The Lever of Power – John McCandlish Phillips

The Lever of Power Awaits the Pull

As evangelical believers we have not deployed our forces wisely. We have not put what we do have where it will do the most good.

By John McCandlish Phillips

We live in a nation where we are utterly free as Christians to spread the gospel by every available means—with no limits whatever, imposed upon us. In fact, the government protects and ensures the right of Christians to send forth the gospel.

Yet we see a waning influence of Biblical truths and Biblical standards in the United States. There are no limits imposed upon us, but we have imposed limits upon ourselves by a restricted and narrow vision of what it means to obey Jesus Christ’s commands.

Beyond that, we suffer from limits imposed upon us by the active strategy of Satan, whose policy it is to work ruthlessly to prevent our fullest carrying out of the Great Commission.

Now if we can find out what that strategy is, we will be able to take steps to overcome it.

The policy of Satan is the suppression of God’s Word and God’s work to as nearly a total degree as possible.

In nations where, more than one billion people live today the promulgation of the gospel is severely limited or forbidden by the governments in power. Whenever possible, our adversary uses the government as the instrument of his persecution of the gospel be-cause that that is the most efficient, the most nearly total way.

Since that is not yet possible in America, the strategy used on us is rather less apparent—but it’s working.

The essence of that strategy is to minimize the Christian impact upon the body politic and the society at large and to maximize the impact of evil upon both. If we look at the overall content of the motion pictures, books, newspapers, and television and radio broadcasting, we can see the degree to which this has occurred and the rate at which it is increasing.

The method by which this strategy is conducted is an extreme segregation of Christians away from nearly all the vital centers of power and influence in the nation. And this is a strategy in which Christians heartily co-operate!

We have allowed a kind of Christian ghetto called the evangelical realm to be established in America with pretty well defined borders beyond which we rarely ever step.

Thank God that we can have an evangelical realm in the United States. I’m glad for it—but it should be a base for a godly assault upon the power and influence centers of the nation, not a temporarily safe and comfortable abode.

Our adversary has marked certain places and certain things as off limits to Christians—and I believe God wants us to get off limits. If we do not, the enemy will destroy our nation from within. There are forces al-ready in motion to do exactly that.

The “god of this world,” as the Bible calls Satan, goes after public power—that is, the power to control things. Where he cannot get that, he goes after public influence—that is, the power to reach and to sway men’s minds.

The main target is the public consciousness. That is what God wants Christians to reach with the truth, and that is what Satan wants to influence by anything and everything but the truth.

In China the population is continually assailed with the words of Chairman Mao. If you travel in a train, the words of Mao are broadcast in your car. If you go into a restaurant, a chorus of a dozen young people sing or chant the words of Mao while you eat. Loudspeakers blare Mao’s words in the public places so that the public is barraged with
     words, words, words
         lies, lies, lies
               —an unceasing attack upon the mind.

In the United States the public consciousness is not dunned with any one political orthodoxy, but it is relentlessly bombarded virtually from coast to coast by many things which do not make for godliness, and peace—by throbbing tribalistic music, by the devil’s propaganda for indulgence and immorality and sin and drugs and revolution. The enemy has a tremendous advantage in this because he controls, through unbelievers who are “the children of disobedience,” most of the means of access to the public consciousness.

Jesus told us to go into all the world and to tell the good news of salvation by His blood—to reach the public consciousness in every place with truth—and to occupy. It comes down to four things: Go. Proclaim. Publish. Occupy. We must do it to the limit of our capacity, not stopping short.

As evangelical believers we have not deployed our forces wisely. We have not put what we do have where it will do the most good.

We therefore have the most urgent need to set some new priorities, and to take some new initiatives.

In the sharp division that exists between the evangelical and the secular in America, we have a situation in publishing, for instance, in which there are two complete and separated realms.

There is the evangelical realm, in which we have certain magazines and books and publishers.

Then there is the secular, or the mass public realm, with different publishers, different magazines, different books.

The evangelical publications for the evangelical realm are for the most part filled with the truth of the Lord. The publications in the mass public realm—newspapers and magazines that reach many millions of people every day, or every week, or every month—are to an overwhelming degree filled with evil things: new excesses in fashion, new excesses in morals; new extremes in occultism and false mysticism, and, of course, much of the current vogue in disruption, violence, and revolution.

So we believers reach ourselves with the truth—and I’m glad that we do—but we allow the mass public media to go the devil’s way for want of a few purposeful, faith-filled Christians to occupy them, not for their personal gain, but for Christ.

It does not take a majority, or anything like it, to wield an effective influence for truth and against evil in such places. It takes a clear-sighted minority.

As Christians, charged by our Lord to proclaim and occupy, we have been segregated out of the one place where the most people can be reached the most often—the mass media. There are times when I tell my editors of a story of Christian significance. Sometimes they tell me to cover it.

To give you some idea of the extent and rapidity of the news process, it is possible for me to go out and cover such a story and to come back and sit down at my typewriter at 5 p.m. and to write a story by 6:45 p.m. that will three hours later, begin to go out in nearly 900,000 copies.

A newspaper is usually read by several people: Father reads it, mother reads it, brother reads it, sister reads it. So those 900,000 copies reach, in a little over 12 hours, some two million readers.

Those copies go into every state in the nation, to high places in foreign capitals, into the White House and to most Congressmen, to hundreds of thousands of homes in a wide urban area, to most universities, to corporation offices, to a high percentage of influential and active people.

That isn’t all. A copy of the story goes straight to The New York Times News Service, that paper’s syndicated newswire, and it is carried to 210 other newspapers in the United States with a total circulation of over 30 million copies and a potential audience, I am told, of close to 100 million readers. Within less than 24 hours that one story may have touched multiplied millions of readers. That is outreach!

Recently in the offices of one of the 10 largest book publishers in the country I saw a copy of a book that is about to be published—The Complete Art of Witchcraft, by Sybil Leek. Now you know that this is darkness and I know it, but the young editor putting out this book does not know it. He will soon run this book out to the public, inculcating men and women and young people into witchcraft.

Let’s just consider what would occur if a Christian happened to be among the chief editors of that publishing house and the proposal to publish a book on witchcraft came up and the Christian said, “No—we’re not going to let our presses publish this kind of trash.” He would turn that book back at the very source from reaching the public. He would exercise an influence for Christ in a very critical area.

Truth has fallen in the public squares of America—in the mass public sector—because there are far too few to speak out for her there.

The mass media which have daily access to the public consciousness are not something wisely to be left entirely in the hands of unbelievers!

Why do we not have in America some major newspapers and magazines owned and operated and chiefly edited by believers? There are areas of the world where that would be impossible, where all the media are concentrated in the hands of the government for its propaganda. In those nations, Christians could yearn with all their hearts and souls to be able to publish forth news and views, but they could not.

We do have that freedom, with nothing to stop us but the limits we have allowed to be put upon us. The result is that our freedom is no more effective than their bondage. The only difference is: They can not. We do not. Either way, the devil has it his way.

We have failed to be strategic; and because we have failed to be so, the nation is suffering terrible damage and moral downcasting. We saw not so very long ago how one woman—expressing in her being the historic enmity of Satan against the Word of God—marched all the way up to the Supreme Court to complain that the reading of the Bible in the public schools violated her rights as an atheist. She won a decree by which the Bible was thrown out of schools all across the nation.

That one woman touched the lever of power in the American legal process and did away with morning Bible reading in the public schools.

Some months later I was seated at my desk in the newsroom when an editor handed me a short piece of wire copy. It was from upstate New York, reporting that a school principal there had refused to permit the printing of two verses of the Bible in the high school yearbook.

“Look into it,” the editor told me.

I sensed a story of some importance and went after it by telephone. I learned that some high school students had gone out to get ads for their yearbook. One of them had pushed the front doorbell of a certain man and asked him if he would like to take a small ad. He thought about it a minute and said, “Well, yes I would.” The man was a former drunkard who had been converted to the Lord Jesus Christ and had gone sober, and he wanted to glorify the Lord in that little ad. He told the student he would like to take an ad and put two Bible verses in it. The student said fine. The man wrote the verses out and paid for the ad. When the student took the ad back to school, the principal said, “No, you can’t print those Bible verses in the yearbook.” He thought it might violate the Supreme Court ruling.

I talked by telephone to the man, to the student who sold the ad, to the school principal, and to the pastor of a Bible-preaching church who had taken the issue up publicly. The people there pointed out that the yearbook had accepted ads from two saloons and a dance hall. Only the Bible was banned. They said, “We believe that our rights as Christians are violated by such a ban.” They said they had hired a lawyer and were going to take the matter to court.

It seemed this was a case in which a school principal had gone too far, a case that offered the very good possibility of getting a modifying ruling asserting the right of a citizen to quote anything reasonable that he wanted in an ad. Such a ruling would have communicated a certain balance to weak or timid school authorities who had gone to extremes in shying away from the Bible.

I waited some time and then called upstate to ask the progress of the case. The man I talked with told me, “We think we had a good case, but we decided to drop it. We figured it would cost too much.”

Last August I was covering the Christian Booksellers Convention at Minneapolis and was talking to one of the richest Christian publishers in America. He said to me, “That was an interesting story you had about the Bible and the school principal. I called the people you mentioned and told them if they needed any money for the case I’d be glad to help.”

There you have it. The unbeliever let nothing stand in her way until she had touched the lever of power that caused the Bible to be thrown out of the American public schools. But when the opportunity arose to press an answering case that had every opportunity to go forward—including full publicity and an important offer of help—the believers failed to go forward with it, failed to touch the lever of power in the law.

It is always the objective of the adversary to energize and propel forward unbelievers, while inducing the maximum amount of inaction among believers. Satan has kept believers on a lower level of faith and action than we ought to be on.

Where Christians make themselves absent, a spiritual vacuum is created that the devil is quick to fill. I have a copy of a big, beautifully printed magazine called Print Project Amerika. This magazine was published by students from Columbia University and from the University of Chicago on $50,000 that a few young men spent last summer going around and raising.

From the titles of articles—”Television For the People, By the People” and “The Video Guerrillas”—you will see that much of the content expresses the desire of these young people to get hold of the media.

I quote: “The new generation will not tolerate the miniaturized vaudeville, the radio with a picture, that is television as presently employed.”

They want to change it, and another article tells how: They intend to present televised sequences of a couple having sexual intercourse in a meadow, an interview with Abbie Hoffman but mixed in such a way that a picture of President. Nixon will seem to be mouthing Abbie Hoffman’s words, and so on. “The media must be liberated,” a young man writes. Now hear these words: “WE WILL SEIZE THE MEDIA!”

That is what these young people intend to do. It’s a big job, and they may not make it; but they are going to go after it with everything they’ve got. “We will seize the media!”

We had better not underestimate, what a fanatically dedicated and revolutionary minority may be able to do. We had better realize that if Christian believers do not make strong and early moves into the mass media, they may be taken over by what will be far worse even than what we have now.

Consider China. The door to missions opened there in the last century and many went in. There were great missionary movements in that vast nation, some of them with miracles attesting the Word. And a Christian establishment grew in China. Many wonderful things were done. There were Christian schools and hospitals and churches and evangelistic meetings and orphanages and much more.

And while Christians were busy about all of these good things, the Marxists were also busy. They weren’t doing very much about hospitals, but they were going after the government. They worked at it until they got it; and when they got it, just about all of those good things the Christians were working at were closed down or taken over.

By failing to pitch the vision high enough, Christians allowed the forces of evil to steal the day. Oh, you say, but it is too much to expect us to go after the government. If it wasn’t too much for the Communists, why is it too much for the Christians?

Take Chile. There were great Christian movements in Chile in this century, some of the greatest in the world. A Christian establishment with many good things grew up in Chile, but while all that was going on, the Marxists came in and took the government.

In the United States Christians are almost totally failing to act where they are most needed—on the highest levels of public influence: In legislatures and other elective offices; in the mass media; in the great universities where most of the most influential people of the next generation are trained and where what they believe is shaped.

Recently I saw a cartoon. It showed the main room of an old-fashioned Dutch house. Water was falling outside, and a leak had developed in the ceiling. The small boy of the family was standing on a table with his finger plugging the leak.

A rather frantic looking man was standing at the front door, motioning for the boy. But the father stood there and said, “Well, the dike will just have to wait.”

The boy was so busy plugging the leak in the ceiling of his house that he could not go and plug the leak in the dike!

The folly of that is plain: No matter how carefully the leak in the roof is plugged, if the dike gives way, the whole house and everything in it will go under—and the city as well.

We have been so busy looking after our own evangelical interests that we are doing almost nothing about great national issues. It will not help at all if we protect and preserve our evangelical realm, while allowing the nation we live in to go to ruin.

There is a Congress of the people in this nation that makes the laws. By the laws made there, the quality of our lives and the quantity of our freedom are constantly monitored and affected.

Why do we not have at least 30, still better 50, evangelical Christians sitting in’ Congress, deliberating this nation’s interests and affairs? It wouldn’t matter which side of the aisle they were on. The important thing is that they would be there when the crises come, Christians who really care about the nation’s well-being.

Oh, someone says, wouldn’t that be worldly? As to believers having control of things, the Word of God speaks plainly:

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked bear rule, the people mourn” (Proverbs 29:2). That is definitive.

Jesus did not tell us to be spectators until He comes. He did not tell us to restrict. our activities to deploring the state of affairs. Nor, did he tell us to occupy until the going gets too hard. Jesus told us to “Occupy till I come.” By what means, and to what degree, shall we occupy? By every available means, and to the highest possible degree!

John McCandlish Phillips is a reporter and feature writer for The New York Times, and author of the book, The Bible, the Supernatural, and the Jews. This article is based on a lecture given by the distinguished journalist at the 23rd annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association in Chicago, May 10, 1971.