Book Review: A Christian Manifesto

I have had a copy of Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto on my shelf for a while. I purchased a used copy of the original 1981edition from eBay and have been toting it around for years. I finally got around to reading it last week. It was about three years too late! A few years ago I would have affirmed a lot of what Schaeffer talks about. Today I find what he wrote to be misguided and perhaps in some areas a bit dangerous.

I found it troubling in the extreme that in his chapter on the use of force, Schaeffer seamlessly transitions from the American Revolution to Nazi Germany to abortion in the United States. Let me be clear that abortion in the United States is infanticide writ large and is murder most foul perpetrated daily on the most defenseless among us. Yet few Christians would advocate for killing abortionists, overcoming evil with evil. It is a far more cut and dried case than waging war on behalf of one nation-state against another nation-state where innocents will invariably be killed and yet we know that while we are called to strive for the unborn we are not called to gun down abortionists to do so. While Schaeffer is careful to not directly advocate for violence against abortionists, even he recognizes that his arguments could lead to an unhinged person doing something violent.

In other places Schaeffer repeatedly refers to Romans 13 but adds the caveat that only "just" governments that follow God's laws are to be submitted to. The glaring weakness in that argument is that the government in place when Romans 13 was written was....the Roman Empire. The Empire that conquered and occupied Israel, that crucified Christ and that would persecute Christians for many, many years. That was hardly a "just" government and Paul was clearly writing to the contemporary church and not just Christians in a future America. The notion that Romans 13 only applies to governments we decide are "just" is fraught with peril and is a convenient excuse to use force when sinful men deem it necessary, with theological cover built right in.

This was my first exposure to Schaeffer and I was thoroughly disappointed with his writing style as well as the substance of his argument. His arguments seem disconnected with Scripture in spite of the frequent appeals to Christian worldviews and ethics. There are plenty of references to the writings of various Founding Fathers and appeals to Lex Rex but very little real effort at engaging the text itself. Perhaps he did so elsewhere and assumed the reader was familiar with these works. In Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto I recognize the seed of the movement we see today that is championing a return to a "Christian America" and that mixes political conservatism with Christianity into a seamless garment.  As I mentioned at the outset, this would have been a far more favorable review from me just a few years ago but as I slowly grow in maturity as a follower of Christ I have begun to realize that defending the American way of life and all of our cherished "rights" is not the calling of the church and should not be a priority for His people.