The Enduring Revolution
by Charles W. Colson Vol. VIII, No. 1, January 1995
[The first half of Chuck Colson's address was presented in our last (December 1994) issue. The following concludes this significant speech. For new readers, the background is: In March 1993 Charles W. Colson, head of Prison Fellowship Ministry and highly regarded Christian author, speaker, and commentator, was named recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. On 2 September 1993, in a ceremony connected with the Templeton Prize, Colson delivered this address at the University of Chicago. Readers may contact Prison Fellowship at P.O. Box 17500, Washington, DC 20041-0500. Chuck Colson is a member of Columbia Baptist Church, Falls Church, V A.]
Roots of the Western Ideal
Make no mistake: This humanizing, civilizing influence is the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a heritage brought to life anew in each generation by men and women whose lives are transformed by the living God and filled with holy conviction.
Despite the failures of some of its followers – the crusades and inquisitions – this heritage has laid the foundations of freedom in the West. It has established a standard of justice over both men and nations. It has proclaimed a higher law that exposes the pretensions of tyrants. It has taught that every human soul is on a path of immortality, that every man and woman is to be treated as the child of a King.
This muscular faith has motivated excellence in art and discovery in science. It has undergirded an ethic of work and an ethic of service. It has tempered freedom with internal restraint, so our laws could be permissive while our society was not.
Christian conviction inspires public virtue, the moral impulse to do good. It has sent legions into battle against disease, oppression, and bigotry. It ended the slave trade, built hospitals and orphanages, tamed the brutality of mental wards and prisons.
In every age it has given divine mercy a human face in the lives of those who follow Christ – from Francis of Assisi to the great social reformers Wilberforce and Shaftesbury to Mother Teresa to the tens of thousands of Prison Fellowship volunteers who take hope to the captives – and who are the true recipients of this award.
Christian conviction also shapes personal virtue, the moral imperative to be good. It subdues an obstinate will. It ties a tether to self-interest and violence.
Finally, Christian conviction provides a principled belief in human freedom. As Lord Acton explained, "Liberty is the highest political end of man ... [But] no country can be free without religion. It creates and strengthens the notion of duty. If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the liberty."
The kind of duty to which Acton refers is driven by the most compelling motivation. l and every other Christian have experienced it. It is the duty that flows from gratitude to God that He would send His only Son to die so we might live.
The Four Horsemen in the West
This is the lesson of centuries: that ordered liberty is one of faith's triumphs. And yet, western cultural and political elites seem blinded by modernity's myths to the historic civilizing role of Christian faith. And so, in the guise of pluralism and tolerance, they have set about to exile religion from our common life. They use the power of the media and the law like steel wool to scrub public debates and public places bare of religious ideas and symbols. But what is left is sterile and featureless and cold.
These elites seek freedom without self restraint, liberty without standards. But they find instead the revenge of offended absolutes.
Courts strike down even perfunctory prayers, and we are surprised that schools, bristling with barbed wire, look more like prisons than prisons do.
Universities reject the very idea of truth, and we are shocked when the best and the brightest of their graduates loot and betray.
Celebrities mock the traditional family, even revile it as a form of slavery, and we are appalled at the human tragedy of broken homes and millions of unwed mothers.
The media celebrate sex without responsibility, and we are horrified by sexual plagues.
Our lawmakers justify the taking of innocent life in sterile clinics, and we are terrorized by the disregard for life in blood-soaked streets.
C. S. Lewis described this irony a generation ago. "We laugh at honor," he said, "and are shocked to find traitors in our midst ... We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
A generation of cultural leaders wants to live off the spiritual capital of its inheritance, while denigrating the ideals of its ancestors. It squanders a treasure it no longer values. It celebrates its liberation when it should be trembling for its future.
The Path to Tyranny
Where does the stampede of the four horsemen lead us? Only one place: tyranny. A new kind of cultural tyranny that finds minds, uninformed by traditions and standards, easy to shape.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt described totalitarianism as a process where lonely, rootless individuals, deprived of meaning and community, welcome the captivity of ideology. To escape their inner emptiness, they seek out new forms of servitude. Trading independence for security, they blend into faceless conformity.
The lonely crowd always finds a leader. It submits to the party line and calls it freedom. America is filled with willing recruits to follow a new Grand Inquisitor.
This coming cultural tyranny already casts its shadow across university campuses where repressive speech codes stifle free debate; across court houses and legislatures where officials hunt down and purge every religious symbol; across network news-rooms and board rooms where nothing is censored except traditional belief. Our modem elites speak of enlightened tolerance while preparing shackles for those who disagree. This is what Chesterton defined as true bigotry: "the anger of men who have no convictions."
Disdaining the past and its values, we flee the judgment of the dead. We tear down memory's monuments – removing every guidepost and landmark – and wander in unfamiliar country. But it is a sterile wasteland in which men and women are left with carefully furnished lives and utterly barren souls.
And so, paradoxically, at the very moment much of the rest of the world seems to be reaching out for western liberal ideas, the West itself, beguiled by myths of modernity, is undermining the very foundation of those ideals,
This is irony without humor – farce without joy. Western elites are carefully separating the wheat from the chaff and keeping the chaff. They are performing a modem miracle of turning wine into water.
This crisis is not only alarming, it is also urgent. In earlier times, social patterns were formed over centuries by tradition and intellectual debate, then gradually filtered to the masses. Now, through technology, a social revolution can be wired directly to the brain. It comes through satellites and videos, through pleasing images and catchy tunes. Refugees on a boat from Southern China were recently intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard: Their entire knowledge of the English language consisted of one acronym, "MTV."
The world's newly developing nations are in a revolution of rising expectations that may become a trap of misplaced hope. Nations that import a western ideal stripped of its soul will find only what we have found: pleasures as shallow as the moment, emptiness as deep as eternity.
The Contemporary Challenge
I say to you assembled here today from every part of the globe that this is a challenge facing all of us. At this extraordinary moment in world history, many nations once enslaved to ruthless ideologies have now been set free only to face a momentous decision: Each must decide whether to embrace the myths of modernity or turn to a deeper, older tradition, the half-forgotten teachings of saints and sages.
I say to my compatriots in the West that we bear a particular responsibility – for modernity' s myths have found fertile soil in our lands, and we have offered haven to the four horsemen who trample the dreams and hopes of men and women everywhere. As the world looks to us, let us summon the courage to challenge our comfortable assumptions, to scrutinize the effect we have on our global neighbors... and then to recover that which has been the very soul and conscience of our own civilization.
For the West today is like Janus, with a two-sided face – one offering futility, empty secularism and death; the other offering freedom, rich, biblically rooted spiritually, and life. Commentators have described the internal conflict between these two as a culture war. Some have even declared the war over. The four horsemen, they tell us, are the victors at this chapter in our history.
The Enduring Revolution
Admittedly the signs are not auspicious, as I have been at pains to show, and it is easy to become discouraged. But a Christian has neither the reason nor the right. For history's cadence is called with a confident voice. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reigns. His plan and purpose rob the future of its fears.
By the Cross He offers hope, by the Resurrection He assures His triumph. This cannot be resisted or delayed. Mankind's only choice is to recognize Him now or in the moment of ultimate judgment. Our only decision is to welcome His rule or to fear it.
But this gives everyone hope. For this is a vision beyond a vain utopia or a timid new world order. It is the vision of an Enduring Revolution. One that breaks more than the chains of tyranny, it breaks the chains of sin and death. And it proclaims a liberation that the cruelest prison cannot contain.
The Templeton Prize is awarded for progress in religion. In a technological age, we often equate progress with breaking through barriers in science and knowledge. But progress does not always mean discovering something new. Sometimes it means rediscovering wisdom that is ancient and eternal. Sometimes, in our search for advancement, we find it only where we began. The greatest progress in religion today is to meet every nation's most urgent need: A revolution that begins in the human heart. It is the Enduring Revolution.
In the aftermath of the tragedy in Waco, Texas, and terrorist bombings in New York, we heard dire warnings, even from the president of the United States, of religious extremism. But that, with due respect, is not the world's gravest threat. Far more dangerous is the decline of true religion and of its humanizing values in our daily lives. No ideology – not even liberal democracy – is sufficient. Every noble hope is empty apart from the Enduring Revolution.
This revolution reaches across centuries and beyond politics. It confounds the ambitions of kings, and rewards the faith of a child. It clothes itself in the rags of common lives, then emerges with sudden splendor. It violates every jaded expectation with the paradox of its power.
The evidence of its power is humility. The evidence of its conquest is peace. The evidence of its triumph is service. But that still, small voice of humility, of peace, of service becomes a thundering judgment that shakes every human institution to its foundation.
The Enduring Revolution teaches that freedom is found in submission to a moral law. It says that duty is our sharpest weapon against fear and tyranny. This revolution raises an unchanging and eternal moral standard and offers hope to everyone who fails to reach it. This revolution sets the content of justice and transforms the will to achieve it. It builds communities of character – and of compassion.
On occasion, God provides glimpses of this glory. I witnessed one in an unlikely place – a prison in Brazil like none I've ever seen.
Twenty years ago in the city of San Jose dos Campos, a prison was turned over to two Christian laymen. They called it Humaita, and their plan was to run it on Christian principles.
The prison has only two full-time staff; the rest of the work is done by inmates. Every prisoner is assigned another inmate to whom he is accountable. In addition, every prisoner is assigned a volunteer family from the outside that works with him during his term and after his release. Every prisoner joins a chapel program, or else takes a course in character development.
When I visited Humaita, I found the inmates smiling – particularly the murderer who held the keys, opened the gates, and let me in. Wherever I walked I saw men at peace. I saw clean living areas. I saw people working industriously. The walls were decorated with biblical sayings from Psalms and Proverbs.
Humaita has an astonishing record. Its recidivism rate is 4 percent compared to 75 percent in the rest of Brazil and the United States. How is that possible?
I saw the answer when my inmate guide escorted me to the notorious punishment cell once used for torture. Today, he told me, that block houses only a single inmate. As we reached the end of the long concrete corridor and he put the key into the lock, he paused and asked, "Are you sure you want to go in?"
"Of course," I replied impatiently. "I've been in isolation cells all over the world." Slowly he swung open the massive door, and I saw the prisoner in that punishment cell: a crucifix, beautifully carved by the Humaita inmates the prisoner Jesus, hanging on the cross.
"He's doing time for all the rest of us," my guide said softly.
In that cross carved by loving hands is a holy subversion. It heralds change more radical than mankind's most fevered dreams. Its followers expand the boundaries of a kingdom that can never fail. A shining kingdom that reaches into the darkest comers of every community, into the darkest comers of every mind. A kingdom of deathless hope, of restless virtue, of endless peace.
This work proceeds, this hope remains, this fire will not be quenched: The Enduring Revolution of the Cross of Christ.