The third note said, “God is the world’s greatest abortionist. 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage within two weeks. That’s intelligent design in practice!” Unsurprisingly, this note was provoked by a column I wrote on the topic of abortion. There was little sense in responding to this note since its contradiction was self-evident. In sentence one (“God is the world’s greatest abortionist”), the author accuses God of killing babies on purpose. That’s what an abortion is—an intentional termination of pregnancy. In sentence three (“That’s intelligent design in practice!”), the author accuses God of killing babies by accident, apparently because God is not intelligent enough to design miscarriage-proof babies. The further insinuation is that if God cannot create babies with a success rate above 75 percent, then He cannot possibly have created the universe.
Of course, even a mentally handicapped child knows the difference between harming someone unintentionally and harming someone on purpose. Who could possibly fail to grasp the parallel difference between abortion and miscarriage? One is an intentional act, the other isn’t.
Frustrated by the stupidity of the notes and by their anonymity, I spoke to the professor who occupies the office across the hall from my mailbox. I just asked him who had been leaving the notes. I first suspected it was a graduate student, but I was wrong. According to the professor, who can see my mailbox directly from his office, it was a fellow professor who was leaving the notes. That professor should have grown out of the practice of leaving anonymous notes, but at this point that is unlikely to happen. He is over fifty years old.
The case of the professor who leaves anonymous notes for his colleagues is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with Godless progressivism. This professor has had tenure for years. His tenure protects him from ever losing his job for saying something controversial. But he doesn’t believe in God, and without God, there can never be real security. That is why so many progressives are so lacking in courage once they step outside of the classroom and away from a captive audience of teenagers.
I share this with you because this is where progressivism can lead students who don’t grow out of it quickly. Unless you choose a radically different path, one day you’ll lack the ability stand up for the truth because you will have convinced yourself that it doesn’t really exist. I want you to lead a better life—one in which you may be ridiculed for standing up for things you believe to be true. It is the only life worth living. It beats the alternative of anonymously defending your unbelief.
Zach, your willingness to hear challenges to your progressive beliefs over the past year has been extraordinary. It’s an unusual student who is willing to reconsider, based on facts and logic, once he has adopted the angry attitudes of his liberal professors. But I hope you can be an even more extraordinary person. I want you to become a lightning rod for the truth—a man constantly pushing buttons and constantly causing people to come after you. I don’t want you to end up an old man sneaking down a hallway and leaving anonymous notes for people you are afraid to confront—just because they hold ideas you cannot rebut.
I won’t be writing again for a couple of weeks, during the usual end-of-semester time crunch. But after I finish my grading I’ll be heading back out to Colorado, and when I get there, I’ll write you again—this time on the subject of the experience I had that caused me to abandon progressive politics altogether.
Meanwhile, I hope your exams go well!
PART TWO
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
“Political problems, at bottom, are moral and religious problems.”
—Russell Kirk
LETTER 27
The Constitution Is Dead (Because God Isn’t)
Dear Zach,
It’s hard to believe we’ve been corresponding for more than a year now. Once again, the weather here in Colorado does not bode well for the global-warming apologist. It is 48 degrees in the middle of the day in the middle of May—exactly one year after I wrote my first letter to you from this same spot. The light mist has just turned into a light rain.
During the course of the past year, we have discussed some problems with the progressive worldview. You’ve seen some logical errors in progressive thinking—and also some signs that a leftist worldview can have strange effects on the people who adopt it.
Now I want to get to the heart of the matter. Progressive politics—in fact, the whole progressive worldview—is really built on one huge mistake.
As I write, the clouds are descending upon Pikes Peak and making their way toward my little cabin at the base of the mountain. It is so much like that afternoon in March of 1996—March to be exact—when I walked inside the gates of a prison in the Andes Mountains just outside of Quito, Ecuador. The weather was the same that day, but everything else in my life was different then.
I was an atheist trying to save the world. I was also a criminologist and an aspiring journalist hoping to change what was going on inside those prison walls. I did not know that what was going on inside those walls would forever change me. The existence of God, the fallen nature of man, and the source of our inalienable rights would all come into focus in a few short hours.
That prison was the closest thing to hell I have ever seen.
First I made a brief visit to the inside of a thirty-six-square-meter cell packed with forty-five inmates. There was the unbelievable stench of rotting meat being thrown into vats of boiling water to make it barely edible for the inmates. There were puddles of urine mixed with fecal matter sitting near broken and rotting pipes. There was the young man I saw being badly beaten by baton-wielding guards. I still remember the sound that club made as it struck against his bones. He was probably no more than eighteen years old.
At the end of the prison visit, I met a man who was awaiting trial for petty larceny. Even though punishment for the offense was usually only a couple of months, he had already been in prison for two years awaiting his trial. I spoke to him about his plight. He told me he missed his wife and his little girl. But there was a peace about him that still haunts me to this day.
Inside that man’s bunk were a Bible and a picture of Jesus. The man’s eyes filled with tears as he thanked me for coming to talk to him that day. “No one knows we are here,” he insisted. “No one cares that we exist,” he added as he smiled and shook my hand.
There are political consequences to religious principles. As a matter of fact, political differences tend to boil down to religious differences, when you get to the heart of the matter. There is a statue of the Virgin Mary that sits atop a hill overlooking that small prison. It was the first thing I saw after the guard shut the prison gate behind me. I stood there in the light drizzling rain and stared up at that statue. “I was wrong,” were the only words that came to me. I was looking upward as I spoke them audibly.
What I meant to say was that I had been wrong about atheism and the path I had been following for years—a path toward a worldview based on moral relativism. That path had led me nowhere. No honest person can witness the things I saw and hear about the things I heard about in that prison and flippantly dismiss right and wrong as cultural conventions.
The clubbing of the boy was simply wrong. Serving rotten meat to prisoners is simply wrong. Shocking confessions out of prisoners by wiring their genitals to car batteries is simply wrong. Telling prisoners they are free to go, shooting them in the back as they are walking out of the prison gates, and then reporting the incident as a thwarted escape attempt is simply wrong.
And of course it does not matter where or when such things take place. They are wrong everywhere you go. They will still be wrong long after you and I are dead. The moral law is not contingent upon our feelings or our perceptions. It stands outside of us and is eternal.
Think about the following question for a moment: If you suddenly decide the law of gravity is relative—that it’s not a universal absolute—will you go floating off into space? Of course you won’t. It is the same with the moral law. You cannot esc
ape it. It is written on your heart, but it is not bound by the thoughts or feelings of any man.
That afternoon in Ecuador, I came to understand that the source of that moral law written on everyone’s heart is God. That’s why I believe that God is seen most clearly when we cast our eyes upon abject evil. C.S. Lewis said that the shadow proves the sunshine. The shadow simply cannot exist without the light.
That day at the prison is also the point at which my progressive political beliefs began to unravel.
As I said earlier, there are political consequences to religious principles. Again, as a matter of fact, political differences tend to boil down to religious differences, when you get to the heart of the matter. There is a reason, for example, why the atheist is more likely than the theist to see our constitution as a living, breathing document. Because he does not believe in God, he cannot believe in an absolute moral law or in God-given rights. He thinks rights are given by man. But if that’s true, man can also take them away.
Beware of the man who believes our constitution is living and breathing. In all likelihood, he believes that God is dead. As Dostoyevsky taught us, if there is no God, then anything is permissible—including torturing prisoners to get confessions, suppressing free speech, and cruel and unusual punishments—all the things that our “dead” constitution prohibits.
What I began to understand in that Ecuadorean prison so many years ago is that everything good, right, and true in this world depends on God. Wherever the reality of his existence and his standards are rejected—well, let’s just say that the results are really ugly.
What I am asking you to do at this point is to take a definite stand on the side of the good, right, and true and against the ugliness that’s so apparent in some of the politics on our campus. I hope that by this point in our correspondence you’re convinced that facts and logic are on the conservative side of the argument. But now I am asking you to take a leap beyond facts and logic—into faith.
In my next two letters, I’m going to tell you the stories of two men who did just that.
LETTER 28
Like a Good Neighbor
Zach,
Jimmy Duke was a NASA engineer who sometimes attended our church in the early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, he had left his job as an engineer to start his own insurance agency with State Farm. As the result of a tragedy, he had also left the church, and he wouldn’t return for about thirty years.
The tragedy did not affect his family but instead that of a good friend. It all happened quite suddenly. His friend’s young daughter was thrown from a car and killed instantly when she was struck by another car moving along the highway. Jimmy could not understand the death of his friend’s young daughter. He simply could not square it with the idea of a loving God. So he left the church. That’s how a lot of people leave the church, I’m afraid.
At first Jimmy Duke didn’t really stop believing in God. He just questioned God’s moral authority to take the life of an innocent child. But once you declare God to be an unjust God you begin to move toward atheism. No one wants to believe in a God that isn’t just. So eventually they just stop believing.
In 1976, Jimmy Duke became my pitching coach on a team called the Red Sox, which eventually won the Little League Championship (with me playing first base). As a die-hard Yankees fan, I can hardly believe that I once wore a Red Sox hat. But I’m glad I did. It gave me a chance to become better friends with the coach’s son, Jim Duke, who was also a pitcher. We had actually known each other since we were in the same second grade class in 1972. But playing together on a winning team made us much better friends.
In 1977, my family moved into Jim Duke’s neighborhood. We lived just one street away from my former teammate and former coach. So we became even better friends in our junior high and high school days. Long after I went off to college at Mississippi State, and even after Jim went to its SEC rival, Auburn, we remained close friends. Jim was a groomsman in my wedding in 2003.
Good, solid, long-term friendships are of immense value—especially when tragedy strikes, as it did in 2005. Jimmy’s ex-wife, Sandy Duke, was diagnosed with cancer and died during the late summer of the year. The last few weeks of the sickness were brutal. She was in constant pain and in need of constant supervision. Thank God that Jim and Jimmy were both living and working nearby, and thus able to be there in her last days on earth.
Sandy and Jimmy had divorced in the late 1980s, but they had a strong friendship in the years that followed. Their relationship was so good that Jimmy and his second wife Linda were both regular visitors at the hospital during Sandy’s last days. The way they treated one another after their divorce was a good example for their children, Jim and Gwendolyn. But it was more than that. It was also a good example for all who knew them.
Jimmy was devastated when Sandy passed away. The senseless death of a child had driven him from the church thirty years before. So he had no church to help him process Sandy’s slow and painful death. There was a void in his life and he knew it. Senseless human suffering may have driven him away from God. But, now, senseless human suffering was drawing him back.
He was certainly confused. So one day he walked into Barnes & Noble and began perusing the apologetics books in the religion section. There were so many of them that he left the store in frustration on several occasions. After a few weeks and more than a few visits, he settled on a book called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek.
Jimmy read the book from cover to cover. Then he read it again. And then he read it a third time. Somewhere in between, he read the Acts of the Apostles from the New Testament. When he was done with his reading, he made a full and complete return to Christianity.
Then Jimmy Duke called a meeting of all his employees at State Farm. There were several dozen of them. Jimmy’s business had grown a lot since the 1970s when it was just Jimmy and a secretary in a cramped office next door to a 7-Eleven convenience store. As the employees sat and listened attentively, Jimmy told them he had just had a religious conversion, and he wanted to let them all know how it was going to affect them as employees.
Jimmy started out by telling all the employees that they could go to the Holy Land any time they wanted, if it was something they desired to do. He said that he would give them time off from work and that he would pay for their trip. Then he went on to say that he would pay their tuition if they wanted to take courses in religion at one of the local colleges or universities. Finally, going even further than that, he offered to pay for their divinity degrees if any of them felt called to serve the Lord in ministry. Then he simply dismissed the meeting and walked out of the room.
Everyone in the office must have been stunned by the sudden turn of events. But it would not be the last time they would be stunned by a sudden turn of events in Jimmy Duke’s life. Just a few months after his conversion, Jimmy was diagnosed with a rare blood disease. By the summer of 2006, he was lying on his deathbed. It was only about a year after Sandy had passed away.
That was a tough period for my friend Jim. Within the span of that next year, he had to watch both of his parents die. Fortunately, Jimmy’s death was a little faster and less excruciating than Sandy’s. In fact, the ending of Jimmy’s life really was a happy one, and I mean that literally. As Jimmy Duke lay dying, his son asked him how he was doing. He was too weak to speak, so he reached for a pen and a piece of paper. He wrote only one word in response to Jim’s question. That word was “HAPPY.”
To the best of my knowledge, that was the last word Jimmy Duke ever expressed on this planet. For thirty years, he was angry at God. But in the end he was happy. He died happy, and there is only one explanation for that happy ending.
But I’m not done with the story yet. I decided to write a review of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, the book that helped lead Jimmy Duke out of his unbelief and toward a very happy ending.
Actually, I had intended to review I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an At
heist for quite some time. Rush Limbaugh’s younger brother David had recommended it to me back in 2004. When I heard about Jimmy’s conversion, I decided to make the review of the book an unusual one. I would simply tell his conversion story and let it speak for itself.
The day I ran my column on TownHall.com, I got a “thank you” call from Frank Turek, who lives just four hours away from me in Charlotte. Later that day, I got another special call. It was Frank’s co-author, Norm Geisler. Norm was calling to tell me that the column moved him so much that he was brought to tears before he finished reading it. Talking to him was a great honor and a great source of joy. We would finally meet in person in the summer of 2010, largely as a result of the column—but I’m getting ahead of myself now.
There was a reason why Norm’s call meant so much to me. I used to read his books when I had realized I was lost and was making my way back to Christianity. It was almost too much to digest—how people like Jimmy Duke continue to influence lives even after they are gone. But Jimmy’s influence on my life was just beginning.
Over the course of the next two years, I became very good friends with Frank Turek. In the spring of 2008, Frank would be the first person to tell me about a great place in Colorado called Summit Ministries. Early that summer, Frank called Summit President David Noebel to tell him he should invite me to speak at one of their student worldview conferences. In July, I flew to Colorado to speak at Summit. The experience changed my life.
In 2008, I spoke at just one Summit student conference. In 2009, I spoke at three. In 2010, I moved out to Colorado for the entire summer in order to speak at seven consecutive student conferences. That first full summer in Colorado was great. While I was there, I met Norm Geisler. I also met a lot of great college students who were serving as Summit staff members.
Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand Page 11