Ben's Reviews > A Christian Manifesto

I didn't intend to read a Christian tract about resisting tyranny and social godlessness during the same week a new president was inaugurated, but it seems God was in the timing.

A Christian Manifesto is Francis Schaeffer's argument from 1981, that Christians had for too long been lax in engaging a society that was slowly but surely turning away from God, and burning up all the Christian social capital accumulated during past ages. Christians' failure, Scaheffer believes, has been in attempting to segregate religious life from social and political life, thereby leaving the "non-religious" aspects of society open to the domination of anti-Christian doctrines. The primary issue that Schaeffer returns to throughout the book is abortion, and it is interesting to see him attempting to convince evangelicals that it is an issue which demands action. Apparently Schaeffer's appeal worked, because abortion remains a key issue for Protestants, but it may be a lesson for Christians in the consequences of waiting to engage the culture that no progress has been made toward addressing the issue politically, and only slightly has progress been made socially.

The book suffers, in my view, from a couple of problems, one Schaeffer's fault and one not. First, the issue not his fault, is simply how dated the book is, being written in another inauguration year, that of Ronald Reagan's first term. The datedness of the book obviously hampers some of its applicability today, particularly in Schaeffer's recommendations for action, though it does also lend a curious charm to the book and reminds the reader that the problems Christians face today are not new. The other problem is one that many evangelical books of this type have, which is that it's just not very historically, politically, or socially sophisticated outside of a specifically Reformed point of view (which is in itself very useful). Why Schaeffer and the evangelicals of the day didn't attach their movement to the longer-standing traditionalist conservatives, who had been fighting these intellectual battles for decades by this point, is hard to understand, particularly since there was considerable benefit to be had by both sides from the perspectives of the other.

The most interesting, and probably controversial, part of the book is Schaeffer's case for civil disobedience against tyranny, up to and including the right of self-defense. He attaches this case to the historical Reformed tradition stretching from William Tyndale and John Knox to Samuel Rutherford through to the American Revolution (Schaeffer mentions John Witherspoon by name, but as Mark David Hall has noted in Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, a significant majority of the founding generation had roots in Reformed political theory, which includes resistance to tyrants). No doubt the denizens of the online evangelical world today would scoff and proclaim horror at Schaeffer's thoughts along these lines, and I have my own Burkean reservations despite Schaeffer's attempt to distinguish between self-defense and revolution, but his points along these lines are well considered, and are certainly not less pertinent in a culture that now demands that we not only look the other way when it violates human life, but also demands Christians' acquiescence in a whole host of other rejections of God's moral law.

So while A Christian Manifesto has not aged as well as some of his other works, we could use a healthy injection into modern Christianity of Schaeffer's passion for boldly proclaiming and standing for the truth. Sadly, the malady that he identifies, of Christians being unwilling and unprepared to apply biblical truth to their entire worldviews persists in our day.