What went wrong--and how to fix it

A Judeo-Christian Challenge to Modem Thought and Culture

How Now Shall We Live?

By Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey

Tyndale House, 1999

572 pages, cloth, $22.99

ISBN 0-8423-1808-9 Conservatives have often concentrated on winning political battles, while leaving the culture firmly in the hands of liberals. Despite the victories of the Reagan years and the conservative takeover of Congress, "progressives" continue to dominate the art world, the educational establishment, the entertainment industry, the media, and other culture-making institutions. The inevitable consequence has been family breakdown, sexual promiscuity, abortion, crime, and educational fraud, as well as the inability to distinguish between elephant dung and actual works of art.

No wonder conservatives are frustrated, with some pulling back from politics and others pronouncing the culture war lost. A new book by Nancy Pearcey and Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live?, is perhaps the best answer to this dilemma. It shows how the various secularist ideologies responsible for our Gomorrah-bound slouch are actually as weak as a house built on sand. And it gives specific examples and practical suggestions for how to take the culture back and how to place it on secure foundations.

Charles Colson, an inspirational speaker whose story is told in Born Again, is a former Nixon aide who went to prison in the Watergate purge (something about having a single unauthorized FBI file, as opposed to the current White House, which had boxes full of them). In the midst of his legal troubles and imprisonment, Colson converted to Christianity, and, after his release, went on to launch Prison Fellowship, a ministry to convicted criminals whose success-rate in reducing recidivism is unmatched. (In New York, the recidivism rate of inmates who participated in Prison Fellowship programs fell from 41% to 14%.)

Nancy Pearcey [see "Conservative Spotlight:' HE, Oct 22, 1999, page 19] is a gifted intellectual and writer who has worked on worldview issues since studying under theologian-philosopher Francis Schaeffer at L:Abn Fellowship in Switzerland in the early 1970s. She is the head of Colson's brain trust and is policy director of the Wilberforce Forum, a think tAnk connected to Prison Fellowship.

Directing a staff of writers, she is also largely responsible for "BreakPoint," Colson's daily radio program of cultural commentary. In addition, Pearcey is managing editor of the journal Origins and Design and a fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Her articles have appeared in such publications as First Things, American Enterprise and Books & Culture, and she is co-author (with Charles Thaxton) of an earlier book titled The Soul of Science.

Worldview That

Corresponds to Reality

This latest book amounts to a "cultural apologetic." Instead of defending Christianity by philosophical proofs of the existence of God, and the like, the book argues that the Judeo-Christian worldview set forth in the Bible corresponds with reality-as it is actually lived by individuals and societies. Not only that, the secular ideologies that people try to use as a substitute for truth-the various humanisms, socialisms and mysticisms-are catastrophic failures.

This work is also a good introduction to "worldview criticism," a mode of analysis that penetrates to the assumptions about reality that underlie human ideas, expressions and systems.

Pearcey and Colson argue that every ideol, ogy, every worldview, is, in effect, religious. "Modem pluralistic society," they write, "provides a smorgasbord of worldviews and belief systems, all clamoring for our allegiance.

And whether their trappings or terminology are secular or religious, all are in essence offering means of salvation-attempts to solve the human dilemma and give hope for renewing the world."

From Marxism to pragmatism, from postmodernism to the New Age movement, each worldview has a doctrine of Creation (a vision of what is real), the Fall (what our problem is), Redemption (how the problem is to be solved), and Restoration (how we should then live).

Using this model, the authors scrutinize the whole menu of contemporary secular belief systems. Science, for example, functions for many people today as a religion. The book quotes the late astronomer Carl Sagan on his hope for salvation through the discovery of extraterrestrial lifeforms, which, he believed, would give us earthlings information as to how we can solve our problems "of food shortages, population growth, energy supplies, dwindling resources, pollution, and war."

The book gives a fascinating account of the new "design theory," which shows that the gene amounts to an encoded language that is irreducibly complex and could not have arisen merely by chance. Other scientific discoveries point to the same conclusion:

that the objective universe is not the result of mere random events, but was designed.

The book is also illuminating on the origins of the sexual revolution, laying bare the crackpot mystical utopianism of Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Wilhelm Reich, and other apostles of salvation through promiscuity. Simply quoting these people in their own words should be enough to keep anyone from talang their ideas seriously, yet their ideas continue to ruin lives today.