Returning to the Fundamentals
Ed Dobson & Cal Thomas's Blinded by Might
Joe Maxwell
January 1, 1999
Jack King and I have sidewalk counseled together at a local abortion clinic. The clinic sits on a lot where I played baseball as a boy. When I returned as an adult to the Jackson, Mississippi, area after seven years in the Chicago suburbs, there sat the abortion clinic, prompting me to ask—"Wow, how did that get there?"
Some might chirp Edmund Burke's familiar answer: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." But Jack King insists that Burke was confused—Jack says that a truly "good" man, by definition, will not "do nothing."
A debate today is swirling among serious Christians, not about whether to do nothing (no serious Christian could advocate doing nothing in the face of evil), but about whether to do relatively nothing politically in favor of doing a lot more of something else. Some argue more from principle, others from pragmatics (a fact that makes the debate hard to follow), but the call is often the same: why not try "love"? This love, it seems, is a love that is best demonstrated outside the halls of political power or to the halls of political power, but rarely as a participant in the halls of political power.
Many who now issue this call are the children of fundamentalists, those biblical purists of a half-century ago who concentrated on personal evangelism and insisted there was no real place for Christ in politics (or any other part of culture, for that matter). Today's second-generation, Francis Schaeffer-quoting, graduate-degree-toting neo-purists escaped the stigma of "fundamentalism" through the fine, mid-century work of men like Schaeffer and Carl F. H. Henry, thinkers who labored with all their Christian might to re-insert evangelical believers into every realm of culture—including ...
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