Forfeited struggle

It was a wake-up call, for sure. I was chatting with a Christian friend of mine, the top man in a very big business. I was trying to persuade him that he should use his influence to get the company’s advertising department to place a regular ad—preferably full page and on the back cover—in every issue of WORLD for the coming year.

I had even gone to the bother of enlisting help from our own staff to propose some catchy themes and graphics for the proposed ad series. And my friend agreed that what we suggested was classy, persuasive, and professional.

But no, I painfully remember his saying. “I pretty much make it a policy not to interfere with the good people under me. I want them to make independent decisions—and I really don’t want them to make corporate decisions like that based on friendships and personal relationships.” That, I had to admit to myself, seemed both prudent and fair.

But it also seemed a little wimpy. Hadn’t God put this man in this particular place in part to help a fledgling magazine like ours gain a foothold? He had said repeatedly he liked what we were doing with WORLD. Would he not raise one little finger to help?

Have we been too easily intimidated? Have the forces of secularism really been that overpowering?

As it turned out, he did take me to the ad department and introduced me personally to the fellow in charge. All this happened at least 20 years ago—but I’ll never forget the ad manager’s blunt and emphatic response. Leafing through the two sample magazines I’d brought along, he was quick to catch on: “Looks pretty ideological to me,” he said. “Not sure at all how that would play with our people. I’m just not sure we want to take on all the unknowns of controversies like those. Sort of distracts the reader from what our real business is.”

It was a theme we’d heard before—and would hear often again. Over the next year, WORLD’s ad sales team armed itself with statistical profiles demonstrating what a high proportion of young families we had in our readership, and how many of them were in the market for Maytag washing machines and Chrysler minivans. No matter. “You’ve just got this pretty strong ideological feel,” the corporate ad people would say.

Here let me change the scene to a men’s retreat I helped organize, also in the late ’90s. The theme focused on helping participants build their own Christian worldview in the secular context of their various businesses. As an exercise, we broke the group of about 50 men into half a dozen subgroups—each symbolizing the board of directors of a different important enterprise in their town. One group acted as the board of the local newspaper. The next was the board of the local library. Another set policy for the local junior college. Yet another ran the local TV and radio station. One group was in charge of the hospital.

We asked all the groups to assume, for the purposes of the exercise, that they were populated exclusively by Christians and had free rein to set policy—while remaining sufficiently sensible (or should I say “pluralistic”?) to stay in business! It’s easy to whine about the secularism that has overwhelmed us, we pointed out. What would we do if we were in charge? Please come back in a couple of hours, we said, with some specific ideas about how the community would be different if Christians were running things.

The men wrestled energetically with their assignment. In the process, we probably ended up with more questions than answers. What strikes me most vividly, though, all these years later, is how much more cautious than creative we were in grappling with that exercise. Even in the 1990s, we had begun feeling the pressures and constraints of a society determined that we tone down our biblical convictions. But if our response was timid 20 years ago, what might we sound like today?

Have we been too easily intimidated? Have the forces of secularism really been that overpowering? Or have we simply forfeited the struggle for our culture on too many fronts—giving up before the battle was ever seriously engaged?

Email jbelz@wng.org