching and have persuaded many that good marketing will grow the church. In addition, some have even taken an unbiblical separation between evangelism and doctrine to an extreme which appears to deliberately disparage doctrine. This may go a long way in explaining why pollster and CGM advocate, George Barna has discovered that only 9% of Evangelicals have a biblical worldview.(13) Why is biblical literacy and believers having a biblical worldview at such low ebb? That may be due to nearly 50% of pastors not having a biblical worldview.(14) The result is a doctrinal anorexia which in turn unwittingly jeopardizes real evangelism.

1 G. A. Pritchard, Willow Creek Seeker Services: Evaluating a New Way of Doing Church, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI , Third Printing, February 2000, 48
2 ibid, 49
3 ibid, 51
4 ibid, 51
5 ibid, 252
6 ibid, 243
7 Curtis A. Peterson, “A Second and Third Look at Church Growth Principles,” paper delivered at the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod’s Metro South Pastors Conference, February 3, 1993, Mishicot, Wisconsin, 13.
8 ibid, 3
9 ibid
10 Parro, “Church Growth’s Two Faces,” Christianity Today, June 24, 1991, 19. Cited in Peterson, ibid., 12-13.
11 Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and America Culture, Baker Book House, ( Grand Rapids, MI., 1991), 161
12 ibid, 11
13 Church Doesn’t Think Like Jesus: Survey shows only 9% of Christians have a biblical worldview; WorldNet Daily December 3, 2003; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35926
14 Only Half of Protestant Pastors Have A Biblical Worldview: http://www.barna.org/cgi-bin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=156&Reference=A

Some Christians have supposed that the choice is between a revolutionary stance and some kind of reconciliation. The Christian, it is assumed, is to choose reconciliation. But we cannot have reconciliation in a world like ours unless something happens first. We are headed for the disaster I have described above, and no nice soft talk of reconciliation and the contentless word “love” is going to have any meaning in such a setting. We must have something stronger.(1)

He was clear that there was a difference between being a cobelligerent and an ally. He was also very concerned about the churches abandonment of truth and the Scriptures:

Second, we and our churches must take truth seriously. The great tragedy is that in all our countries evangelicalism under the name of evangelicalism is destroying evangelicalism. Orthodoxy under the name of orthodoxy is destroying orthodoxy. Take the Free University of Amsterdam, that great school that under Abraham Kuyper really spoke for God, not only in theology but in its understanding of culture. Today the Theology Department in the Free University destroys the Scripture. In America it is the same. We have theological seminaries that call themselves evangelical and no longer hold to the Scriptures(2)

He was very unambiguous that truth and the Scriptures were of paramount importance. “We must practice truth even when it is costly. We must practice it when it involves evangelistic cooperation.”(3) Something with which we heartily agree and he went further:

Third, our churches must be real communities. With an orthodoxy of doctrine there must equally be an orthodoxy of community. Our Christian organizations must be communities in which others see what God has revealed in his Word. They should see that what has happened in Christ’s death and reconciliation on the cross back there in space and time and history is relevant, that it is possible to have something beautiful and unusual in our own generation.(4)

It is apparent that Schaeffer’s concerns and warnings went largely unheard and unheeded as truth and orthodox doctrine continued to give way to pragmatism, emotionalism, faddism, and figuring out ways to market the church. The result was a new sort of spirituality within culture in general and taking over church thinking:

Baby Boomers were “a generation of seekers.” Only 4 percent of them are atheists or agnostics. The rest follow some religion. Our declining moral standards are not because we are no longer religious but because we have changed religions. The noble search for expanded consciousness and alternative spiritualities in the ‘60s led East, where seekers discovered mysticism and returned to spawn a relativistic religious hybrid: Western spiritual monism.

This new pagan monism joins the Eastern religious idea that “all is one and one is all” to Western technology, democratic self-determinism and the ideal of autonomous egalitarianism. The whole clothed in “Christian” dress for general Western consumption.(5)

Against this backdrop, some were concerned about the viability of the church in an increasing anti-institutional and pagan culture. Professor Gene A. Getz of Dallas Theological Seminary, in response to challenges on this front by his students, spent time looking at the New Testament church which culminated with his book Sharpening the Focus of the Church. Through the prompting of a number of families Fellowship Church was founded in 1972 using the principles outlined in his book. The emphasis was on sound biblical teaching and fellowship with a view to training and preparing the believers to do outreach. In other words, against much of the common church practice of the day, Getz took the view that the ministry of the church is teaching, training, and equipping the saints during the corporate meetings and prepare them to perform the mission of the church (evangelism) outside the church. The result was that not only did his church grow spiritually and numerically but over the next four years they planted four other churches. Gene Getz went on to write other books which became very popular, The Measure of a Church and The Measure of a Man. Unfortunately, although these became popular study materials in churches across the country, many churches focused on the style and growth of Getz’s church rather than what he was teaching and the imitation of his style gave birth to yet another fad. Since Getz sat on a stool and used an overhead projector to teach, churches were abandoning the pulpits, getting overhead projectors and bar stools in order to attract people into their churches. Style rather than substance became the aspect to emulate.

Troubled Political Water…gate

In 1971 the Reverend Sun Myung Moon made his third visit to the United States. A few of his followers had been here for the previous decade but were ineffective at establishing his group and teachings. There had been a fair amount of infighting and little unity but this would change with the presence of Moon himself who began making common cause with conservative political figures.

In spite of the general mayhem college students had created in their protests over the Viet Nam war, President Richard M. Nixon was certain that most of the nation was behind his policies. He called this group the “Silent Majority” in a speech in 1969. He was apparently right and to the elation and seeming affirmation of the Conservative Intellectual movement and consternation of liberals was reelected by a landslide vote in 1972. Shortly after he was sworn in to office in 1973 the “Watergate” scandal started becoming the focus of public attention through the heavy influence of the media. Seemingly the distrust of conservatives by liberals and college students was vindicated by the 1972 break in of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. On August 8, 1974 Nixon announced that he would resign from office and he delivered a farewell address to the nation on the morning of August 9, 1974 and Vice-President, Gerald Ford ascended to the office of President. Talk of prosecuting Nixon was mounting and on September 8, 1974, President Ford issued a pardon proclamation for Nixon and gave his reasons for this to the nation. It seemed all the gains by conservatives up to this point were lost in one fell swoop.

Rev. Moon and his followers, who had been supporting Nixon through the Watergate scandal were disappointed with Nixon’s resignation but it did give them public exposure and introduction to a number of other conservative political figures. With new found notoriety and seeming establishment acceptance his group went on the recruit and established communes for their members who spent most of their day on street corners “fund raising” through selling flowers and candy. Not knowing what to do to rescue their kids from the “Moonies” some parents hired “deprogrammers” to kid knap their offspring from what was viewed as a new and dangerous religious group. The term “cult” began taking on new meaning to many as this phenomena grew.

On the political and cultural scene discussion regarding abortion was going on both inside and outside the church. The general feeling among Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians seems to have been in favor of such legislation.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had voted almost unanimously in support of a resolution affirming a woman’s right to have an abortion if giving birth would pose physical or emotional danger.(6)

With little resistance from the public or Fundamental and Evangelical churches at large the now infamous Roe v. Wade decision, legalizing abortion was handed down by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973. The engineering of social change advocated by Dewey and others in the 1930s which had gone on unchecked by Christians for nearly forty years was now working itself out in culture and law. New “rights” for one human being to choose to kill a human being of one particular class were “discovered” in the Constitution. The Social Darwinism of the 1930s was finally winning the day in court and indeed the culture. The lone dissenting voice seemed to come primarily from the Roman Catholic quarter.

In the midst of the chaos, crisis and change in culture, the church found itself seriously challenged and reacted to it in different ways. Through the 1970s at least four distinct movements with very different approaches emerged in response. We might call these, the Protecting, the Popular and the Political and the Prosperity Church Movements.

The Protecting Church Movement

One of the first groups to gain a large following was Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts (now Institute in Basic Life Principles or IBLP). Bill Gothard graduated from Wheaton College with a B.A. in 1957 and received his M.A. in 1961. His Master’s thesis was titled, A Proposed Program for Hi-Crusaders Clubs. He was very interested and active in youth ministry. Sometime around 1964, Gothard was invited to teach a course on youth ministry at his alma mater, Wheaton College. Forty-five students attended, including pastors, youth workers, and educators. The materials he presented at the time were later fine tuned and became the foundation for his seminars promoting what he called the “Seven Non-Optional Principles of Life.” Being only very loosely based on the Bible these “principles” were essentially a humanistic cause and effect way of living and promoted as the way to please God rigid sets of steps and principles which, it was taught, if faithfully followed would result in protection from spiritual, physical, relational and financial loss. His views were more akin to the ideas of the Behavioral Psychologist B. F. Skinner:

Skinner received his PhD in 1931. In 1936 he took an academic position at the University of Minnesota where he wrote The Behavior of Organisms and began his novel Walden II, about a commune where behaviorist principles created a new kind of utopia. He also began development of his controversial “baby box,” a controlled-environment chamber for infants (his second daughter spent much of her babyhood in one). Pigeons roosted outside his office window at the University of Minnesota, which gave him the idea to use them as experimental subjects — they became his favorite.

With pigeons, he developed the ideas of “operant conditioning” and “shaping behavior.” Unlike Pavlov’s “classical conditioning,” where an existing behavior (salivating for food) is shaped by associating it with a new stimulus (ringing of a metronome), operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behavior or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. Operant conditioning can be used to shape behavior. If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward. Skinner compared this learning with the way children learn to talk — they are rewarded for making a sound that is sort of like a word until in fact they can say the word. Skinner believed other complicated tasks could be broken down in this way and taught. He even developed teaching machines so students could learn bit by bit, uncovering answers for an immediate “reward.”(7)

In Skinner’s view by following a particular set of steps and principles humans could be programmed to live certain ways which would bring about rewards as a result of their behavior.

By following this sort of methodology and attaching Bible verses to the “non-optional principle” system, Gothard created, in effect, an Evangelical Talmud. Some may ask, “What is a Talmud?” The Talmud is the body of Jewish oral traditions extending back at least to the Babylonian Captivity which were written down and completed by the fifth century A.D.(8), and considered authoritative by the Jews. These were the same oral traditions that Jesus opposed in his rebuke of the Pharisees (e.g., Matt. 23).

Gothard’s first actual seminar took place in 1966 with 1,000 attending. There was some minor growth over the next several years (the combined total attendance for 1968 was about 2,000) but the early 1970s accelerated the growth of his ministry. According to Wilfred Bockelman in his book, Gothard – The Man And His Ministry: An Evaluation, the attendance in “1971, 12,000; 1972 over 128,000 including 13,000 in the Seattle Coliseum; in 1973 more than 200,000.”(9) Before you could say, “post-Watergate, social malaise,” Gothard’s public career ultimately outlasted that of most major rock-and-roll stars, including the Beatles (as a group at least), and his live audiences were at least as huge as those at rock concerts. Churches in every city, town, and hamlet in America were taking their young people to his seminars by the busload.
Gothard’s concepts were simple. Authority is like an umbrella and is a top down structure which must be listened to and unquestioningly obeyed. The stress was on external things, dress, appearance, and blind obedience which would bring about peace, harmony and protection. Association with anyone who didn’t not hold to and practice his “non-optional principles” and standards was to be avoided at all costs. To do otherwise might invite rebellion and the accompanying wrath of God for those who get outside of the “umbrella.” This reinforced in the hearts and minds of many very fine, very concerned Christians who were terrified for their children that they must hide and protect them from anyone outside their camp. Fear, concern and the consuming desire to protect our children may drive us to make particular decisions which in the end may have been the wrong decisions. Bill Gothard’s teachings were and continue to be an outworking of his humanistic external cause and effect answers to life. Keeping in the tradition of the previous generation of teaching, the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone was, on occasion, clearly stated. Sanctification on the other hand was essentially taught as something which happens from the outside in through a strict obedience to prescribed codes of behavior, dress, hair styles, and personal associations. Passages such as Philippians 1:6 “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” while acknowledged were little taught. The idea that not only is salvation accomplished by God but sanctification is in His hands as well has been displaced by the idea that with God’s assistance we must make ourselves holy. Extreme legalism became the badge of spirituality. Anyone who would dare question were automatically labeled rebellious and therefore in opposition to “Holy Living.” This worked quite well in many Fundamentalist and some Evangelical churches. It also continued the nearly forty year tradition of attempting to hide from culture and Bill Gothard seemed to be able to provide additional tools to fortify the fence which would protect believers from coming into contact with unbelievers or less holy believers and thus become spiritually contaminated.

1 Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the 20th Century, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL., Second printing 1971; 36.
2 ibid, 37
3 ibid, 38
4 ibid, 39
5 Peter Jones, Pagans in the Pews, Regal Books, A Division of Gospel Light, Ventura, CA, 2001, p. 30.
6 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1996; 156
7 A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, B.F., 1904-1990; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhskin.html
8 The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, edited by Werblowsky and Wigoder, (Massada, Press LTD, 1965), pp. 373-374
9 Wilfred Bockelman, Gothard – The Man And His Ministry: An Evaluation, (Santa Barbara, CA: Quill Publications, 1976) 35

When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, The age of Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius.

Harmony and understanding, Sympathy and trust abounding, No more falsehoods or derisions, Golden living dreams of visions, Mystic crystal revelation, And the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius, Aquarius
(1)

The entrance to the 1970s seems to have the word “crisis” written all over it. The Conservative Intellectual Movement had been strengthened as a force to be reckoned with through the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1968. All of this would be called into question a few years later with Nixon’s presidential scandal called “Watergate.” The word “cult” had taken on new meaning with the arrest and trial of Charles Manson and his “family” for the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1968 and 1969. Although the horror of this crime rocked the nation it didn’t seem to occur to many that the Mason Family actions were just consistently carrying out the world view which most of the educational system had been teaching for over 30 years. It is probably unfortunate for Charles Manson, “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins and the others that the inimitable Clarence Darrow wasn’t alive to defend them. He may very likely have been able to defend them to an acquittal with exactly that defense:

In a widely publicized case a year before the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial,” Clarence Darrow successfully defended two university students against the capital offense of murdering a boy for the intellectual experience of it. Argues Darrow, “Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it?… Your honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”(2)

As author Philip Yancey points out:

In short, the reducers offer little compelling reason why we as humans should rise above the behavior of beasts rather than mimic it. Adolf Hitler said it well: “Nature is cruel, therefore we too can be cruel.” (3)

During the early ‘70s, the “revolutionary” fervor that had gripped so many of the youth began to cool. Toga parties were replacing campus sit-ins. Why? “The Establishment” had had enough of ‘60s “fun and frivolity” and things began to get, well, scary. In the shadow of the May 4, 1970 Kent State University Massacre, the Woodstock generation woke up to the fact that radicalism could cost some of them their lives. This was definitely not cool. Revolution was not supposed to be dangerous! And commitment to a cause was sooooooooo 1950’s. The ‘60s “radicals” that wreaked such havoc was made up of a small percentage of true Marxists bent on destroying “Amerika” and the capitalist system through revolution, and a much larger percentage of kids that were just trying to save their skin while having the time of their lives. The self-righteousness earned from protesting society’s evils was a plus. Rebellion could be fun, but seeing as how the prospect of being killed was a big reason why this second group was protesting Vietnam in the first place, getting shot on campus seemed to defeat the purpose. When the Vietnam War finally ended, there seemed little to care about for many young people, aside from where to take their next toke on a joint, or where to have their next sexual encounter. So, while the older generation was relieved its children were no longer about the business of tearing down “the Establishment,” new fears dawned of a directionless generation with declining scholastic aptitude, addicted to gratification and sexual freedom.

We feel to again reiterate that it was the violent and worst behaved of the 60’s generation that got all the press. There were innumerable young people in the 1960’s who never protested the war, or were involved in radicalism in any way. Countless young people of that generation didn’t “do drugs,” beyond the occasional aspirin. But since so many of the former 60’s “radicals” are the present day establishment—the academic elite of our universities and those who dominate the culture and the media—they still get all the press! They have been able to self-righteously frame the period as they wished, propagandizing the succeeding generations with tales of the pristine purity of their motives and incontestable rightness of their cause, while ignoring the disastrous fall-out of their rebellion. Rather than coming to terms with the damage done, they have been able to romanticize the era as one of America’s best. On the contrary, the Psychedelic 60’s had taken a massive toll on our nation’s moral and ethical health—Humpty Dumpty has not to this day been put back together again and more to the point, does influence the church.

Many of the colleges and universities who worked so hard at training their students to do the very things they did, were mystified as to why they were acting that way. It appears that the ability to put together the cause of teaching and effect of behavior still escapes these institutions:

Still, deconstructing Western civilization remains a central mission of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Its professors regularly denounce Eurocentricism and competition, and students sign up for popular courses like Education for Social and Political Change.(4)

The Court-Martial and trial of Lt. William Calley for the March 16, 1968 My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam began on November 12, 1970. The claim by Calley and others that they were “simply following orders” as they rounded up and killed 347 unarmed men, women and children further solidified the motto “question all authority” among the college crowd.

“Ministers and Marchers”

The issue of segregation came to the forefront of both culture and the church through the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr., a theological liberal backed predominately by liberals had pressed for equal rights. Fundamentalist and Evangelical conservative churches were, at best, uncomfortable with this movement and resistant to change. Although Billy Graham had effectively insisted on mixed audiences in his crusades this had not worked at the local church, Bible College or Seminary level at this point. African-Americans continued to be unwelcomed in white churches, Bible Colleges and Seminaries. Jerry Falwell seemed to speak for the feeling of most churches in his 1965 speech and booklet “Ministers and Marchers” for which he publicly repented in the 1970s.

To his credit, Falwell faced his past squarely and apologized for it. He went to individual black ministers, told them he had been wrong in some of his past attitudes, and asked for their forgiveness.(5)

Falwell made amends for his “Ministers and Marchers” sermon in similarly open fashion. He called a press conference at which he explicitly repudiated the assertions that ministers ought to stay out of politics as “false prophecy,”(6)

The attitude of the church was changing in the early 1970s as desegregation began to become the norm. Jerry Falwell’s church began one of the then popular “bus ministries,” in this case to minority neighborhoods and in 1971 his Thomas Road Baptist Church performed its first baptism of an African-American. Also in 1971 Bob Jones University allowed African-Americans to begin attending but forbade interracial dating and marriage.

The church, like culture, continued in other areas of transition in the late 1960s particularly from sound thinking and sound doctrinal teaching to more of a mystical “sound bite” faith. Belief in absolutes continued to be more and more regarded as narrow minded, unkind, unloving and perhaps even evil. As the cry-baby boomer generation (of which the authors must admit membership), came into its own our culture has transitioned from “If it feels good, do it” to “If it feels good, believe it.” Instead of our faith being “all about God and His will,” it continued to become more “about us and our feelings.” Harmony, trust for everyone, affirmation that all beliefs are equally true was, in some circles, the order of the day.

In the face of this, church fads also became more the norm for generating church growth. Fundamentalists had watched a church in the factory town of Hammond Indiana grow to mega church status with their bus ministry. Since evangelism had become something which happened more inside of church than outside of church the way to get unbelievers in was through the burgeoning bus ministry. One of the important things which fundamentalists and evangelicals share is their zeal to proclaim the gospel as well as to affirm the essentials of the faith. Our concern is that the very zeal, which was wonderful about them, can lead into fads and approaches which in the end sidetrack into being more focused on the method than on the reason for the method, to glorify our Lord, Jesus Christ. Soon, every church was buying a bus and attempting to imitate this new methodology. Booklets were written and seminars given on church growth via bus ministry. Certainly, some were brought to the faith through this endeavor but the real ministry of the church, teaching, training, equipping and encouraging believers had been displaced by recruitment into the newest fad.

Robert Schuller’s church, the Crystal Cathedral, which had been founded primarily on Maslow’s psychology and focused primarily on how to self-actualize, and meet the hierarchy of needs by teaching the Bible through the grid of psychology and self-esteem was setting trends in church growth. Schuller wasn’t shy about his anthropocentric theology and seems quite convinced that being Theo-centric is actually a bad thing.

For decades now we have watched the church in Western Europe and in America decline in power, membership, and influence. I believe that this decline is the result of our placing Theo centric communications above the meeting of the deeper emotional and spiritual needs of humanity.(7)

Schuller’s shift in theological thinking was not new but rather the fruit born from the shift which began at the turn of the Nineteenth Century:

Even books on theology changed their order of things so that the theology of man took on greater and greater importance. Theologians previous to Friedrich Schleiermacher of Germany generally considered theology to be the study of God, and that from knowing God one could gain insight into His creation, including the nature of man. However, Schleiermacher included self-consciousness in his theology, whereby subjective experience gained a foothold alongside revelation.(8)

In this shift preaching and teaching had less to do with truth and sound doctrine and more to do with the question of “How do we get more people in to our church?” From a human perspective this is pretty understandable in light of the waning influence of the church:

First, Americans simply did not go to church in great numbers in the nineteenth century. Many estimates place church membership at around 7 percent at the dawn of the nineteenth century and only 15 percent by 1850, after the so-called Second Great Awakening.(9)

The solution at that time came in the form of a young attorney turned preacher by the name of Charles Finney:

All that began to change in the 1740s at the time of the Great Awakening and the preaching of George Whitefield. When the embers of this time or revival died down, the church went into a drought. Church attendance began to dive, theology lost its appeal, the teachings of the Enlightenment began to catch on, and Deism became popular. By 1800 the American church was in a dismal state and ripe for anything that would offer some kind of spiritual sustenance. The Second Great Awakening, which began in 1801 in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, would fill that void and forever change Christianity in America. Sermons of substance were replaced with emotional appeals. Doctrine was replaced by stories, and the preacher’s performance became more important than what was taught. Music took on a central role as emotionalism became the order of the day. Ministers began to study “what worked” in order to draw a crowd. Charles Finney would perfect all of this, changing the heart and soul of the church. In other words, church services became a form of entertainment.(10)

Watching the seeming “success” of Finney, pastors began using his marketing principles and style. Story telling, using the Bible of course, substituted for preaching and teaching. Preparing the environment for the consumer in order to make the final pitch of the gospel with an altar call directed the product packaging. The ministry of the church, worship, preaching, teaching and preparing the saints for the work of service (Eph 4:11-16) was replaced with the mission of the church (the proclamation of the gospel). Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in full bloom of its success:

Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s wrote an insightful analysis of American character and culture. De Tocqueville argued that Americans’ “self-interest” was an “irresistible force” and profoundly shaped how Christianity was presented.

De Tocqueville reported that pastors had lost all hope of contradicting American’s basic self-interest. Picture Americans’ self-interest as a swiftly flowing river. Instead of trying to row upstream, pastors decided to guide the boat downstream.

They turn all their thoughts to the direction of it [self-interest]. They therefore do not deny that every man may follow his one interest, but they endeavor to prove that it is in the interest of every man to be virtuous.(10)

What seems to be so little recognized today is that Finney himself saw his attempt as a failure.

Joseph Ives Foot, a Presbyterian minister, wrote in 1838: ‘During the ten years, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, were annually reported to be converted on all hands; but now it is admitted, that his [Finney’s] real converts are comparatively few. It is declared even by himself, that “the great body of them are a disgrace to religion.”(12)

Never-the-less, Finney’s methods became part of the fabric of the church and Robert Schuller was the latest salesman for the marketing method.

1 Aquarius, from “THE AMERICAN TRIBAL LOVE-ROCK MUSICAL – HAIR “, James Rado and Gerome Ragni with musical score by Galt MacDermot. First opened at the Public Theater in New York on October 17, 1967.
2 Philip Yancey, Rumors of Another World, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003) 22
3 ibid, 23
4 Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San Francisco, CA; 2002) 257
5 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1996; 219
6 ibid
7 Robert H. Schuller, , Word Books, Waco, TX, 1982; 12
8 Martin and Deidre Bobgan, Against “Biblical Counseling” For the Bible, EastGate Publishers, (Santa Barbara, CA; 1994) 34-35
9 Gary E. Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market: The Church in the Age of Entertainment; Xulon Press, (Fairfax, VA; 2002) 31-32
10 ibid, 32
11 G.A. Pritchard, Willow Creek Seeker Services:Evaluating a New Way of Doing Church, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 1996: 251
12 Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism; The Banner of Truth Trust, 1994; 289

Pushing the envelope on peak experience through drugs and Eastern religions, Timothy Leary founded his own church in 1966:

By September, even as his Playboy interview hit the newsstands, Leary was back on the religions track, calling a press conference to announce that he was establishing his own psychedelic church to be called the League for Spiritual Discovery. Its message was “Turn on, tune in and drop out” – admittedly a catchier slogan that “solipsistic nihilism.” People who cared about consistency had reason to be confused. Was getting high a form of religious expression? Or was it an activity that the government could regulate, like drinking alcohol? Of course, very few heads cared about consistency. Nor, certainly, did Leary.”(1)

The mood in culture was to “find myself.” The Beatles keyed in on and helped to more popularize what Leary was doing with their 1967 release of their album “Magical Mystery Tour.” Discovering who I am and why I do what I do, began and ended with me and my experience, as college kids themselves began embracing Hinduism, if not as a religion as least as their guiding worldview. The lyrics from this album became part of their belief system and they moved into the drug culture and, following Leary’s example and motto, “Turned on, tuned in and dropped out.” This fit in fairly nicely with the contributions which Carl Rogers had made:

Peter D. Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac, credits Rogers with an “extensive contribution to contemporary culture, to our sense of who we are.” As to the nature of that contribution, Kramer sums it up nicely: “For Rogers, the cardinal sin in therapy, or in teaching or family life, is the imposition of authority.

As this mood and thinking continued to grow it would alarm most of the nation in the not too distant future.

At the same time, 1966, Tim LaHaye set forth his answer as to why we do what we do through occultism and astrology with his best seller Spirit-Controlled Temperament. LaHaye’s book was based largely on the writings of a Norwegian theologian, Dr. Ole Hallesby:

LaHaye introduced the four temperaments to evangelical Christians in 1966. The four temperaments had virtually been discarded after the Middle Ages and discounted as a valid means of understanding people, until a few lone souls discovered them among the relics of the past and marketed them in twentieth-century language. One of those lone souls was Dr. Ole Hallesby, a Norwegian theologian who wrote Temperamentene i krstelig lys, published in 1940 and translated into English in 1962 as Temperament and the Christian Faith. LaHaye says he “drew extensively” from Temperament and the Christian Faith in writing his book Spirit-Controlled Temperament, which was published four years after the English translation of Hallesby’s book.(2)

The four temperament personality theory had its beginning about 500 years before God the Son incarnated as Jesus Christ. It worked with the Greek philosophers teaching that fire, air, earth and water are the universe’s four primary elements.

Each had specific qualities of warm, cold, dry, and moist with fire being warm and dry; air being warm and moist; earth being cold and dry; and water being cold and moist. Because of the inherent mixture of cosmology with myth, each element also had its corresponding god or goddess.(3)

Hippocrates further developed the ideas of Empedocles and applied them to illness. He:

…taught that there were four corresponding bodily fluids or humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. He theorized that health depended upon the proper balance of those humors in the body and that illnesses were caused by imbalance of the bodily fluids.(4)

Hippocrates is generally credited with the humeral temperament theory or personality, since he connected the types with both mental and physical states. For example, blood, being warm and moist, made the cheeks rosy and promoted a cheerful (Sanguine) temperament. Phlegm, on the other hand, was considered cold and moist and brought about watery-looking, colorless skin and a bland or sluggish temperament.(5)

Plato further expanded on this to the effect that the “qualities of the elements and the constitution of the humors related directly to behavior.”(6) The combining of the of the signs of the Zodiac, the four temperaments and the four humors were used by physicians and philosophers from then until about the Middle Ages to diagnose and treat sickness and for understanding people. Carl Jung wrote on the connection:

In his book Psychological Types, Carl Jung also clearly notes the relationship between astrology and the four temperaments. He says:

From the earliest times attempts have been made to classify individuals according to types, and so to bring order into the chaos. The oldest attempts known to us were made by oriental astrologers who devised the so-called trigons of the four elements – air, water, earth and fire. The air trigon in the horoscope consists of the three aerial signs of the zodiac, Aquarius, Gemini, Libra; the fire trigon is made up of Aries, Leo, Sagittarius. According to this age-old view, whoever is born in these trigons shares in their aerial or fiery nature and will have a corresponding temperament and fate. Closely connected with this ancient cosmological scheme is the physiological typology of antiquity, the division into four temperaments corresponding to the four humours. What was first represented by the signs of the zodiac was later expressed in the physiological language of Greek medicine, giving us the classification into the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic. These are simply designations of the body. As is well known, this typology lasted at least seventeen hundred years. As for the astrological type theory, to the astonishment of the enlightened it still remains intact today and is even enjoying a new vogue.(7)

On the one hand LaHaye claimed to reject psychology and psychiatry and it is unclear how much material he used outside of Hallesby’s book. Did he understand the occult and astrological core and influences on his answers to why we do what we do? We cannot say for sure but with the change from a theo-centric theology to a human centric theology aided by the influence of psychology on culture and the church, it is little wonder that this fad would become so widely accepted in the church even though it had already been rejected by psychology. LaHaye also used elements of Freud and Jung in his temperament scheme. Freud believed that the “unconscious” had unseen forces which caused individuals to do what they did. LaHaye also incorporated Jung’s Introvert-Extrovert typology. So while on the one hand he claimed to reject psychology (and would likely state the same for occultism and astrology), he brought a combination of some of the worst psychology had to offer along with occultism to answer the question the apparently less informed Apostle Paul answered theo-centrically in Romans with the result of coming to radically different answers.

Robert Schuller also was busy building his church in California with a view to answer this question. His answer was directly and unapologetically drawn from psychology. The problem isn’t that we are sinners according to Schuller. Maslow has it right! The problem is that we have low self-esteem. Schuller who holds to the views espoused in the human potential movement, is fairly upfront in his rejection of a theocentric view:

For decades now we have watched the church in Western Europe and in America decline in power, membership, and influence. I believe that this decline is the result of our placing theocentric communication above the meeting of deeper emotional and spiritual needs of humanity.(8)

He also points out:

Other classical systematic theologians would begin with the doctrine of God. But this is part of the reason the church is in the predicament it is in today.(9)

Starting with God as the center and focus truly does expose us as sinners who do what we do as a result of our sinful nature. In Schuller’s teaching, what we really needed to do is abandon that archaic and uniformed view and adopt Maslow’s more spiritually enlightened teachings. However, if anyone is sketchy about the superiority of psychology over Scripture to answer the questions about why we do what we do, Dr. Schuller certainly makes sure to disabuse them of that notion:

Are we aware that theology has failed to accommodate and apply proven insights in human behavior as revealed by twentieth-century psychologists?(10)

All of this will have a very big impact on the church over the next 30 years. Schuller would rely heavily on this as he modernized the methodology of how to better market to non-Christians in order to get them into church and “evangelize” them. The alter calls would be replaced by more sophisticated psychology talks with verses sprinkled here and there to give it a sort of Christian feel but the most important thing to do is to make people feel good about themselves.

This could be the most important chapter in the book; it is the crucial step in the process of getting to feel really good about ourselves.(11)

None of this “O wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:24) nonsense. Bring in those unchurched folks and help them self-actualize by building up their self-esteem and meeting their hierarchy of needs.

Chaos Reigns

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the explosion of a cultural crisis with the “counter cultural revolution.” Some of America’s youth began marching against the “establishment,” and were anti war, anti capitalism, advocated “free love” as part of the sexual revolution and many other areas which had up to this point been part of the fabric of a generally conservative America. Into this mix stepped Bill Gothard with his Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts to the rescue.(12) Bill Gothard was a theological and philosophical eclectic who developed his seminars around what he called the Bible’s “seven non-optional principles of life.” Fearing that the culture would further infect their young folks, (a fear we can certainly understand) and with the newfound ecumenism, Christian parents and churches began attending the 32 hour seminars by the busload. As with other popular fad teachers of this time, Bible verses were sprinkled into the seminar to give the points the air of credibility. Unfortunately anything approaching real hermeneutics and sound Bible teaching were abandoned in favor of “it works.” A cause and effect mechanistic approach guided by the emotions of “it works” was promoted as being the key way of determining what is true. Sound biblical teaching was further forsaken in favor of gaining personal infallible inspired interpretations of Scripture which often were in direct conflict with what was actually written. Pragmatism (it works) and mysticism more and more became the order of the day for the church and culture by the end of the 1960s.

1 Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) 117
2 Martin and Deidre Bobgan, Four Temperaments, Astrology & Personality Testing, EastGate Publisher, (Santa Barbara, CA; 1992) 50-51
3 ibid, 19-20
4 ibid, 20
5 ibid, 21
6 ibid, 21
7 ibid, 27-28
8 Robert H. Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, Word Books (Waco, TX; 1982) 12
9 ibid, 36
10 ibid, 27
11 ibid, 108
12 For a more detailed look at this see our book A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard and the Christian Life, Don Veinot, Joy Veinot & Ron Henzel; MCOI (Lombard, IL; 2003)

…politics was important and time was running out. It was not enough to proclaim their ideals and anathematize the forces of darkness. The defense of Western civilization required that their ideas be implemented, and the war could not be fought solely in academic journals or in National Review. Sooner of later the conservative intellectual movement, if it wanted to succeed, would have to shape political forces and prevail in the political marketplace. It would have to do more than stand athwart history, yelling “Stop.” (1)

.John Dewey and other Social Darwinists in the 1930s regarded the educational system as the way to bring about social change and set about the task of changing culture. By the 1960s most of the educators, attorneys, doctors, politicians, and Supreme Court Justices and many ministers had been trained in that system. Realistically John Dewey and his followers were every bit as anti-intellectual as the fundamentalists they so loved to attack. For nearly 30 years now their primary concern was changing society not reading, writing and arithmetic. The fruit of their labor began manifesting itself in the 1960s under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

In 1961 the Supreme Court referred to secular humanism as a religion. We would agree that it is a religion but one that is in direct conflict with the Declaration of Independence which asserted a Creator, creation and inalienable rights which come from the Creator. Up until this time the nation had lived on the borrowed capital of Christian morals which could now begin to be swept away. In 1962, after a 300-year tradition, the Supreme Court banned Bible reading and prayer from the public classroom(2) as well as a number other rulings which served to alarm the culture.

Finally, the trend toward majoritarianism was enormously stimulated by a series of Supreme Court decisions that aroused not just conservative intellectuals but broad segments of the populace which right wingers could now, a long last, cultivate. These included policemen and law enforcement officials enraged by Court decisions which protected the “rights” of criminals; millions of Americans who could not understand why the “rights” of atheists should prevent the voluntary reading of the Lord’s Prayer and the Bible in public schools; Americans angry about “permissiveness” and Court rulings on pornography; politicians astounded by the Court’s reapportionment decisions; and the anti-Communists alarmed at the Court’s continual blows at congressional investigations and cold war legislation.(3)

The Supreme Court had become an activist organization which had the virtually unchecked power to carry out the social change which they had been taught in school. The cultural battle lines were now clearly drawn for all to see. The next few decades continued to witness the meshing of the worldview indoctrination promoted by Dewey and the “self actualizing” of the baby boomers by apply the “virtue of creative rebellion” as espoused by Mazlow.
Although horrified by these developments the fundamentalist and evangelical church still remained largely uninvolved with cultural issues, viewing them as “the social gospel” which in their minds detracted from the gospel of salvation.

No Stops Signs at the Crossroads

On February 7, 1964 The Beatles arrived in America from England. After becoming the most successful rock musicians in the western world, they went east in search of spiritual enlightenment. They were quite instrumental in popularizing Hinduism and eastern thought with the current crop of college students. And there were a lot of college students—by 1967 fully one-half of the U.S. population was less than 21 years old and by 1968, it had become frighteningly obvious in the anti-war protests how much damage these youths could do! The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as notorious crimes like the “hippie” Manson murders added to the social turmoil, and to the fears of traditional and law-abiding Americans. The decade of the 1960s became the crossroad intersection with no stop signs where the competing worldviews and philosophies were about to collide.

It would be unfair to caricature the whole of the ‘60s as one, long, hippie love-in. In the early ‘60s, youth rebellion had pretty much been limited to the occasional street and motorcycle gang. With a president who mirrored their own youthful idealism, this generation exchanged their Mickey Mouse ears for membership in the Peace Corps, and for them the future seemed to be full of hope. Young people believed they were able to isolate American political demons and send Freedom Riders to exorcise them. But, with the JFK assassination, youthful idealism began to fade, and with the troop buildup in Vietnam, it seemed ready to disappear altogether.

It helps to remember that the discovery of the German concentration camps and the Jewish Holocaust was only about 20 years old back then. And the post-World War II, Nuremberg, war-crimes trials had left the world to ponder the haunting refrain that was used to justify more than ten-million, savage murders: “We were only following orders.” In light of this monumental horror, it might seem only natural that the next generation should recoil from the dangers of unquestioned authority.

The fruit of the previous decades which had been cultivated in the institutions of higher learning were able to witness the maturing of their views. College students began “self-actualizing’ through “creative rebellion” in ways that would terrify their parents. By all accounts, the “Free Speech Movement” on the campus of Berkeley University in 1964 (a symbol of student protest in the ‘60s) was almost a religious experience for those in attendance. The violence that later came to characterize the ‘60s can be seen as youthful idealism turned angry.

The vast majority of these young people of the 60’s were among “the best and brightest” of their time and would have been so in any generation before or since. But, their parents reasoned, if tomorrow’s leaders were brawling with the local “fuzz” in Chicago, blowing up college buildings, burning draft cards, inciting to riot, taking drugs, challenging traditional sexual morality, listening to raucous music, and making a general nuisance of themselves, what hope was there for the future? Shaking off the vestiges of society’s “Christian hangover,” all traditional moral values were questioned by the young and summarily discarded, in favor of the new moral values spurred on by youthful idealism, Marxist philosophy and human centered psychology. While the WW2 generation was thrown completely off guard and didn’t know what to think about their offspring’s radical bent, the younger generation judged the older generation’s “morality” by their new “enlightened” moral system. How could “the older generation” make a claim to morality, the thinking went, when they allowed materialism, racism, sexism, and all those other evil “isms” to flourish without protest under their watch? New “sins” rapidly replaced the old. Sex before marriage, for example, couldn’t be a sin, since it “didn’t hurt anybody.” But war, for whatever “good” reason—was obviously a SIN!

The older generation’s problem in defending their culture was similar to the churches’ problem of the past century, when their Christian faith began to be challenged by emerging philosophies. Even though the Bible commands believers to be prepared to give a reasoned defense for their faith, they had no idea of how to defend it, because never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that they would have to. The walls were high, the fortress impenetrable. In the same way, the WW2 generation felt that American culture and values were safe and in fact, had experienced resurgence in religious interest since they had only recently rescued the world from Nazi Germany, and life was good. In their minds, the superiority of American culture, morals, and worldview was self-evident. Certainly they never expected to have been confronted and condemned by their own children, for whom they had sacrificed and to whom they had handed the world on a platter.

In 1964 the Conservative Intellectual Movement shifted from talking about conservatism and jumped into the middle of the election process backing an Arizona Senator by the name of Barry Goldwater that did not go well:

The crusade of 1964 ended, of course, in overwhelming electoral defeat. Nevertheless, for conservative intellectuals it was an intensely educational experience. One lesson drawn by many of them was that the campaign revealed the immense power and blatant bias of the news media and the utter unscrupulousness of their presumably responsible liberal foes. It was, said Buckley, a “vile campaign,” and conservatives were deeply stung and embittered by it. “Goldwater Republicanism is the closest thing in American politics to an equivalent of Russian Stalinism,” said Senator Fulbright. “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” said Martin Luther King. “All we needed to hear [at the Republican convention] was ‘Heil Hitler,’” commented Governor Brown of California. “[The Republicans] had Mein Kampf as their political bible,” charged the mayor of San Francisco. “Goldwater is mentally unbalanced – he needs a psychiatrist,” said Walter Reuther. These and other statements by responsible liberals had a searing and lasting impact on the intellectual Right.(4)

Not only were fundamentalist and Evangelicals concerned about where they thought society was heading but the conservative intellectual movement in 1964 was voicing the same concerns:

Radicalism was “the logical conclusion” of the inherent egalitarianism and relativism of the liberals. What was the hippie counterculture, with its call to “do your own thing,” but “an extreme extension” of liberalism’s relativist assault on the verities of the West?

One alarming and saddening aspect of the crisis, for conservatives, was that at times it seemed so inevitable. For years they had inveighed against pernicious doctrines espoused by entrenched elites in the universities. Now, they charged, the chickens were coming home to roost. In the early 1960s, well before the decay had become outwardly visible, Richard Weaver trenchantly exposed the intellectual heresy that was allegedly sapping the foundations of our culture. For fifty years American education had been controlled by “revolutionaries” whose “grand pundit” was John Dewey. For fifty years America had been the victim of an unprecedented and

Systematic attempt to undermine a society’s traditions and beliefs through the educational establishment which is usually employed to maintain them…. The result has been an educational system not only intrinsically bad but increasingly at war with the aims of the community which authorizes it…

(5)

Fundamentalists, Evangelicals and intellectual conservatives saw a crisis coming and it seemed little could be done to prevent it.

Endnotes:

1 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 238

2 The Supreme Court overturned a Maryland law (specifically, Art. 77, Sec. 202 of the Annotated Code of Maryland). According to the text: “The rule provided for the holding of opening exercises in the schools of the city, consisting primarily of the ‘reading, without comment, of a chapter in the Holy Bible and/or the use of the Lord’s Prayer.’”

3 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 234
4 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 274
5 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 282-283

The final phase was the penetration of Pentecostalism into the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches as “charismatic renewal” movements… 1

This phase proved to be enormously effective in its influence:

Strangely enough, these newer “waves” also originated largely in the United States. These included the Protestant “Neo-pentecostal” movement which began in 1960 in Van Nuys, California, under the ministry of Dennis Bennett, Rector of St. Marks Episcopal (Anglican) Church. Within a decade, this movement had spread to all the 150 major Protestant families of the world reaching a total of 55,000,000 people by 1990.2

It should also be noted that at an earlier time the Episcopalians had attempted to integrate psychology with their faith:

Shortly after the turn of the century there was a direct attempt to bring psychological principles together with Christianity. This was the Emmanuel Movement, which was started by Episcopalians. They were eclectic and drew from a variety of sources, including Freud, Janet and James. Their methodology seemed to vacillate between attempting to work directly through the subconscious and to appeal directly to the will through reasoned discourse.3

Our interest here is not really in the debate over whether or not the sign gifts are extant in the Church today nor that one denomination was necessarily better or worse or more responsible than any others. All believers share this history, for better or worse. There are many fine believers on both sides of the issue of the continuation of the sign gifts but that discussion doesn’t really deal with the core issues of the faith. Rather, this topic falls in to, like so many other issues, important but secondary doctrines of the faith. What we might call the mechanics of the faith (how God does something) versus the essentials of the faith (deity of Christ, salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, the physical resurrection, etc). The big question we are asking is, was this an outpouring of the Holy Spirit or simply Maslow’s “self actualization” and a resultant spiritual emotionalism? The widespread acceptance of the “charismatic renewal” brought with it something that no one really anticipated which had both positive and negative aspects of influence in the Church.

On the positive end a new sense of unity came about as believers crossed denominational lines to fellowship with one another. They would pray together and jointly share the experience of the Holy Spirit. The desire on the lay level to share the gospel and see new believers get involved in churches, regardless of denominational affiliation seemed to be fostered. Being “doctrinaire” (elevating denominational positions over a relationship with God and other body members) began to fall in disrepute. The progressive slide away from sound teaching and toward determining truth by one’s feelings would further prepare the way for the age of church fads, of which there would be many.

1960 also saw the advent of Christian television. Christian media began to establish itself though organizations such as CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network):

Forty years ago, one could have reasonably suggested that Pat Robertson was stretching his imagination when he named his broadcasting organization, located in a defunct Portsmouth, Virginia, TV station, The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Not only was CBN the first Christian television station in Virginia, it was also the first in the nation. Forty years later, no one can dispute that CBN is one of the largest television ministries in the world. Moreover, with its many subsidiary and affiliate organizations, CBN goes beyond the bounds of broadcasting in its mission to reach the world with a message of hope from the Bible.

The story of CBN’s birth and early years is documented in Pat Robertson’s autobiography, Shout It From The Housetops. Founded on January 11, 1960, CBN first went on the air on October 1, 1961, on WYAH-TV (from Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God), a UHF television station with barely enough power to reach across the Portsmouth city limits. With a modest income from a few local supporters, CBN began broadcasting live half-hour programs from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. every night. Gradually, the broadcast day was expanded to 5:00 p.m. to midnight. Because Robertson refused to accept commercial advertisements, paying for programming was out of the question. A few free travelogue films were used to fill in the blank spots.

In the fall of 1963, CBN conducted its first telethon to raise the $7,000 per month needed for the following year’s budget. Robertson told viewers that a “club” of 700 contributors, each giving $10 a month, would enable CBN to meet its expenses. As guests appeared to sing and share their religious experiences, Robertson invited the audience to pray for the 700 supporters who would help keep CBN going. Though its financial struggles continued, CBN had taken an important step in building community support for the ministry.

A year later, the “700 Club” telethon was an important turning point for CBN. This telethon generated more contributions than the previous year’s but not enough to meet CBN’s growing budget. Then, in the final minutes of the broadcast, a remarkable outpouring of spiritual revival began to sweep through the viewing audience. Throughout the next several days, callers flooded CBN with prayer requests and pledges of financial support to CBN. A year later, Robertson added a program to the end of his station’s broadcast day that followed the telethon format¾ prayer and ministry coupled with telephone response. He named it The 700 Club, hoping to build on the audience that had become familiar with CBN’s telethons. The program’s audience grew as other stations began carrying the show.

Today CBN is a multifaceted nonprofit organization that provides programming by cable, broadcast and satellite to approximately 180 countries, with a 24-hour telephone prayer line. Chief among CBN’s broadcasting components is The 700 Club, a daily television program featuring Pat Robertson, Terry Meeuswen, Lisa Ryan, Gordon Robertson, Kristi Watts and news anchor Lee Webb. On the air continuously since 1966, The 700 Club is one of the longest-running programs in broadcast history. Seen in 96% of the television markets across the United States, the show’s news/magazine format presents a lively mix of information, interviews, and inspiration to an average daily audience of one million viewers 4

Others, such as the late Kenneth Hagin, began radio ministries in the 1960s. About 12 years after the founding of CBN, TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) was born:

TBN began with a dream. A vision. To build a Christian television network that spans the whole world. From a humble beginning in 1973, the dream grew. And grew. And grew. More and more people caught the vision of TBN’s founders; Paul and Jan Crouch.
TBN is now the world’s largest Christian television network. Across America and around the world TBN is carried by TV stations and cable systems to millions of homes. As a matter of fact, TBN is seen on over 3171 television stations, 21 satellites, the Internet and thousands of cable systems around the world. And the number continues to grow! 5

Christian publishing and Christian bookstores gained a new momentum with a wider potential customer base which has turned into a “$4.3 billion retailing market.”6

In writing about televangelism, Quentin J. Schultze observes a correlation between the use and growth of television by Pentecostal and charismatics and the growth of Charismatic practice and its displacement of doctrine:

Christianity Today magazine commissioned a Gallup Poll in 1979 to determine how many charismatics and Pentecostals there were in the country. The magazine found that 19 percent of all American adults considered themselves to be Pentecostal or Charismatic Christians – an almost unbelievable figure. Moreover, the charismatic movement stretched across the spectrum of organized American Christianity, from Roman Catholic (18% charismatic) to Baptist (20%) to Methodist (18%) and to Lutherans (20%). However, only a small fraction (17%) of those who called themselves Pentecostal-charismatic actually spoke in tongues. In other words, the rapidly growing charismatic movement of the 1970s and 1980s was distinguished more by its style of religious expression than by its beliefs or doctrines, more by how it worshiped than whom or why it worshiped.7

With the growth of these Christian media markets, discernment and critical thinking continued shrinking in deference to experience.

In all its dimensions the charismatic movement seeks to turn loose the personality of the believer and the personality of God in the act of worship. In other words, this expression of faith has never been based primarily on traditional practices, scriptural interpretation, preaching or the sacraments. It was always centered on personal experience, with the song leader or pastor establishing the direction of the experience.8

The Christian public had been persuaded to believe that if something was on a Christian television station, Christian radio station, spoken by an all knowing televangelist or printed by a Christian publishing house and in a Christian bookstore; it was and remains to be regarded as Christian with a capital “C.” Unfortunately, it isn’t so. In fact, there are many Pentecostal and charismatic pastors and leaders who are as concerned as non-charismatics about the false doctrines and false teachers which populate the television and radio airwaves as well as publishing houses and bookstores. They just do not have as large and visible a platform. Their attempt as well as that of apologists to bring experience to conform to Scripture within the Body of Christ finds their message is falling on deaf ears for the most part.

1 Vinson Synan, PhD., “The Origins of the Pentecostal Movement,” The Holy Spirit Research Center, January 4, 2002, p. 12; http://www.oru.edu/university/library/holyspirit/pentorg1.html
2 ibid, p 13
3 Martin and Deidre Bobgan, Against “Biblical Counseling” For the Bible, EastGate Publishers, (Santa Barbara, CA; 1994) 40
4 http://cbn.org/about/
5 http://www.tbn.org/about/tbnstory/index.htm
6 http://www.familychristian.com/corporate/
7 Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI; 1991, 81
8 ibid, 82

I shall insert here what may seem obvious: I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world-situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel is between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. (William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom>/em>,” (with a new introduction by the author), Regnery Gateway (Washington, D.C.; 1992) lx)

This work sparked quite a controversy as he brought into the light of day the worldviews which were being communicated at Yale. He was quite clear that if Yale’s alumni were in favor of knowingly and intentionally financing an institution which had become largely one of atheism and collectivism, that was fine. However, he was convinced that the alumni were unaware of Yale’s educational theory at the time. Buckley was quite correct that the most important “duel is between Christianity and atheism” and this duel extended into educational theory and the university.

Even as the ink was drying on Buckley’s book, Abraham Maslow was recruited in 1951 by the founders of Brandeis University to develop a psychologies study for their new institution. This new position gave him a great deal of credibility and the opportunity to effectively train a large priesthood for his new religion:

The prestige and intellectual cachet of his new position gave Maslow a degree of professional visibility he had never enjoyed during his years at Brooklyn, and the appearance in 1954 of Motivation and Personality, a compilation of his articles on self-actualization, was a career-making event. Maslow’s view of motivation had immense appeal for students of education, social work, management and other branches of applied psychology. It released them from the burden of having to defend traditional moral codes that they personally considered outdated or overly harsh and imbued them with a sense of mission. An army of counselors, therapists, trainers, and enlightened teachers would be needed to satisfy the deficiency of America’s young and not-so-young, lifting them to the level at which they would be able to take charge of their own personal growth. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) 54)

In his book, Motivation and Personality he began introducing his readers to the idea of “peak experiences.” It is very likely that he was influenced in his thinking in this area by the 1901 book by Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness. In that book, Bucke:

…argued that about six hundred thousand years ago the human race made a giant evolutionary leap from simple animal consciousness to self-consciousness. According to Bucke, Homo Sapiens are on the brink of another such transformation, a giant leap forward to the stage of “cosmic consciousness.” Since such important evolutionary changes don’t take place all at once, a few exceptional individuals has already moved to the next level, among them Jesus Christ, Buddha, St. Paul and Mohammed. In all cases, added Bucke, their transformations were associated with a life-changing mystical experience that occurred around the age of thirty. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) 55)

The idea of psychology and psychotherapy as a religion which freed oneself form the moral and social constraints afforded s superior godlike being originated early in the century by Carl Jung . The idea of a form of “self actualization” also began with Jung who called it “self-deification” or “individuation”:

Analysis became an initiatory process, a descent into the unconscious mind in order to spark a process of individual transformation through a direct encounter with the transcendental realm of the gods. Just as the Last Supper became the central event upon which the mystery of Communion in the Roman Catholic Mass was based, Jungian analysis became a ritualized reenactment of Jung’s own inner drama, a story of heroic confrontation with the gods that is enshrined as the sacred myth of analytical psychology. For those who survived an encounter with the god or gods within, Jung promised rebirth as a true “individual,” free from all the repressive mechanisms of conventional beliefs about family, society, and deity. The successful survivors of such pagan regeneration became reborn, spiritually superior “individuated” beings. (Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, (New York, 1997,) 141)

Harold McCormick (the McCormick’s were one of America’s three wealthiest families) and his wife Edith Rockefeller McCormick (the Rockefellers were also one of the three America’s three wealthiest families) were very involved with Jung.

Rather than always have one foot in and one foot out of the magically unreal community of spiritual seekers around Jung, he now felt part of their mission. As others in analysis in Zurich found, the war [1st World War] seemed to heighten the social cohesiveness and group identity of the Jungians. Harold finally saw the need for spiritual rebirth of the world and was certain that Jung was the man to bring it about. His conversion was complete. (Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, (New York, 1997,) 214)

Although this didn’t happen in Jung’s lifetime, now Maslow, his new religion and army of priests which were being trained would have a significant impact not only on the next decade, but through the balance of the 20th Century, both in culture and in the church. Some of his friends and associates, Abbott Hoffman, Timothy Leary and Carl Rogers would serve to advance the cause of psychology, hierarchy of needs and peak experiences very successfully in the years to come. At the same time, some of the concerns fundamentalists had voiced about neo-evangelicals would begin manifesting themselves and seemingly vindicate their whole position, including introducing this new religion into the core of the church. John Dewey’s idea of changing culture through the educational system was in full swing and Marxism/Socialism was gaining momentum through this vehicle. Many of these tributaries will begin converging and restructuring the thinking and behavior of culture and the church in the next decade.