Bearing witness: ‘Remember who you are and whom you serve,’ Christianity Today has reminded us

Bear witness.

“Remember who you are and whom you serve,” as Christianity Today has just reminded us.

Jeanette gave me a subscription to Christianity Today for Christmas this year. While I always try and find my way into Hull’s Family Bookstores when we’re in Winnipeg, where I buy the most recent issue available, my trips to the provincial capital are only occasional, and I have not previously been a subscriber to the magazine, although I have been reading free content online over the years.

This month, I can’t think of any publication more deserving of monetary support.

Kudos to Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of Christianity Today, and Mark Galli, outgoing editor in chief of Christianity Today. Since 1956 and its founding by the late Billy Graham, Christianity Today has been a trusted beacon. Part of its “Statement of Faith” proclaims, “When we have turned to God in penitent faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are accountable to God for living a life separated from sin and characterized by the fruit of the Spirit. It is our responsibility to contribute by word and deed to the universal spread of the Gospel.”

Nearly 200 evangelical leaders, however, are pushing back against Galli’s recent editorial that called for United States President Donald Trump to be removed from office, saying the piece “offensively” dismissed their support of the president.

Following Trump’s impeachment last week, Galli called Trump a “grossly immoral character.” The criticism was notable as evangelicals are a key constituency of Trump.

On Dec. 22, a number of prominent evangelical leaders affirmed their strong support of the president and slammed the magazine in a letter to Dalrymple: “Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelical leaders wrote. “It not only targeted our President; it also targeted those of us who support him, and have supported you,” they added.

The signatories include Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty College; Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Ralph Reed, the president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition; and Paula White Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser who recently joined the White House staff.

Former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and former United States House of Representatives Republicans Michele Bachmann and Bob McEwen were also among those who signed the letter.

All that said, it would be a mistake simply to reduce this to a matter of caricature of those we disagree with. Jerry Falwell (as was his father) is too tempting a target. And while it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s too of-this-world political and too cozy with Trump and his band of cronies for my taste, yet I have great admiration for his work as head of Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

In 2014 Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, asked Samaritan’s Purse to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital – the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia.

It would be impossible, I think, for most of us to be unmoved by the steps Franklin Graham took to rescue Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, who had contracted Ebola, and who became the first patient ever medically evacuated and repatriated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, largely due to Graham’s efforts.

Jeanette has taught me many things, but one of the earliest points she made with me when I was writing scathing editorials, was that when it comes to individuals – real flesh-and-blood people – it is often both difficult and dangerous to assign motive and infer intention into hearts we cannot know, and truth be told, that includes men like Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham, as painful as that is to admit at times.

Terry Mattingly, who describes himself as a “prodigal Texan,” and is a parishioner at St. Anne’s Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, elucidates the complexities at play well in his post, ” What’s the one thing journalists need to learn from the Christianity Today firestorm?,” which was published yesterday in GetReligion.org, an independent website, which he founded and edits, and which takes as its mission wrestling with issues of religion-beat coverage, as it critiques the mainstream media’s coverage of religion news. The post can be read at: https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2019/12/23/whats-the-one-thing-journalists-need-to-learn-from-the-christianity-today-firestorm

We desperately need more of the likes of John McCandlish Phillips, who died in 2013 at the age of 85, and lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952. You can read more about him here at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

As for Mattingly, his father was a Southern Baptist pastor and his mother a language arts teacher. He double-majored in journalism and history at Baylor University and then earned an M.A. at Baylor in Church-State Studies and an M.S. in communications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

He worked as a reporter and religion columnist at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News. In 1991, Mattingly began teaching at Denver Seminary and has lectured at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

While we should tread with caution in judging the intentions of others, as Mattingly reminds of us, we are also called to bear witness through the example of our own lives. While it may only be an errantly attributed aphorism, Abraham Lincoln’s “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest” speaks a powerful truth.

More and more, the world is in need of Christian witness such as that from Christianity Today, evangelicalism’s flagship magazine, as an earlier era was moved by the witness of German theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller’s, whose prophetic words are inscribed on a wall in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Hall of Witness, a memorial space on the ground floor:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Socialist.

“Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

“Because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Galli’s Dec. 19 editorial, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” and Dalrymple’s Dec. 22 update, “The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President,” are both linked to below:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-evangelicals-editorial-christianity-today-president.html

As I write these words, I am given to ponder the three Bible verses below:

Joshua 24:14-15:

“Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Micah 6:8

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love [a]mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?”

Amos 5:24

“But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Science-Medicine

A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis

One of the first things I knew I wanted to write about almost four years ago when soundingsjohnbarker started was something about Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. “A bigger picture” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/ became my third blog post here on Sept. 3, 2014.

It interested me because Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief ministry run by Franklin Graham, son of the late North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham, and based in nearby Boone, North Carolina, was best known in recent years by many in North America for its Operation Christmas Child, which was started in 1990, and by 1993 it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse.

Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

As of 2014, Operation Christmas Child had collected and distributed over 100 million shoebox gifts in more than 130 countries worldwide. Each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed. Here in Thompson, hundreds of shoeboxes are collected each Christmas season for Operation Christmas Child through efforts co-ordinated in recent years mainly by the First Baptist Church, and previously the Thompson Pentecostal Assembly, which have co-ordinated efforts on behalf of a number of local churches, including St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church, and other places including University College of the North (UCN), Thompson Public Library, and individual donors.

Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King, who pastored the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson, and was in active ministerial service here for 19 years, until she retired in June 2014, touched a nerve in her “Spiritual Thoughts” column in the Nickel Belt News Oct. 26, 2012 when she mentioned using the Canada Revenue Agency website to look at how the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Calgary-based Samaritan’s Purse Canada operates.

In a nutshell, while King had no problem with the charity’s six per cent management and administration budget expense, while 90 per cent went directly to the charity, which, she said, was “very good,” she didn’t much like the concept of sending shoeboxes stuffed with a pillowcase, toothbrush and a few pencils to a poor child on the other side of the world. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where? That way, it would be more likely that our gift would build the economy in a community that needs it?” she asked.

Frank King, no relation, communications manager for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Samaritan’s Purse Canada, pointed out “our work in developing nations, including distributing Operation Christmas Child shoe box gifts, is always done through local partners. This is a priority for us because we want to build up local churches and we want to rely on local expertise to do (or financially support) the work that best benefits those communities.”

The Ebola story and Samaritan’s Purse was to me the international back story to the local Operation Christmas Child story. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where?” Leslie King asked in 2012. Well, speaking of NGOs, in 2014 it would be Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, but stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, that would ask Samaritan’s Purse on July 8, 2014 to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital — the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia. The West African Ebola crisis — the world’s first urban outbreak as opposed to primarily rural previous ones — began in December 2013 in Meliandou, a small, isolated village in Guinea with only 31 households. It wasn’t until March 21, 2014, that the disease was identified as Ebola. The outbreak peaked in October 2014 and ended in June 2016.

Writing back in September 2014, what I knew then was that Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, contracted Ebola and was the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Brantly originally moved to Liberia with his wife and children in October 2013 to be a general practitioner. Immediately after Samaritan’s Purse took over Ebola treatment operations in Liberia, he traded his hospital scrubs for a full-body hazmat suit.

I also knew that Brantly was the first Ebola patient ever treated with ZMapp, a highly experimental three-mouse monoclonal antibody drug serum treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, based in San Diego. ZMapp was produced for Mapp Biopharmaceutical in the Reynolds American tobacco plant Kentucky Bioprocessing facility in Owensboro, Kentucky inside the leaves of tobacco plants. Two of the drug’s three components were originally developed at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s containment level 4 National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

But what I didn’t know until I recently saw Samaritan Purse’s compelling 2017 documentary Facing Darkness on Netflix was that at the time Brantly was given ZMapp there were only four courses of ZMapp treatment in existence anywhere in the world. A specially-equipped isolation chamber Phoenix Air modified Gulfstream III air ambulance, the only one of its kind at the time in the world, chartered by Samaritan’s Purse to medically evacuate and repatriate Brantly, and en route from the United States to Liberia, had turned back half way across the Atlantic Ocean with a mechanical problem. Phoenix Air is headquartered in Cartersville, Georgia.

And then, a miracle by many measures. One of Brantly’s colleagues, and one of the physicians treating the critically-ill doctor, Dr. Lance Plyler, medical director of the Disaster Response Unit at Samaritan’s Purse, located one of those four courses of ZMapp in neighbouring Sierra Leone. A Styrofoam box containing three frozen vials of straw-colored fluid was flown to the border, canoed across a river and put on a plane to Monrovia, the Liberian capital. But there was enough to treat only one person, and meanwhile, Nancy Writebol, 59, with Serving in Mission, (SIM), had also contacted Ebola.

The day the ZMapp arrived in Monrovia, Brantly was actually having one of his better days since contracting the virus, and insisted that Writebol, who appeared sicker, be given the available ZMapp. But as the frozen vials were literally warming up under her arm, Brantly took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, and started to seize. Plyler made what must have required the Wisdom of Solomon-like Hippocratic Oath decision to retrieve the ZMapp vials from under Writebol’s arm, and administered the drug to Brantly instead. Brantly started to feel better almost immediately.

Both Brantly and Writebol would both wind up being treated with ZMapp and be medically evacuated by Phoenix Air within days, Brantly first, to Emory. Both made full recoveries.

Facing Darkness also provides insights into the character of Franklin Graham, as head of Samaritan’s Purse, that I had never seen before. While it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s a bit too of-this-world political and too cozy with President Donald Trump and his band of cronies for my taste. But recalling how he learned about Brantly contracting Ebola while he was in Alaska, Graham was almost ashen-face still as he recalled the moment. Speaking in the same measured tones Billy Graham often did, doesn’t take away from Franklin Graham’s sense of being overwhelmed by shock and grief. Initially, “I didn’t even know how to pray,” he says. But Graham would soon enough pray. And Samaritan’s Purse with Franklin Graham at the helm, would, in the best tradition of the United States Army Rangers nemo resideo, and “leave no one behind,” move heaven and earth to medically evacuate Brantly and Writebol from Liberia back to the United States.

A true-life page-tuner worthy of the best of the late Michael Crichton’s medical thrillers.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Evangelicalism, Populism, Religion

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has it right on Catholic respect and admiration for Billy Graham

It was probably one of the shorter tributes published last week after the death of 99-year-old Protestant evangelist Billy Graham, but nonetheless Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who heads the Archdiocese of New York, had it exactly right about Graham’s place in Catholic understanding.

Writing on the Archdiocese of New York’s website Feb. 21, Cardinal Dolan, wh0 grew up in the American Midwest in Ballwin and St, Louis, Missouri, said, “As anyone growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s can tell you, it was hard not to notice and be impressed by the Reverend Billy Graham. There was no question that the Dolans were a Catholic family, firm in our faith, but in our household there was always respect and admiration for Billy Graham and the work he was doing to bring people to God.”

Graham, a graduate of Florida Bible Institute, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church in 1938 and ordained to preach by a Southern Baptist congregation in 1939. While his early years of ministry were marked by antipathy towards Roman Catholicism (in 1948 he reportedly said, “The three greatest menaces faced by orthodox Christianity are communism, Roman Catholicism, and Mohammedanism”) Graham within a few years had greatly moderated his position on Catholics and by the early 1950s was friends with Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the finest Catholic communicator of his or any other Catholic generation to date, and Cardinal Richard Cushing, archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970. The story of how Sheen and Graham met has been oft told. According to Graham, the two happened to be on the same train from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Graham was apparently already in his pajamas when Sheen knocked on his door, wanting to meet him for a chat and to pray, and the two became fast friends.

Billy Graham’s crusades, one of the most remarkable cultural phenomenons of 20th century Christianity, made him a representative Christian, deeply respected across denominational lines, including by Roman Catholics, many of whom also attended his Crusades. In June 1972, at the peak of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America with members of the movement often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks” more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative, and Billy Graham, the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. Cardinal Karol Wotjyla, just before he was elected pope, later to become Pope Saint John Paul II, invited Graham to Poland to preach a mission in Krakow in 1978.

While Graham’s life was a powerful witness to the repentance and redemption he preached, he paid a price with some of his more hardline fellow Protestant evangelicals for his warming towards Roman Catholics, leading some to publicly label him as a disobedient compromiser at best and an outright apostate at worst. So it goes. There is always a price to pay on the walk.

Said Dolan last week: “Whether it was one of his famous Crusades, radio programs, television specials, or meeting and counseling the presidents, Billy Graham seemed to be everywhere, always with the same message: Jesus is your Savior, and wants you to be happy with Him forever. As an historian, my admiration for him only grew as I studied our nation’s religious past, and came to appreciate even more the tremendous role he played in the American evangelical movement. May the Lord that Billy Graham loved so passionately now grant him eternal rest.”

“From Jerusalem, I mourn the death of Billy Graham,,” tweeted Father Jonathan Morris at 7:09 a.m. Israel Standard Time (IST) last Wednesday. Morris is the pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Bronx. “From this earthly city of human brokenness, I can imagine more easily the New Jerusalem, where Our Lord has now welcomed his faithful son, #billygraham,” Morris tweeted.

It took me a few months to get around to finishing, but back in 2015 I watched the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham gave over his long life, was remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. I once wrote right after that observation, “If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.) It was all half, true, half in jest, of course. No one knew better than Billy Graham himself that he was no saint, and indeed, was a sinner, as we all are.

While most of what was written about the passing of Billy Graham last week was pretty fair and accurate, an unfortunate minority of pieces that have appeared have not only been mean-spirited but unfair to his historical record on the major social issues of his life and times. Drives me crazy! I shouldn’t let what finds its way onto social media get under my skin, but I still do at times.

Yes, Billy Graham, was a man of his times, as we all are. He got things wrong. But Billy Graham never shirked from later admitting he had been wrong, expressing sorrow, repenting and apologizing. He may have got some important things wrong at times, but he was not on the wrong side of history.

Martin Luther King, a fellow pastor, called Graham a good friend. While Graham’s crusades had been desegregated in 1953, before either custom or the law required it, he had no hesitation at admitting he should have been on the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in March 1965, but he wasn’t. In 1993, Graham agreed with the suggestion HIV/AIDS might be a judgment of God. He later admitted he was wrong and apologized.

Billy Graham fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christian Cinema, Ideas, Popular Culture

Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise. Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times. The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Blogosphere

Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham. While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp. Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2. Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of. If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christian Cinema, Popular Culture and Ideas

Woodlawn is a potent mix of Deep South high school football set against a backdrop of racial tension and the early 1970s Jesus movement

Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

It’s a pretty impressive list.

Woodlawn, released last October, is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 97, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review last September after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christian Cinema, Eschatology, Popular Culture and Ideas

Left Behind and the Canadian boys from North Bay, Ontario, brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde

Sometimes it’s a “special feature” embedded deep on the DVD off the “main menu” that is the real nugget. After not finding enough bandwidth to watch a Netflix offering, I dug deep into my DVD collection last night to pull out the first Left Behind movie by North Bay, Ontario brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, filmed in 2000, and which made its theatrical premiere on Jan. 26, 2001 at a star-studded red carpet event at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theatre on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The DVD special feature, “Seeing is Believing,” has interviews with some of those on hand for that theatrical premiere, including the redoubtable Tom Selleck.

At the time almost 16 years ago, Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest and most ambitious Christian genre movie ever made, and it was hoped by many in the evangelical community to be the big crossover movie that would appeal also to the general public – read the “unsaved” or “non-believers,” as well as those already preaching in the choir. Left Behind: The Movie was an unusual release because it went to video first in October 2000, then theatres in January 2001. It opened in 800 theatres and grossed $4.2 million. It won “Bestselling Title of the Year from an Independent Studio” and “Sell-through Title of the Year by an Independent Studio” from the Video Software Dealer’s Association.

Alas, Left Behind has never quite realized that early promise and the franchise has been beset by problems of various kinds over the last decade.

For the uninitiated, Left Behind started out as a a series of 16 best-selling novels by Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist End Times view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows. The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

LaHaye, now 89, is a sometimes controversial evangelical minister, who conceived the Left Behind books, although Jerry B. Jenkins, 66, a sports-oriented biographical writer, did the actual writing of the books from LaHaye’s notes.

LaHaye was inspired to write the books in part by the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

Jenkins, on the other hand, has said, “I write the best I can. I know I’m never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?” Having read all 16 books in the series – from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides; Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed; Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007, I can only say, “true that Jerry.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That is very much an evangelical Protestant rather than Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. Catholics do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

The Left Behind movie franchise, which is now up to four movies with a fifth possible, is perhaps surprisingly, a Canadian phenomenon, spearheaded by two brothers from North Bay Ontario, Peter and Paul Lalonde, who first came to wide notice on television in 1989 with their weekly half-hour show This Week in Bible Prophecy, before going onto form Cloud Ten Pictures in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1995. Paul Lalonde worked as social worker at various group homes in North Bay before attaining his televised pulpit, while Peter Lalonde was a good enough goalie he might had a shot at playing NHL hockey had he wanted to.

Peter Lalonde has said he became a “Christian as a result of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 in a church. I went back on Sunday, then again, and several weeks later I became a believer.”

Left Behind: The Movie was quickly followed by Left Behind II: Tribulation Force in 2002 and Left Behind: World at War in 2005, all starring Kirk Cameron, 45, still perhaps best known to the larger public as a teenage actor for his role as Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains between 1985 and 1992, and Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie, Janaya Stephens, and Cameron’s real-life wife, Chelsea Noble.

But none of them would be back by the time the fourth movie, simply called Left Behind, was finally released nine years later in October 2014.

The most recent Left Behind movie was produced by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, a company he formed in 2012, and released through Cloud Ten Pictures, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, Johnson’s former role as an airline pilot, with Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer and movie.

The choice of Cage caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic.

Why the long delay? Some nasty litigation is one explanation. LaHaye, who had sold the film rights for Left Behind to Joe Goodman, Bobby Neutz and Ralph Winter, owners of Namesake Entertainment in April 1997, before the End Times novels became a publishing phenomenon, hated the film. Namesake Entertainment had sold the rights to make the film to Cloud Ten Pictures in 1999. Left Behind: The Movie was privately financed and cost $17.4 million to make, including production, post-production, publicity, marketing, and distribution costs.Its theological consultants included John Hagee, author of Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, published in October 2013, from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Michigan televangelist Jack Van Impe.

Widely known as “The Walking Bible” for spending about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 Bible verses, Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to 97-year-old Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching, was hospitalized in early April with serious cardiac problems, missing taping almost six months worth of half hour episodes for his long-running TV show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, which he normally co-hosts with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, while a number of guest co-hosts stepped in during his long convalescence in hospital and at a Michinga nursing home before his return to the airwaves in early October. The Van Impes have been married since 1954.

Sharp-eyed observers in Left Behind: The Movie could get a quick glimpse of Jack Van Impe as one of the passengers caught up in the Rapture mid-transatlantic flight. The Lalondes and Cloud Ten Pictures discovered early on theological consultants, musicians and all kinds of normally behind-the-scenes folk, like most everyone, enjoy the chance to have their 15 seconds of fame on the silver screen, too, which is also good for holding the line on production costs from the filmmakers’ perspective.

LaHaye, however, was not so easily charmed. He sued both Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures in July 1999, claiming the the producers told him that the movie’s production budget would exceed $40 million, although there was no language in the contract to that effect. LaHaye also claimed that he had sold the film rights on the condition that the picture be produced by a major studio with big-name Hollywood box office stars, and released to theaters in late 1999 so as to capitalize on the Y2K phenomenon.

LaHaye’s lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. federal district court in 2003, but by that point Cloud Ten Pictures and Namesake Entertainment had filed a countersuit against LaHaye for breach of contract, among other allegations.

Ultimately, in August 2008, the two sides settled their legal differences out of court, and LaHaye reportedly liked a rough cut he saw of the new Left Behind movie.

Unfortunately for Cloud Ten Pictures, Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, LaHaye, if he did in fact like the finished final cut as well, was pretty much alone in that opinion. To say the film was savaged by critics in both the serious religious and secular press would be a charitable understatement. Two examples, one from the religious press, one from the secular, pretty much illustrate the debacle

Jackson Cuidon, writing in Christianity Today, said, “[t]he Left Behind movie is just a disaster flick injected with the slightest, most infinitesimal amount of Christianity possible. This is, in one way, good – no one needs to be upset, or get angry, or be offended, or question their beliefs, or the beliefs of those around them, or anything, because the film takes no stance on anything. The film is so inept, confused, and involuted that there’s no danger of even accidentally cobbling together something that could necessitate a defense of Christianity.”

That was the mild criticism. Andrew Barker (no relation), senior features writer for Variety, penned this piece published Oct. 2, 2014, the day before the film opened in theaters: “In what was surely a first in the annals of motion-picture marketing, an early ad for Left Behind featured a quote taken not from a film critic, but rather from Satan himself, who allegedly quipped, ‘Please do not bring unbelievers to this movie,’” Barker wrote.

“This presents a rare scenario in which Christian moviegoers ought to feel perfectly secure heeding the advice of the Devil, as this faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions. With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption.”

OK, for the record, eh. I’m a big fan of the Sharknado franchise, too, so find your analogical comparisons elsewhere, and for God’s sake, if no other, lighten up namesake Barker! Cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics.

I haven’t seen the most recent Left Behind movie yet (although I have seen the first three). Will I? Quite probably should the opportunity present itself. Why? I’ve been a writer long enough to know critics like to hear the sound of their own voices above all else and if purple prose and hyperbole serve the day’s writing purpose, so be it. Most film critics are about as qualified to write about religion and especially eschatology as I am to perform neurosurgery.

Besides I have something of a soft spot admittedly for the Lalonde brothers, the boys from North Bay. Way back in 1993 and 1994, when I was a first-year graduate student in 2oth century American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and was contemplating what thesis topic I might pursue for my master’s degree, one of my possibilities under consideration was premillennial dispensationalism and the Rapture, which made watching This Week in Bible Prophecy something of a guilty pleasure. But in fairness, much of what I first learned about the “cashless” society and biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning, all of which came true in the years that followed, so much so they’re almost commonplaces today, I first learned more than 20 years ago watching Peter and Paul Lalonde.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote: “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly. His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren. While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22