Over the past decade, World writers have regularly praised Francis Schaeffer, who during the second half of the 20th century wonderfully promoted Christian worldview thinking. Schaeffer was particularly powerful in pointing out the hopelessness of non-Christian thinking, and showing logically why men and women should turn to Christ. What happens, though, when many people don't, yet in a democratic society we need to work alongside them to counteract the aggressiveness of secular liberal absolutism?
Schaeffer noted the importance of developing "co-belligerency" contacts in those situations but didn't spell out how far to go. My University of Texas colleague (and World contributor) Jay Bud has written a respectful critique of Schaeffer that states: "Suppose public officials tried to regulate whom the church may ordain or what the church may teach. Of course Christians should try to convert them, but the immediate need is to persuade them to act less like Pharoah and more like Cyrus. For this, one needs arguments that make sense to the unconverted -- even to those who stop listening at the mention of Scripture."
Daniel in the Bible, of course, spoke in a way that sometimes made sense to the unconverted, and sometimes did not: Belshazzar in chapter five of Daniel's book decides to eat, drink and be merry, probably thinking that "tomorrow we die" -- and Belshazzar died that very night. We're told in the next chapter that "Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian." But we're also told at the beginning of chapter 10 that in the third year of Cyrus' reign Daniel was mourning for three weeks, apparently in connection with a political development, until he had "a great vision" of war in the heavens.
That's how we should emerge as well: communicating with Cyrus while keeping in mind that we are only small hobbits in a great big universal war. Keeping that in mind, here's my proposed ABC of how to act:
A: Assess accurately both past and present. Western civilization is founded on both Jerusalem and Athens, biblical and classical knowledge, and just as it's not accurate for liberal professors to ignore the Bible, so it's not accurate for conservative Christians to say that non-biblical strains were unimportant in the formation of Western civilization or America itself. Christianity was crucial in the founding of the United States, but some deists and skeptics also were part of the revolutionary coalition.