c. 1999 Religion News Service

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. _ As a new millennium looms, Christians need to look beyond individual salvation and better equip themselves to use their faith to reclaim influence on everything from science to popular culture.

That was the thrust of a conference titled”The Christian Mind in the New Millennium,”staged in Colorado Springs last weekend (Oct. 15-17) by Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Washington, D.C.-based group founded by lawyer-turned-evangelist Chuck Colson.

The conference drew 650 people from across the country to sessions on how Christianity can shape all aspects of society _ politics, arts, economics, health, law. Those are fields in which”Christians have taken almost a defeatist attitude,”said Krista Obitts, a conference organizer.”I think we’re seeing a change in that now.” Alan Hull, a 66-year-old health care consultant from Dallas who attended the conference, agreed.”The problem of the last 100 years is that Christians have withdrawn from the world, especially in areas like the arts and science,”he said.”Silence is a great problem, and we have no reason to be silent.” Colson, in an introductory lecture, waved off suggestions made by some of his conservative Christian colleagues that they withdraw from political life and social discourse to focus on their own lives and families. He believes that would only further privatize and marginalize the religion.

Rather, he said Christians’ main failure in recent decades has been to not recognize Christianity as a life system, or”worldview.””Christianity is more than simply salvation,”said Colson, who structured the conference around ideas in”How Now Shall We Live?”a new, 574-page manifesto he co-authored on Christian thought.”It is ultimate reality. It is a road map for all of life. The task we have is to understand that road map … so ultimately, we reform the culture of the day.” Recent culture has been dominated by the notion that everything can be explained naturally with no need to bring God into the picture, Colson said. He said secular naturalists’ belief that a”benevolent government could create a perfect society”has”resulted in taking away people’s own responsibility.” He raised the April 20 Columbine High School shootings as an example of what he sees as the clash of two worldviews: gun-toting murderers who read Nietzsche versus Christians who celebrated hope even in death. He called Columbine the”Pearl Harbor of the culture wars.” Christianity, Colson argued, offers the only”viable, rationally defensible answers”to life’s questions. For Christians to influence and ultimately win people’s minds, they must shed the image of”backwoods, Bible-pounding bigots”and ground themselves in reasoned, fact-based arguments, Colson said.

The conference speakers, many of them university professors, were charged with helping people accomplish that. Phillip E. Johnson, a University of California-Berkeley law professor who has written books seeking to discredit Darwinism, warned people against immediately quoting the Book of Genesis when arguing about the origins of man.”It’s vitally important to keep the Bible out of it _ at first,”he said.”The Bible is a non-starter.” That’s because such talk provides opponents easy fodder to talk about”how ridiculous some Bible story is,”he said.

Johnson argued that those who don’t believe God played a role in creating the universe are out to advance an atheist worldview. He said they reach biased conclusions by looking at data only through that prism. He offers them a criticism often pointed at Christians:”You want to believe what you want to believe instead of what the data shows you.” The best strategy for Christians is to raise questions about people’s beliefs and get a dialogue going _ not just say the Bible is the answer, Johnson said.

To emphasize the need to spread Christian messages to the larger society, Colson called upon Martha Williamson, executive producer of the hit CBS television show,”Touched By an Angel.”The series, in which an Irish-accented angel comes to the aid of souls in crisis, shot into the ratings top 10 last year when it moved to Sundays. The series’ success led to a Williamson-produced spin-off,”Promised Land,”which was canceled last spring.

Williamson was cheered when she noted that ABC had decided to temporarily yank from its schedule”NYPD Blue,”the subject of conservative protests over its use of harsh language, violence, and nudity. She said she believes greater opportunities for shows such as hers will arise as advertisers seek women as a discrete demographic market.

To get her show on the air, Williamson said she had to agree never to mention Jesus in scripts. She doesn’t think she compromised her beliefs. The messages just are a bit subtler, she said.”If I walked into CBS and said, `We want to do a Christian show,’ do you think we would be here now?”she asked.

DEA END GORSKI