Page 4481 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Pentecostal World Conference “offers Pentecostals an opportunity to be a unifying force in a divided world.”

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About 25 percent of the world's Christians are Pentecostal or charismatic, historian Vinson Synan, dean of the Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, told the triennial Pentecostal World Conference (PWC) in Seoul in September. An estimated 450 million are charismatic or Pentecostal.

"The continuing explosive growth of Pentecostalism indicates that the renewal will continue with increasing strength into the next millennium," Synan declared. "Not only is growth occurring in eye-catching megachurches, but in tens of thousands of small local churches that are planted each year in big cities and remote villages."

PWC chair Ray H. Hughes says two-thirds of Pentecostals live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. "PWC offers Pentecostals an opportunity to be a unifying force in a divided world," Hughes said.

Missions expert David Barrett told CT that the Pentecostal and charismatic church is growing by 19 million per year.

On September 25 in Olympic Stadium, 100,000 Pentecostals from more than 60 countries gathered at a closing service sponsored by the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, and the Foursquare Gospel church in South Korea. Church banners decorated the stadium, and hundreds of balloons formed a cross.

South Korean Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil expressed his government's gratefulness for the prayers and contributions of the Pentecostal movement. Christianity has surpassed Buddhism as the major faith in South Korea.

During daily sessions, prayers were offered for the economic situation in Asia, peace in the Middle East and Albania, and on behalf of the persecuted church.

The next world conference will be held in Los Angeles in 2001 and will be chaired by Thomas E. Trask, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, based in Springfield, Missouri. The first such international gathering took place in 1947 in Zurich.

Pentecostalism

Rusty Wright in San Jose, Costa Rica

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In a flurry of activity, Latin American Christian media and church leaders are linking to blanket their continent with the gospel by the century’s end.

Dubbed “the Thousand-Day Plan,” the campaign involves mobilizing Christians to pray and fast, saturating the airwaves with programs and commercials pointing audiences to Christ, conducting evangelistic campaigns, and training disciples. The plan blends mass media with personal contact.

In September, media and church leaders from across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking North and South America convened in San Jose, Costa Rica, for COICOM ’98, the confederation of Iberoamerican communicators. COICOM president Raul Justiniano, a Bolivian broadcaster and also the Thousand-Day Plan president, challenged coworkers to combine holy lives, evangelistic passion, and technological expertise to finish the task.

Justiniano says Iberoamerica has 600 million people in 300 cities in 26 nations. Latin America has 600 Christian-formatted radio stations, about 100 television stations, nearly 15 satellite radio networks, at least one satellite television network, 500 publications, and nearly 5,000 independent producers. COICOM believes the stage has been set for massive outreach (CT, Nov. 17, 1997, p. 82). Efforts to date have included a “World Cup” edition of the Jesus film featuring testimonies of Brazilian soccer players, prolonged citywide evangelism in Monterrey, Mexico, and stadium rallies in the Dominican Republic.

- More fromRusty Wright in San Jose, Costa Rica

by Alex Buchan, Compass Direct

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India’s Christian leaders are putting pressure on the government to stop a tide of violence against Christian workers in the wake of the September 23 gang rape of four nuns in Madhya Pradesh State.

The assault occurred after 15 to 20 men dragged four Catholic nuns—all under age 35 and from Tamil Nadu—from their convent. One of the men earlier had feigned sickness in an unsuccessful effort to coax the nuns outside. The nuns operate a medical clinic as part of the work of their order, the Foreign Missionary Sisters.

Suspecting an attack, they barricaded themselves in the convent’s chapel, but later opened the doors when the men assured them there would be no violence. The gang rapes then occurred in a nearby field.

Police arrested five people the following day. Christian leaders are pressing the government to protect religious minorities, noting a rise in anti-Christian attacks. Archbishop Alan de Lastic wrote a strongly worded letter to the nation’s president warning that the Christian community is “feeling insecure and disturbed at this increasing violence against them.” Protestants make up a third of India’s 25 million Christians.

The attack came two weeks after the first National Consultation on Reconciliation, Religious Liberty, and Social Justice convened by the Evangelical Fellowship of India. More than 150 Protestant church leaders warned, “If we keep sowing the wind of hatred we shall reap the whirlwind of violence and destruction. The hatred, often spread by religious leaders, has already caused incalculable suffering to the families of the victims of riots, terrorism and religious persecution.”

- More fromby Alex Buchan, Compass Direct

Smart Cards, Silly People

Recently, I have spent an irrational amount of time trying to calculate the intrinsic value of a thinner wallet and a lighter purse (my wife’s purse, that is). This bothersome question arose as I followed the progress of New Jersey’s plans to implement the nation’s first government-issued smart card. The governor’s spirited initiative is entitled Access NJ, and it would establish a precedent-setting program that begins with a digitized driver’s license. Initially, a motorist’s picture, driving record, signature, and fingerprint would be stored on his or her individual card, and in subsequent stages, insurance, credit, bank records, medical information, and other personal data would be added. All of the specific-use plastic and paper cards we carry and the services they represent would be combined into one convenient—and very smart—personal identification card.

I work for a New Jersey legislator, so I was not unaware of the program that narrowly failed in June when controversy prevented the bill from being posted for a floor vote in either the senate or the assembly. The barrage of voices that rose from an unusual coalition of religious conservatives, free thinkers, and civil libertarians caused enough hesitancy in the legislature to put the program on hold.

Commercial smart cards are becoming more prevalent here and abroad, but they have been issued by private industry, predominantly banks or short-term authorities (like the one used by patrons at the Atlanta Olympics). To date, no state in the Union has produced a smart card.

When the smart-card headlines succumbed to fresher topics, I was left alone with my query concerning my wallet. I was trying to figure out exactly when our walk through the technology bazaar became a forced march. And I wondered how many questions we consider appropriate to raise before we make peace with the latest marvels.

Technology stop or yield signs are hard to define and defend, and we have yet to set the limits that would at least frame a thorough debate on things like smart cards. Invasion of privacy is certainly a valid argument, but it needs some persuasive allies in order to insert a persuasive wedge. A good starting point is the incongruity of a government producing a smart card.

The commercial interest in smart cards is clear enough; it has been reported that they reduce per-transaction costs from a quarter to a penny. Government enthusiasm is more difficult to understand. Indeed, the leaner, meaner efficiency such cards so proudly offer is noticeably incompatible with the bureaucracy that proposes to issue them.

We Americans are a diverse and cluttered people. The venerated wisdom arising from the colonies was decidedly in favor of inefficiency, even the sloppy, wasteful kind that prefers motion without effect to hasty accomplishments. The bicameral legislature and separation of powers conceptualized and created by this nation’s founders were not intended to be compact and always practical, and they are anything but efficient.

Obviously, they were designed to fracture governmental potency into less threatening pieces dependent on the intangibles of cooperation, and waiting. Our forefathers knew that budgets would be delayed, projects suspended, and energy wasted, and they understood the virtue of mandating such unbecoming safeguards.

The smart-card mentality doesn’t like such hindrances. It would argue for a single branch of government, a streamlined command unencumbered by prudence, protest, or delay. Separation of powers makes us clumsy; why not instead one orderly whole? Perhaps a single building could handle all of the affairs of government; though that may seem alarming, it really is not, and the savings are too great to ignore. We will be fine. Such consolidations are expressly prohibited by the Constitution, but a tidy restructuring is sure to simplify our lives, and we can rest assured that our technological prowess will provide a continuation of the independence we all expect. OK?

Debate on the smart cards will soon resume here and in other states close behind. In the meantime, I have promised myself that I will regularly extract a dollar bill from the limited assets within my impractical billfold and stare at it. I will contemplate anew the unique, stirring remainders of the beautiful inefficiencies of our freedom, and I will trust in God. I may count the numerous cards within and be grateful for little checks, little balances. I will let myself be inspired by remembering that a cluttered wallet is an ideology to be preserved and defended, and that one made thinner by being relieved of the bulkiness of liberty is none the better.

William Crew is director of communications for Assemblyman Jack Gibson (N.J.).

Dogma

“I sit there every Sunday and I feel nothing,” says Bethany. “I can remember sitting in church when I was a kid and being moved—like everything meant something, like I was important. And the stories of all these holy people were so inspiring. Now I sit there and think about my checking, and what I’m going to wear to work the next day.”

It sounds like something straight out of a Bill Hybels book. But it’s not. It’s from the script for Dogma, a forthcoming film by Kevin Smith, one of Hollywood’s coarsest—and most popular—directors. Smith’s previous film, Chasing Amy, centered on a young man’s love for a lesbian. Now he has turned his sights on the ills of religion—specifically, Catholicism.

Here’s the basic plotline: Once upon a time, the Angel of Death, at another angel’s prodding, decided to become a conscientious objector. For their insolence, God banished them to Wisconsin for the rest of history. But the angels (played by Hollywood darlings Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) find a “loophole” that may allow them to return to heaven. In an effort to get more people into church, one Catholic parish has reinstituted plenary indulgences, but only as a special, one-time offer. Those attending the church for the rededication ceremony will receive a clean slate morally, and all their previous sins will be forgiven. So the angels set out to enter the church.

There’s only one problem: God doesn’t allow loopholes. If the angels manage to finagle their way back into heaven, negating their banishment, all of God’s other decrees will be up for grabs as well, from “Let there be light” on down. Existence will be canceled. So the forces of God enlist humans to stop the angels.

First on their list is Bethany, a counselor at an abortion clinic (and a descendant of Joseph and Mary). She meets up with Silent Bob and Jay—lovable dope-dealing characters from the director’s past three movies—and Rufus, the thirteenth apostle (left out of gospel accounts because he was black). I won’t spoil more of the plot; those who want to read a version of the script can do so at the semiofficial Web site (http://www.newsaskew.com).

Thus far Dogma may sound like just another antireligion flick created by a pagan filmmaker. But there’s a wrinkle. The script is often critical of Christian (especially Catholic) practices, but not so much of Catholic doctrines. It has a deeply “inside” feel to it—as if it were written by an editor of the Door, if he were Catholic and potty-mouthed.

As Ben Affleck told the online entertainment magazine Mr. Showbiz, “Smith is a devoutly religious Catholic. This is a criticism of the Catholic Church by someone who was raised in it … and grew up within it. He’s a firm believer in Christianity and God and a believer in the Catholic doctrine.”

But Smith doesn’t make movies to preach. Instead, he makes them to deal with his own life. If he satirizes others, he satirizes himself even more. The inspiration for Chasing Amy, Smith has said, was his own struggle in dating a woman far more sexually experienced than he.

Likewise, in Dogma it’s clear that Smith is working through questions about his own faith. Unfortunately, while he regards the church with vigilant skepticism, he swallows Hollywood’s favorite religious dogmas without blinking.

“So if we’re so wrong, then what’s the right religion?” asks Bethany.

“When are you people going to learn?” comes the answer. “It’s not about right or wrong—it’s a question of faith. It doesn’t matter what you believe in—just that you believe.”

In Smith’s p*rno world, the church’s role is simply to inspire, and faith is simply a good, even necessary, thing to have, like a balanced diet, an exercise schedule, and the Star Wars movies on video.

And God? He hardly makes an appearance in the film, either in depiction or discussion. All we know is that he/she really likes to play Skee-Ball on the weekends (and he looks a lot like Alanis Morisette—don’t ask). Smith’s faith isn’t even based on belief. As Rufus (played by Chris Rock) puts it, God prefers ideas to beliefs:

I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can’t generate.

What Smith is left with is a religion without claims to being right, one that changes its definition of sin with the times, one that is itself always changing, run by a God who’s absent because he/she’s off playing Skee-Ball.

In that case, I’ll be the one rooting for the Angel of Death.

Ted Olsen is assistant editor of Christian History.

Roy Anker

Earlier this year the American Film Institute made headlines with a list of the 100 best American films. We asked regular reviewers Roy Anker and Peter Chattaway to give us a modest counterpart: their 10 favorite films. Herewith their lists:

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Roy Anker

Favorite doesn’t necessarily mean best (though most here are), for these choices depend as much on personal history as cinematic merit. Kafka wrote that art is the “ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us,” and so all these, showing both dark and bright, shook this soul.

The Godfather Saga (dir. Francis Coppola, 1972-90). This wrenching fugue on moral decay has the “blackness of darkness” (Melville on Hawthorne, with whom Coppola belongs). At once inescapable and self-chosen, an appalling evil devours mob son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). By part 3, aging and soul sick, Michael reaches for Christian redemption but chooses ill yet again, arriving at a final unfathomable devastation.
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Again gorgeous, grim stuff, a blanched noir tale of a jaded streetwise PI (Jack Nicholson) who runs into moral horror beyond imagining, and that in the best of places. And surprise! cruelest malice wears a smiling face.
Superman (Richard Donner, 1978). Well, why not, at least the first half: superhero as seriocomic Christ (Christopher Reeve) tells more about the glad core of the Incarnation than whole theologies. Indeed, the film tutors the heart, especially with the help of John Williams’s exultant score.
Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980). With painterly precision, Redford explores the “mess” tragedy brings to a well-to-do Chicago family. The wonder is that any recover enough to find relish in living, which is also grace. The movie made Pachelbel famous for the good reason that in context the Canon in D wonderfully suggests the exquisite splendor of being alive.
American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980). A stark Calvinist parable about the nature of evil and the persistence of grace, even for upscale gigolos (Richard Gere). Best of all is the film’s moving portrait of the central human yearning for intimacy and “home.”
Tender Mercies (Bruce Beresford, 1983). Writer Horton Foote’s story of a derelict country singer (Robert Duvall) whose self-destruction is redeemed by the “tender mercies” of a West Texas Baptist widow (Tess Harper). Through people and places, grace comes to the inscrutable emptiness of the Texas plains.
The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986). Eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Central America. The first half of Robert Bolt’s screenplay depicts the conversion (unexpected and wild, it is the best ever put on screen) of a slave-trading murderer (Robert De Niro), and the second unflichingly explores the fate of Christ amid the demonic tangles of geopolitics. Joffe’s rapturous direction is complemented by stunning cinematography (Chris Menges) and one of the best film scores ever (Ennio Morricone).
Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987). Long ago in a tiny Danish fishing village, two maiden daughters of a pietist preacher take in a homeless French cook who years later repays their kindness with a sumptuous French dinner. That becomes the Love Feast, precisely because of its splendidly loving carnality. Wondrous-strange Light here transmutes the lasting sadness of darkness and loss.
Grand Canyon (Lawrence Kasdan, 1991). Amid the horrors of contemporary L.A., a motley bunch of unsuspecting pilgrims stumble upon signs of a Providence that shoves their lives toward one another, meaning, and joy. Kasdan’s inventive cinema makes all these tales plausible and conveys well the “feel” of What visits these disparate folks.
Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993). In this virtually silent film, a young French woman (Juliette Binoche) seeks numbness after a car wreck kills her daughter and composer husband. Slowly but inexorably, the haunting coda of an unfinished symphony, which sounds Love itself, carries her back into living and loving.

Consider as well Places in the Heart, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dead Man Walking, The Doctor, The Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and, yes, Citizen Kane.

Peter T. Chattaway

They asked for “favorite” films, not the “best” movies ever produced, so I will not pretend that this list is definitive for anyone other than myself. And even then—well, let’s just say the top five or so are pretty much set in stone, but the rest remain more tentative.

Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, 1962). A grand, visual spectacle backed by Maurice Jarre’s majestic music and supported by perhaps the greatest international cast ever assembled, yes, but also a thoughtful, incisive look at the tensions that exist between nationality and personality, power and identity, destiny and free will.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985). A “minor character” steps off a movie screen and into Depression-era New Jersey, stranding his fellow characters while offering perfect, but imaginary, love to an abused housewife. A delightfully comic exploration of the difference between movie fantasy and harsh reality, but also a remarkably canny parable about a created world that is deemed good yet loses its sense of purpose once its inhabitants “chuck out the plot.”
The Family Way (Roy Boulting, 1966). A poignant, funny, bittersweet look at newlywed woes in working-class England that touches gently on a few hot buttons, notably impotence. John Mills delivers a superb, many-layered performance as real-life daughter Hayley’s father-in-law, and Paul McCartney—in the first solo Beatle project—provides the tender, melancholy, and hauntingly perfect score.
Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983). No script, no actors, no plot—just pure cinema, set to Philip Glass’s mesmerizing music. The title is Hopi for “life out of balance,” and Reggio employs a grab bag of camera tricks to convey the idea that modern technology—including moviemaking!—has thrown the created order out of whack. A dazzling film that seems to recreate itself with every viewing.
The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). Not your typical sequel. George Lucas took a lot of risks with the middle chapter in his space opera and created a more successfully convincing parallel universe than Star Wars ever hinted at. The confrontation between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker is striking for its moral complexity, and it ultimately opens the door to Vader’s redemption. Who could have predicted that?
When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989). Forget Seinfeld. Reiner, Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal, and Meg Ryan scooped that so-so series with this surprisingly perceptive and frequently amusing dissection of modern relationships—platonic and otherwise—between the sexes. A treat for cynics and romantics alike.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz & William Keighley, 1938). Swordfights, romance, swashbuckling derring-do, and a subversively patriotic idealism—what more could one want? Still the best film of its kind, even if Basil Rathbone is less menacing here than he is in The Court Jester(Melvin Frank & Norman Panama, 1956), Danny Kaye’s witty, affectionate send-up of the genre.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979). Not as irreverent as some might think, this intelligent, albeit raunchy, satire of big-budget Bible epics is, if anything, sympathetic toward Jesus. It taps into a subversive critique of shallow faith, personal ingratitude, and misplaced political zeal that is as old as the Gospels themselves.
The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988). Morris’s dreamlike documentary is much more than a stylish, neonoir, real-life account of an innocent man convicted and almost executed for a murder he did not commit. It’s a remarkable piece of investigative journalism and a probing study of the construction—and deconstruction—of memory.
Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989). A sometimes gentle, sometimes biting, allegorical tour-de-force about the postmodern quest for meaning and the tensions between integrity and compromise that plague both art and religion. Tight, complex, and richly conceived, every scene seems to be pregnant with multiple meanings.

Honorable mention goes to the animated shorts of Chuck Jones, especially Rabbit Seasoning (1952), One Froggy Evening (1955), and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). Jones is a master of restraint; his characters can speak volumes with little more than an arched eyebrow or a blank stare. Would that writers could do the same.

Roy Anker and Peter T. Chattaway spend much of their time in darkened theaters, emerging every once in a while to experience what others call real life.

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Eric Metaxas

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We moderns like our heroes cut down to size. Especially we demand that Christian faith, which is nothing if not the heroic writ large, must be portrayed warts and all. Robert Duvall did just that in The Apostle. The extremely favorable reception of Duvall’s extraordinary film tells me that something is afoot in our culture. Christian themes can actually be portrayed in a way that is neither saccharine nor demeaning—and audiences will applaud. In case you’ve been asleep during the twentieth century, this is big news.

All of which brings us to Central Station, a striking film by Brazilian director Walter Salles that took top honors at the Berlin Film Festival and won Sundance’s Cinema 100 award for its screenplay. The story focuses on two people: Josue, an orphan of nine, and Dora, a nastily cynical and bitter woman of 67—going on 167. (When in one scene on a bus her shrewish squawking prompts a wakened passenger to denounce her as a hag, I thought, “Ah, yes, that’s the word I was looking for.”)

The movie’s quirkily filmed opening is a happy presentiment of things to come. We see closeups of various people “talking” to the camera—to us—pouring out their hearts, as to a mirror, or to God. Because of the heartbreaking earnestness of their words, even the least attractive of them has a radiant inner beauty. We soon realize these people are dictating letters as they speak—to Dora, who works in the main room of Rio de Janeiro’s eponymous Central Station as a surrogate “letter writer.”

One of the people who visits Dora is Josue’s mother, whose letter is addressed to her runaway husband. She implores him to return so he can see his son. Josue squirms nervously by her side, correctly sizing up the old woman as untrustworthy. But when they finish and leave to go home, tragedy strikes: a speeding bus hits and kills Josue’s mother. The authorities spirit her away in an ambulance, and Josue is somehow left behind. The brave boy wanders the station for several days, waiting for her to return, but of course she never does.

In the meantime, we learn something ugly about Dora. It seems she doesn’t mail many of the letters she’s supposed to. She takes them home and after mockingly reading them with her neighbor, imperiously decides which ones merit mailing, tossing the others in the trash. There is something inescapably evil about this act, especially when one considers the hopeful and kind faces of those illiterates who entrusted her with their deepest thoughts and concerns, not to mention money for postage and handling.

Because Dora’s own father, an alcoholic, treated her and her mother poorly, Dora has it in for all fathers. When she reads the letter Josue’s mother dictated she is especially derisive. She assumes Josue’s father will never respond to it, and she moves to discard it. Her neighbor protests, and Dora finally consigns the letter to the cramped limbo of her “maybe” drawer, clearly never intending to mail it.

But because she alone knows the details of Josue’s circ*mstances, Dora begins to feel somehow responsible for him as she watches him wandering about the station, futilely waiting for the return of his mother. When a policeman moves to take Josue away from the station, Dora surprises herself and us by telling the policeman she knows the boy. More suprising still, she takes him home.

The two of them bicker immediately, though, and after a few days Dora returns to her less magnanimous ways, selling the boy to a shady adoption agency for a tidy sum. Her neighbor berates her, and Dora finally relents, returning to the agency to rescue Josue. She does so, but without refunding the money. Predictably, the authorities give chase, making it impossible to return to her apartment.

At this turning point in the story, Dora vows to reunite Josue with his father, who lives in the rural northwest of Brazil. The two get on a bus and begin their long, strange journey, a kind of Heart of Darkness in reverse—a diesel-powered flight from Mr. Kurtz’s dense cinder of horror into the free and expansive light of God’s redemption. That this journey will mark Dora’s pilgrimage home to her own heavenly Father is neither obvious nor cloying.

During their journey they argue again, and the bus leaves them behind, sans cash. But God appoints an evangelical truck driver named Cesar to give them a lift. His truck has decals that say, in Portuguese: “God is coming / Prepare yourself” and “With God I follow my destiny.” Cesar is an odd but generally likable fellow. (Think Soupy Sales meets John the Baptist.) When they stop in a restaurant for a bite to eat, Dora, whose heart is now lurching toward life, takes a shine to him. She offers him some of her beer. He initially refuses, saying he cannot, that he’s an evangelist, but suddenly he relents and gulps it down greedily. It is a measure of the film’s extraordinary maturity in dealing with faith that we don’t see this as mere hypocrisy but rather as an honest picture of a man struggling with temptation.

Now Dora’s slowly thawing heart melts into overdrive: suddenly aware of her decades-suppressed desire for love, she awkwardly puts her hand on Cesar’s and gazes at him longingly. She then excuses herself and shuttles to the bathroom to apply some lipstick. When she does this it is as though she is smearing life itself onto her face. A decade or two seem to vanish—poof!—and mirabile dictu, the old bird suddenly looks attractive again. But her newfound radiance is too late to capture Cesar, who is spooked by her clumsy grasping as much as by his own inability to resist temptation. When she returns, he has slipped into his rig and is hauling his assets toward the horizon.

Visually, parts of Central Station are beautiful. Sometimes it resembles the later films of Jacques Tati, who, three decades before Imax, filled every inch of his frame with action, nearly overwhelming the viewer. Other shots, such as the ones of swarming commuters, bring to mind the peopled segments of the Phillip Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi. And yet, somehow Salles has managed to choose the ugliest earth tones imaginable for his pallette. Think of it as the chromatic opposite of The Truman Show or anything by Merchant-Ivory.

When Dora and Josue finally near their destination, without money or any resources, things take an almost hallucinatory turn. They stumble onto a vast Catholic revival meeting, where pilgrims are singing hymns and praying. When Josue and Dora argue yet again, he runs away through the suppliant throng and she follows him, eventually ending up in a strange tent filled with candles and loudly praying faithful. The confusing din undoes her, and she collapses, but when Josue and she are reunited it’s clear they have come through a crucial pass, geographically and spiritually.

I won’t spoil the ending, but there is one more precious scene involving letter writing, this time to various saints, that tops the first one and forms a touching counterpoint to it. Either of these alone is worth the price of admission. And of course, this batch of letters is mailed.

Eric Metaxas is associate editor of Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint radio program. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and Regeneration Quarterly. His most recent book for children is The Bible ABC (Tommy Nelson).

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Susan Wise Bauer

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Any parent of a newborn will tell you that an unbroken night is God’s most underappreciated gift. Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep is far more precious than guaranteed college tuition. On this much, agreement is unanimous. But the debate about how to achieve this nirvana before the baby goes off to school is fragmented beyond repair.

Gary Ezzo, author of the much-loved and much-vilified parenting guides Babywise and Preparation for Parenting, suggests that babies can learn to sleep through the night by nine weeks; sociologist Amy Scott calls Ezzo’s plan “misinformation, denial, and disguised child-hate.” Sleep is always an emotional topic, especially for the deprived, but passionate discussions over infant training reach far beyond the crib. Ezzo suggests that toddlers can be trained to eat neatly; pediatric guru T. Berry Brazelton counters that a child must be allowed complete control of her food, even if this involves “tossing it to the dog. … We fed one of ours in the bathtub so she could play with her food, drop it and smear it at will!”

“Raising good children,” says Gary Ezzo, “is not a matter of chance.” Carol Rubenstein, Ph.D., writes, “A child’s personality and temperament has little to do with his mother or her sacrifices, and a great deal to do with what she has passed on to him genetically.” And the 1998 annual convention of the American Psychological Association was all abuzz over the contrarian theory of outsider-scholar Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture Assumption), who believes that peers are far more influential than parents in shaping a child’s personality.

There is little prospect of peace talks between these warring child-care generals; but what do those of us in the trenches do? Enter Julia Grant with a different approach: the metadiscourse of parenthood. Grant’s Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers doesn’t offer any new answers to the perennial questions of parenthood, but instead tackles the assumptions that allow the debate to exist. Metadiscourse—the study of the rules and conditions of communication—never provides content to an ongoing discussion; Grant doesn’t care whether or not you let your baby cry it out at night, but she is interested in why you think an expert’s book (as opposed to your mother, or your church, or your own common sense) might give you a trustworthy answer.

Metadiscourse, like most academic pursuits, turns deadly in a hurry. If you’re fighting with your spouse over whether or not to spank a rebellious toddler, you want an answer, not someone who’s going to inform you that your argument takes the form D(p)M1: M(p). But good work in metadiscourse can allow the combatants to step back, view the debate in a new light, and reopen discussion in a way that might possibly lead to compromise (or conversion).

Contemporary evangelicalism suffers from a number of stalemated debates that could benefit from some good, accessible theory of metadiscourse: gender roles, translation issues, birth control. And, of course, parenting. Daycare or family care? Working or stay-at-home moms? Demand feeding or parent-directed feeding? How exactly do you get that baby to sleep through the night?

Raising Baby by the Book, like most examples of metadiscourse, isn’t scintillating reading. But Julia Grant asks some new and fruitful questions about the ongoing relationship between parents, parenting books, and the experts who write them. Why do parents feel a need for expert reassurance? How does this expert advice interact with the common-sense insights provided by daily parenting? And what do you do when the experts disagree?

Grant’s survey of parenting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests that parents began to feel inadequate largely because of a change in family makeup. Big extended families, living close together, gave way to small, isolated family units of mother, father, and two children; parents were deprived of the experienced help previously provided by older family members. This increased isolation of parents coincided with the growing availability of jobs that removed fathers from the home all day, and with a widespread social perception of women as less rational, less capable, and thus less competent than men. Mothers, left alone with children all day long without fathers or extended family to make up for their female shortcomings, became the target of child-study groups sponsored by such organizations as the Baby Hygiene Association of Boston, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and the Child Study Association of America. The “traditional kinship networks that supplied child-rearing knowledge,” Grant suggests, were “no longer fully functional.”

Within this framework, Grant surveys the major schools of parenting expertise: the behaviorism of the thirties, the democratic child-raising practices of the forties, the psychoanalytical fifties, and the Spock years. Although the rise and fall of these schools is presented in stultifying detail, the complex history of expert advice is worth plowing through.

For one thing, Grant’s survey of the past reveals that many of the shibboleths we hear mouthed today are merely repetitions of past slogans. “The proper care and training of children,” announced pediatrician Edith Jackson in a 1944 radio broadcast, “is as essential to true and final victory as the warfare on our fighting fronts”—a declaration that bears an eerie resemblance to evangelical rhetoric about building Christ’s kingdom through the work of mothers at home.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, in A Mother’s Place: Taking the Debate About Working Mothers Beyond Guilt and Blame (1997), Susan Chira writes that a mother can “enrich her children” by pursuing her own dreams (even if this involves a full-time nanny and a 60-hour work week). Grant finds this same rhetoric in the Freudian-focused groups of the past, which assumed that “the better we understand ourselves, the better we understand our children.”

Grant doesn’t bring her study up to the present, ending her survey sometime around 1978. And she ignores the most authoritative book of all. “In general,” she says, in the only paragraph devoted to biblical standards for parenting, “people with a strong religious affiliation will develop child-rearing values that at least partially derive from their communities of belief.”

In part, Grant’s neglect of biblical influences seems to stem from Scripture’s unsatisfactory character as a nuts-and-bolts parenting handbook. The Bible offers a few general instructions for parenting (“Fathers, do not exasperate your children”) and plenty of ideals for adults, but specific prescriptions for the everyday raising of children are few and far between (which is why evangelicals can battle to the point of excommunication over the Ezzo method of sleep-training).

The most frequently quoted biblical text on parenting is Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” In some Christian circles, this declaration is read as a guarantee that children who are raised properly will “turn out” perfectly. Grant’s history of parenting advice reveals this interpretation as an echo of behaviorism: supply the correct stimuli, and the desired response will mechanically follow. Yet behaviorism is in tension both with life as we know it (well-raised children do sometimes rebel) and with the God-created complexity and originality of each person.

At the other extreme, this affirmation of the wonderful individuality of each child has been corrupted into the shrug-of-the-shoulders philosophy that “nothing you really do changes the child anyway.” Carol Rubenstein’s recent dreadful book, The Sacrificial Mother, assures us that parents’ actions “play little, if any, part in [their] children’s overall development. It’s much more likely that the genes a child is born with will have the greatest influence over his future personality.”

This notion that character is biologically predetermined, popularized in recent years under the label “evolutionary psychology,” makes odd bedfellows. Rubenstein uses it to encourage something she calls “selfism,” putting parental wishes far ahead of childish needs, but Grant points out that a similar notion lies at the root of child-centered training methods: demand feeding, originally promoted by Arnold Gesell in the 1940s, grew out of the theory that “children’s psychosocial development was guided by inherent biological mechanisms that were impervious to parental training.”

Gesell’s methods currently rule much of the secular parenting literature (think “meals in a bathtub”). A recent issue of Salon, the online magazine, contained a scathing article by Katie Allison Granju about the Ezzo methods. Most of Granju’s righteous indignation seems centered on the chutzpah the Ezzos display in proposing an “ideal” pattern for training children. Granju objects to the Ezzos’ “authoritative tone,” to their nerve in “boldly” informing parents of their method, and to their goal of producing “obedient, respectful children.” She writes, “Although the books do sprinkle warnings against ‘legalism’ and in favor of ‘context’ throughout their pages, the overall message remains one of rigid, uncompromising parental authoritarianism.” Given a plethora of such Ezzo statements as “Flexibility is basic to your success,” and “Neither of you should be enslaved to routine,” Granju’s assessment displays an almost pathological fear of any parental standards “imposed” on children (such as “Do not toss your dinner to the dog”).

Once more, Raising Baby by the Book provides useful perspective. This complete rejection of any parental training, Julia Grant suggests, followed World War II; Gesell himself went so far as to suggest that “the seeds of fascism” were embedded in the very notion of parental training! In the immediate postwar years, popular child-rearing manuals “challenged parents to adopt democratic child-rearing strategies, using powerful political terminology . …Social scientists speculated on the authoritarian child-rearing patterns that had engendered a German populace susceptible to the temptations of fascism.”

In the same way, Salon’s Granju calls the Ezzo methods “rigid,” “harsh,” and unlikely to “produce emotionally healthy adults”; she labels the child-centered parenting she prefers as “hands-on, relaxed,” and “increasingly popular.”

Grant’s work suggests that the reaction to Babywise (Granju is typical) has less to do with the Ezzos than with a general hatred of absolute moral declarations, (Indeed Salon tips its hand with the article’s teaser: “Do parents who buy the controversial baby-care book know about its conservative Christian agenda?”) Raising Baby by the Book also confirms that parents, even those who feel inadequate, tend to react strongly to expert advice. “White folks,” comments one African American mother in 1933, “just naturally can’t tell you nothing about raising children.” “It may be that I am having interesting experiences with children,” snaps another mother, fed up with cheerful experts who want to improve her parenting technique, “but I cannot tell you what they are. I do not see them.”

Most parents are in this same boat. Perhaps the best thing the church can offer them is not yet another list of books by parenting experts but rather (in Grant’s words) a network of child-rearing knowledge. “We learn to care for children,” Grant concludes, “in the context of the families and the communities in which we live.”

These communities—known as “interpretive communities” in the jargon of metadiscourse—help to interpret the dictates of the experts for individual parents and children. An interpretive community dedicated to discovering the wisdom of God can make sense of Babywise. Without an interpretive community, the conflicting dictates of the experts might never make sense. Get ready to face 18 years of broken sleep, and a whole lot of meals served in the bathtub.

Susan Wise Bauer is a novelist who successfully used the Ezzo method, modified by advice from other mothers (including her own), to teach her three boys to sleep through the night.

- More fromSusan Wise Bauer

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References