Archive: Is Nothing Worth Dying For?

The transcendent is being stripped out of American culture. People are calling out, ‘What can I believe in anymore?’

By Charles Colson

It’s hard these days to pick up a newspaper without feeling a sense of betrayal. Not long ago the Marine sentries, elite of the elite, guarding our embassy in Moscow were charged with trading secrets for sexual favors. That these young men would do such a thing was bad enough, but the reaction of the congress was equally tragic. Congressmen were not so shocked by the Marines’ breach of trust; they were shocked that the state department would put young, single men in a position where they couldn’t easily satisfy their biological urges.

When I practiced law years ago, stock broker was a badge of honor. Now stock brokers trade insider information, losing their good names but making hundreds of millions of dollars. How does the public respond? According to a Gallup poll, 70 percent of the American people said merely, “That’s business.”

Not long ago congressmen allowed a pay raise to take effect by not voting it down within the prescribed time. The next day, when it was too late, the House of Representatives unanimously voted to kill the pay raise which had automatically taken effect the night before. There was no howl of public outrage; that’s politics.

And, in the saddest breach of trust of all, several ministers of the gospel have tragically broken not only the trust of their supporters but of the Lord, to the great shame of the cause of Christ in this country.

I recently picked up a “Bloom County” cartoon. It was a series of cartoon frames; the first one read, “Last Tuesday Opus was suffering a general crisis of faith.” Opus (the hero of “Bloom County”) is standing in front of the television, watching the announcer say, “Today the President admitted to sending a personally-inscribed copy of Leo Buscaglia’s Living, Loving and Hugging to Ghadafi.” Opus shrugs his shoulders, walks into the next room and says, “Well, I have faith in the forces of capitalism.”

Next, he finds someone reading a newspaper that says, “Today on Wall Street Everybody but the Wiener Vendors was Busted.” Then Opus shakes his head and walks off saying, “Well, there’s always religion.” Then Opus sees someone reading a magazine which says, “Oral Roberts Strangled Jimmy Swaggart And Ran Off With Tammy Bakker’s Drug Counselor.” Opus walks out onto his front porch and shouts, “What can a fellow believe in anymore? Are there no more bastions of purity?”

Finally Opus swings around and sees a very pregnant woman walking toward him with a bag of groceries. He runs over, leans up against her and says, “Ah, motherhood.” She looks down and says, “Surrogate.”

What can a fellow believe in anymore? Are there no more bastions of purity? What’s happened to us? We Christians believe we are sinners, rescued only by the grace of God. So are these merely isolated instances of individual sin or is a pattern emerging?

I believe there is a pattern, and it is simply this: We are abandoning the whole concepts of honor and trust; we are caring only for ourselves and finding nothing to believe in.

What is honor? Honor is believing in and caring about a cause greater than one’s self. For some 2,000 years Western civilization has functioned on the premise that there is a God, and that God defines responsibilities. But in the latter decades of the 20th century we’ve experimented for the first time with defining responsibilities without reference to that transcendent God.

More than 100 years ago Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that by the end of the 20th century God would be dead. Nietzsche didn’t argue that there wasn’t a God; Nietzsche argued that man would kill God, that man would learn to live as if there were no God.

Recently Robert Bellah, a sociologist, did a study to determine what values make Americans tick. He described American values today as “utilitarian individualism.” He said, “The goals of life in America today are personal success and vivid personal feelings.” According to his discoveries marriage is looked upon as a vehicle for personal development; work, as a vehicle for personal advancement; and the Church, as the vehicle for personal fulfillment

Bellah’s work shows we have done exactly what Nietzsche predicted. We have decided that God no longer exists; we live as if there were no God. We live only for ourselves. We have become the most self-centered culture in history.

Yet 80 percent of Americans claim to be Christian. More people attend church than ever before. God, evidently, is still alive in our church pews; He’s just dead in our streets.

A well-known television anchor interviewed a young lawyer who argued the creationists’ case for the state of Louisiana. The lawyer’s responses were brilliant. Finally the interviewer was so trapped that he leaned into the monitor and said, “But isn’t it true that those people sponsoring that legislation in Louisiana were devout Christians?”

His implication, or assumption, was that religion should stay out of public life. I thought of the debate over slave trade 200 years ago, when William Wilberforce had the courage to stand up in the House of Parliament and declare, “I as a Christian cannot countenance this, no matter what it means to the British Empire.” And Lord Melbourne stood up and said, “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life.”

If religion had not been “allowed to invade public life,” we would still have slave ships bringing slaves from Africa to the Western hemisphere. Religion had better invade public life! We sometimes blame the media, but the media is not solely responsible for our situation. Since the early 60s the courts have progressively narrowed the role of religion in public life.

Consider the public school in Evansville, Indiana, where teachers were holding a Bible study among themselves. The school board told them they could not, and the situation was taken to court. One school administrator argued, “We can’t have the teachers walking into school with their Bibles; that might give the wrong impression to students.” The court then asked. “Supposing they only held their Bible studies before school began?” The school board said it could still be dangerous: “They might leave one of their Bibles lying around in the school.” The court upheld the school board.

Paul Vitz’s study of public school textbooks shows how even historical references to religion have been on the decline for years. There is virtually no reference to religion in modern textbooks.

Vitz writes of a student who reported to his mother, “Thanksgiving was a time in which we gave thanks to the Indians.” And the mother said, “No, no. Thanksgiving was the time that we gave thanks to God.” She called the school principal and said, “What are you teaching our children? Thanksgiving was the time we gave thanks to God, not to the Indians.” And the school principal said, “I can only do what the textbook said.”

To quote Richard Neuhaus, “We have virtually stripped the public square naked of religious values.” We continue in our churches to sing hymns, preach sermons and hold Bible studies, but we’re talking to ourselves. Out in the streets religious influence is gradually being excised from American life. Western culture is in terrible danger; society cannot exist without godly influence. During the time President Carter was trying to reinstitute draft registration, newspapers all over the United States carried a front-page picture of a Princeton student parading a huge placard which said, “Nothing is worth dying for.” Some might see that placard as a celebration of life. But the truth is, that placard exposes the bankruptcy of our society. If nothing is worth dying for, nothing is worth living for.

Of course we have no honor; of course we have an unprecedented rash of spy secrets; of course people are doing insider trading deals and breaking trust; of course we see the moral foundation and framework of our society collapsing—because if nothing is worth dying for, nothing is worth living for, and the whole heart of a society has been stripped.

It’s easy for us to blame the government, blame the media, blame the courts or blame someone else. But in the final analysis, the responsibility for bringing a transcendent influence to society belongs to the Church. When the transcendent value system is being destroyed in our society it means we aren’t doing our jobs, and there’s a problem in the Church.

Two polarized phenomena are taking place in the Church today. On the one hand, some Christians believe the only way to restore Christian values in America is politically, through legislation. As one Christian leader pronounced at the end of a recent session of Congress, “We have been legislated out of revival.” (I wrote him and said, “I don’t know about the God you worship, but I know the God I worship is stronger than the United States Congress!”)

But if some churchmen believe faith must be totally political, others insist it be totally private. A few years ago Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, gave a brilliant and eloquent speech in which he, a professing Roman Catholic Christian, defended his pro-choice position. As a practicing Catholic, he said, he subscribed to the Church’s teachings on abortion. But as a keeper of the people’s trust he could not impose his views on others. Then he went on to say, in effect, that until the majority of the people of his state are opposed to abortion, he can be for it. That’s like saying the Word of God is subject to a majority vote of the people!

But both of these positions, political and private, deny the lordship of Christ. Both are sellouts of historic Christianity, and both fail to take into account that what Jesus came to do was not to proclaim a new legal code and a more comfortable way to live but to announce the kingdom of God. That kingdom came in Him, and since we’re His citizens, we’re to make a difference in our society.

If we’re going to bring transcendent values back into the public square we’ve got to learn to live by the laws of the kingdom. People understand what it means to be citizens and to live by the laws of the nation-state; what they don’t understand is what it means to be citizens of the kingdom of God.

Donald Bloesch, in his book Crumbling Foundations, writes that secularism advances when orthodoxy retreats. According to a Gallup poll, only 42 percent of evangelicals said that they believe that Jesus was fully God and fully man.

The problem is, orthodoxy is in retreat. We must return to the fundamental, basic beliefs in the gospel of Jesus Christ, to orthodoxy. What’s the real tragedy of recent scandals in the Church? Not sexual lust; that happens in every church. Not the taking of exorbitant salaries; people misuse money. And not the issue abuse of power; power corrupts. So what has gone wrong? The retreat of orthodoxy; the advance of a false gospel. We’ve been hearing that God will give us anything we want, and some have begun to believe it!

The Gospel comes to convict us of sin, to call us to repentance in faith, to challenge us to live a Christian life because Jesus is true, not because there’s something in it for us. That’s orthodoxy. And when you lose orthodoxy you lose the guts and the heart of the Church. So the first thing we must do is restore orthodoxy.

Second, we must truly be the Church. The Church has dissolved to little more than a spectator sport. It reminds me of a bunch of Monday-morning quarterbacks, only instead of discussing football plays and players they’re saying, “I don’t like what the pastor said ” or “I don’t like the music minister.”

That’s not the Church! The Church isn’t something you watch. The Church is the people of God. It is you and me. It’s the community of the redeemed, of the citizens of God who live as a holy nation, a witness of the kingdom to come, a transcendent influence. That’s the Church.

Third, we must learn to think and act like Christians. The first paragraph of the book The Christian Mind, by Harry Blamires, consists of just five words: “There is no Christian mind.” His point is simple. We get into our little huddles and talk to one another as Christians, but we don’t use what we believe to be truth as a yard stick against the values of our society. Our job is to use Christian truth as the base for evaluating every principle of public policy and every value system in our culture. If we don’t, we’re not doing our jobs as citizens of the kingdom of God.

Fourth, Jesus gives us a command to go and make disciples, baptize them, and take the Good News to all of the world That’s the Great Commission. But Jesus gave us another commission, too. He said, “You are the salt of the earth. … You are the light of the world. … Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven ” (Matt. 5:13-16).

In Zambia not long ago I walked into the worst prison I have ever entered in my life. The stench was overwhelming. I was with a group of Prison Fellowship volunteers and a former inmate who said, “I want to show you my old cell block.” Each block held about 60 men. The prisoners were expected to sleep in a ten-by-twelve cell, 15 men per cell; they had to take turns lying down. The container in which water was brought in was the same container that carried waste out.

As we walked through that prison, I suddenly heard a beautiful African melody. “What is that?” I asked. My guide replied, “That’s my cell block. They’re singing for you.” When the gate was swung open, I saw 60 men against the backdrop of a chalk, white-washed wall, singing. They had the most radiant expressions on their faces. And on the immense chalk wall behind them, I saw, etched in charcoal, Jesus on the cross—the suffering Christ. That’s the light, even in places of darkness. That’s what happens when we live the gospel.

In 1983 Jack Eckerd, owner of the second-largest drugstore chain in America, was marvelously converted. One day he walked into one of his 1,700 Eckerd drug stores and saw Playboy and Penthouse magazines in the racks and said, “Take those out of my drugstores.” That began a sequence of events which resulted in Playboy and Penthouse being removed from 12,000 drugstores and retail outlets across America. What I like best about the story is, when I asked Jack, “Did you do that because you’d become a Christian?” he replied, “Why else would I give away a couple million dollars? God wouldn’t let me off the hook.” That is the greatest definition of the lordship of Christ I’ve ever heard.

So there’s our challenge. The transcendent is being stripped out of American culture. People are calling out, crying the same thing Opus is crying, “What can a fellow believe in anymore? Are there no more bastions of purity?”

Are there any values? Is there anything that matters? Yes! Something is worth dying for because Jesus died for the human race. Therefore, something is worth living for.

But if our society is going to change, it won’t be because of the press or the government or the courts. It will only happen because the citizens of the kingdom of God have the courage to live by the values Jesus Christ proclaimed.

Adapted from a speech delivered by Chuck Colson to the Christian Booksellers’ Convention in July 1987.