The worldview legacy

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Francis Schaeffer once warned that ideas have consequences—not just for individuals, but for entire civilizations.

SCHAEFFER: There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted in what people think, and what they think will determine how they act…

A half a century ago, Schaeffer released a book and film series that challenged evangelicals to stop treating Christianity as merely private and personal.

BROWN: WORLD commentator Daniel Darling says Schaeffer—and later, Chuck Colson—helped shape a generation of Christians concerned not only with personal faith, but with the moral direction of an entire culture.

DANIEL DARLING: Fifty years ago, two books helped reshape the evangelical conscience.

Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? and Chuck Colson’s Born Again challenged Christians to see their faith as more than merely personal or private.

Schaeffer was a Presbyterian pastor and apologist who founded the L’Abri ministry in Switzerland with his wife Edith. 

He warned that Western civilization was living off moral capital it no longer believed in. He argued that ideas shape cultures—and eventually shape nations.

SCHAEFFER: There is violence and a breakdown in society. On the other hand, there is a danger of increasing authoritarianism … Should we despair and give in? If not, how should we then live?

Schaeffer said Christians ought to reject a privatized faith that surrendered culture to destructive ideas and moral confusion. But he also warned believers not to embrace Christianity merely as a political strategy or social tool.

SCHAEFFER: Christianity cannot be accepted merely as a means to an end. Christianity is truth, and it demands a commitment to that truth. 

That message deeply influenced another evangelical voice whose own life became a testimony to grace and transformation.

Charles Colson had once been one of Richard Nixon’s most feared political operatives. Colson was a hard-driving White House insider later imprisoned during Watergate. 

But after becoming a Christian, Colson devoted the rest of his life to prison ministry, moral renewal, and helping Christians recover what he called a biblical worldview.

COLSON: Christianity is not just a personal relationship with Jesus, it’s a way of seeing all of life.

Like Schaeffer, Colson believed freedom could not survive without virtue, conscience, and moral formation.

COLSON: And if the people start acting irresponsibly … you have to continue to increase government power in order to prevent chaos.

Colson never argued for Christian withdrawal from public life. But neither did he place ultimate hope in politics or power. 

Instead, he believed Christians should bring truth to bear on every part of society, while remembering that cultural renewal begins first with transformed hearts.

COLSON: Francis Schaeffer once said we have to act like missionaries to our own culture.

That conviction shaped a generation of evangelicals who came to understand Christianity not merely as a devotional experience, but as a worldview—a way of understanding reality itself.

Fifty years later, the temptations Schaeffer and Colson confronted are still with us: moral confusion, political idolatry, cultural retreat, and the seductive belief that freedom can survive without virtue.

Their answer was not despair. And it was not triumphalism.

It was faithful Christian witness grounded in truth.

For WORLD, I’m Daniel Darling.

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