0: [emcee: John McCandlish Phillips from The New York Times, we welcome you, John. [APS]]

0: Robert Flood, with whom I have recently enjoyed the classic adversarial relationship of editor to writer, Mr. Rohrer. And I would also say to the lovely young lady who sang to us: I appreciated her words tonight. I especially appreciated the word she spoke about building walls, because I would like to talk tonight about tearing down some walls.

I find it very often when you’re asked to speak, the person who asks you to speak assigns you a topic. They give you a series of words and say, “You will speak on this.” And tonight was no exception, I was asked to speak on the topic, “Will the Christian press please stand up?” And since it’s my opinion that the Christian press is now, in fact, standing up, it becomes a bit of a puzzle of how to address myself to that question, and I think perhaps it would be presumptuous for me to speak on exactly that topic. And I’d like, if I may, to revise the topic of tonight’s discussion to this briefer phrase: “Front Line Action.”

1: I’m glad tonight that I live in a nation where there can be a convention such as this. I’m glad tonight I live in a nation where there can be Christian publications, Christian books and Christian magazines and Christian newspapers, in great variety that roll forth from the presses, with no one to say, “You can’t do that.”

2: Because it so happens that we’re living in a world where there are nations where a convention of this kind could not be held. We’re living in a world where it’s illegal in certain nations for Christians so much as to possess the means of communication, such as the printing press and the radio and television broadcasting apparatus. And if they were to be found possessing these things and turning out Christian literature, they would be guilty of a crime and they would face imprisonment and loss and perhaps something worse. It’s a very different world we live in.

3: But we can hold this convention openly with no one to impose any limits at all upon us from the government. In fact, the government of this country stands in effect by its laws and by its legal processes behind the promulgation of the gospel, not as a philosophy but as a right.

No limits whatever imposed upon us as Christians by the government. And yet, limits imposed upon us by ourselves by restriction of vision and more than that. Limits imposed upon us as Christians by the deliberate and very active strategy of our adversary Satan to prevent us from penetrating as high as we must and reaching as far as we can. And if we can find out what that strategy is and how it works, we will place ourselves in the position of being able to overcome it.

4: If you look at the world, you could adduce this fact: that the policy of Satan is the suppression of God’s Word and God’s work to as nearly a total degree as possible. In some nations, that is a pretty total degree. In other nations, less so. In our nation, I think, a very special situation. In nations tonight where nearly one billion people reside, the very things that we can do and do do and the things that we ought to do cannot be done.

5: Now the strategy for the limitation of God’s Word and God’s work in America is quite different from the one applied in such nations as Russia and China and yet it’s working. And the essence of that strategy is this: it’s to minimize the Christian impact upon the body politic and the public at large and to maximize the impact of evil upon both. And the method by which this strategy is conducted is the extreme segregation of Christians away from the vital centers of power and influence, and this happens to be a strategy in which Christians for the most part heartily cooperate. Well, we say, “Here we are in free America,” with no limits whatever imposed upon us for promulgating the gospel with the power of the Word of God totally available to us and yet things are getting worse and worse and worse and we ask ourselves why.

6: And the answer is because we’ve allowed a kind of Christian ghetto that we call the evangelical realm to be established in this nation with pretty well-defined borders beyond which we rarely step and move.

Now, I’m not knocking at all the evangelical realm. I can say that I thank God for it; I thank God for the publications that go forth—I think we need them all. I thank God for the churches and the gospel halls and everything you could call the Christian establishment. It’s wonderful that we have it and can have it.

7: But what I am saying is that that Christian base, establishment, the ghetto, should be the base from which Christians launch a concerted assault upon the vital power centers of this nation. It should not be a safe retreat, a place within whose borders we keep for a certain degree of safety and comfort, a kind of shelter.

8: Now, our adversary has marked as off limits, posted as off limits, certain areas of American life and said, “No Christians shall come here.” And I say tonight that God wants us to get off limits. And I tell you this: if we don’t do that, this nation will be destroyed from within. There are forces now in motion that intend to do exactly that, that intend to end a government of liberty and the law and bring in a regime of tyranny under one flag or another.

9: The Lord said that Christians were salt in the earth. We are salt in the earth. Salt, as we have all heard from preachers at times, acts as a preservative. Where salt is, the meat so to speak is kept from spoiling, from going rotten. And where there is no salt, there is no preservative and nothing to prevent the rotting of that in which the salt is not.

And so if we look at certain areas of American life tonight and we say, “Why are they getting so rotten?”

And the answer comes back, “Because there’s no salt in them or upon them.”

10: I think it’s self-evident that when an evil system such as communism or fascism seeks to fasten itself upon a nation, it seeks to do that by going after certain just a few limited centers of power: chiefly the governments, the universities and the press. And when it has those three things in hand, it controls the public influence and the public power and evil can then have an unlimited heyday.

11: Let me give you three words and ask you to mark them in your minds or even on paper. The three words are this: “The public consciousness.” The public consciousness is that which the Lord wants us as Christians to reach. And the public consciousness is that which Satan desires to control by anything and everything except the true—anything else.

In China, as we’ve all heard perhaps, the public consciousness is bombarded all the time by the thoughts of Chairman Mao. You go in trains and they have PA systems set up in trains and so all the way you’re traveling on that train, all you hear over and over and over again are the chanted or repeated thoughts of Chairman Mao. You go into a restaurant to eat, and they have a so-called choir of a dozen young people there, and while you’re dining, they sing out the words of Chairman Mao. So that everywhere you go, public PA systems blaring out, barraging the public consciousness with these evil and untruthful thoughts. Words, words, words, lies, lies, lies, all the time unceasing.

12: Now in the U.S., the public consciousness is also bombarded all the time, virtually from coast to coast, not by the thoughts of Chairman Mao, by a variety of other things: by throbbing tribalistic music, by false philosophies of various kinds, by the devil’s own propaganda for indulgence in sin on every level, by drugs and by the increasingly insistent tempo of words of revolution. We keep hearing, “We’re going to have a revolution. There’s going to be a violent overthrow.”

13: Now, in this situation in America, the adversary has the advantage, because he controls at this present time through unbelievers, whom the Bible describes as the children of disobedience, most of the means of access to public consciousness.

For instance, take daily newspapers. For instance, take television stations. What do you get by and large pouring forth from both of these aspects of the media? Anything but the gospel. Anything but the reports of what God is actually doing to rescue drug addicts and other such things. I don’t mean that this is always the case and there aren’t exceptions—there are exceptions. But for every five articles on witchcraft, there is only one on something the Lord is doing.

14: And the Lord told us to go into all the world and to preach the gospel, to tell His good news to every creature, to herald forth the salvation of the blood of Jesus Christ, to reach the public consciousness in every place with truth, and to occupy.

Now, you can only reach the public consciousness by the two means that the Lord has written into the human constitution by which it can be reached: by the eye through print and by the ear through the oral proclamation of the gospel.

So, we are commissioned and authorized by the Lord to declare, to proclaim His praise for the ear, and to publish glad tidings for the eye. And by these two means to reach and penetrate, yea, I say, even to bombard the public consciousness with truth, with reports not of the problem only but reports of the solutions contained throughout the Word of God. And we must do that energetically and intelligently and also effectively.

15: Now, we look at this nation tonight, this abundant nation, and we say this: “Well, there are no shortages of the things necessary to do the job.” There’s no shortage of freedom in this country. There’s no shortage of Bibles in this country. There’s no shortage at all of born-again Christians in this country. There’s no shortage whatever of facilities and money. There’s no shortage of Christian effort and Christian energy. All of these things in abundance.

Yet, there is a critical shortage of effective Christian action. Why? Because what we have to a degree is misplaced Christian energy and misplaced Christian money and, most serious of all, misplaced Christians.

17: A friend of mine recently said to me a thought that struck me rather hard. He said this that if the Communists…if the Communist party in this nation had the resources and the personnel that the Christians have in this nation, that they would long since have taken over the nation. Why? Because they would have put the amount that we have into the places that determine control, power, influence and communication. And therefore, I say this: that we as Christians have the most urgent need tonight of setting some new priorities and also for the taking of some new initiatives.

18: In the division that exists between the evangelical realm and the secular realm in America, we see two distinct and separate publishing entities. There is the evangelical publishing entity and there is the secular publishing entity and rarely do the twain meet.

And we have in the Christian realm the Christian service publications reaching by and large the Christian audience, people who are for the most part already Christians. And this is good. And we have publishing houses for books like Zondervan and Revell and others that we could name, and they publish many excellent books. We have magazines of all kinds reaching all the time in great abundance the evangelical realm.

19: And then we see the wall and we see a wholly separate publishing realm from which all daily newspapers virtually in this country go forth: different publishing houses, the large secular houses, different magazines. And I ask you this question: why aren’t we taking some of what we have over on this side and carrying it over to this side? To reach millions of people who are fed nothing virtually but that which the secular publishing realm now produces and getting worse all the time?

20: Somewhere David said this, he said, “Lord, I live in a desert land. O, that I could see Thee work in that land as I saw Thee work, or have seen Thee work, in the sanctuary.” What David was saying was this: he was living in a spiritual desert and he knew there was a God in heaven who had abundance of water. And he had often gone into the sanctuary of the Lord and heard the priests singing and heard the Word of God proclaimed and rejoiced in the presence of God. But he said, “Lord, I want to see Thee working in the public places the way I see Thee working in the sanctuary.”

21: The wall that divides the two realms, the Christian from the secular, is very hard to get through. It’s not a visible wall, it’s an invisible wall. Many people when they set out from this side to get to this side find that they come up against barriers and they can’t quite get past them, and so they retire to this side again.

22: And this wall of separation keeps millions of people tonight in darkness and ignorance about what the Lord is doing, what He actually is doing. It also keeps them ceaselessly aware of what the devil is doing; every new fad, every new rebellion, every new outbreak of violence is always presented to them.

23: And it so happens tonight that I stand here as a member of the secular press, a Christian member of that press, talking to many members of the evangelical press. And I’m not saying at all, “Well, you should get up out of your seats and go over to the secular press.” I don’t in any way propose that. But I do propose that you can do something about making cracks in this wall, which must be brought down, that you can do something about dismantling this wall. How?

24: When a man goes to a place like Nigeria—a man of God—and finds certain needs there, the needs of the people, he comes back to America and he goes from place to place among the Christians and he says, “Look, there are tremendous needs in Nigeria,” and he proposes interest by words in that area of the world, gospel interest. And he asks people to give of their substance and some to give of their lives to meet that need. And as he does this more and more, certain Christians are roused by the Lord and they go out to Nigeria.

And the situation in Nigeria begins to change. False cults begin to lose their power over their followers as the gospel is proclaimed in breaking that power. Superstitious practices that torment the people are broken. Change comes in the atmosphere of Nigeria.

25: Well, now, I come tonight as a missionary not to Nigeria but to a place called media, and specifically to a place called mass media. And I say that there are needs, desperate and urgent needs, in mass media, and those needs can only be answered by Christians who are called to answer them.

As editors and writers, you all, I think, deal with one chief commodity all the time and that’s words. Now, I wonder if you have any conception whatever of the power of words. Words are actually more powerful than nuclear fission. It’s a surprising statement, but it’s quite true. Words, in fact, precede nuclear fission. Words have the power to change lives. Words have the power to change nations. Words have the power to change history.

26: You read that by the word of God, the heavens existed long ago. Have you ever considered the propulsive power of words? I’ve seen this in action in the neighborhood where I live. I happen to live on Morningside Heights in Manhattan, right opposite Columbia University. And that university has been one of the three or four most frequent targets of disruptions in recent years. And I have watched the pattern of these disruptions from my living room window, which is a big picture window overlooking the campus. And it’s been an invariable sequence of events, never changing.

27: First, the two or at most three young men with the bullhorns announcing nothing more than a meeting, a meeting of students in the center of the campus at a certain hour—4 PM or 8 PM or whatever hour it might be—and urging them to come. And then the hour arriving for the rally: the gathering of students, 100 or 200 or 300 or 400, to that rally. And then words are spoken to the consciousness of those students propelling them to certain actions.

28: One night, I heard noise on the campus. I went to my window, I saw a gathering of about 50 students—only 50. I went to my radio and tuned in the campus radio station WKCR that often covers campus events as they’re occurring, and they were that night. They had a microphone right where the rally was going on. And a young man was saying these words: “If you’ve got a gun, use it. If you’ve got a knife, use it. If you haven’t got a gun or a knife, pick up a rock and use it.” I heard those words on the radio coming from the middle of that rally.

29: The next morning, there were broken windows all over that campus and some also in the neighborhood. Why? Because words had been spoken and people had acted upon words. Well, that’s a miniature example of what can happen with the propulsive power of words.

When I was a child of about four or perhaps five years old and didn’t even know the name of the man, I heard words that I will never forget. They came over the radio. I lived in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, on the second floor of which there was an old German lady. And as I realized later, she was interested in the news and the events in Germany at that time in the 1930’s.

30: And I heard this staccato voice trumpeting out certain words, a flurry of words. And then the great roar from the crowd, and then more words and a great roar, and more words and a great roar. Four or five years old, I’ll never forget that. I didn’t know that was Hitler speaking to the German people and proposing adventures across the face of Europe that would lead to the digging of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands of graves. Now why is this?

31: The Bible says that the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity and that it is set on fire initially of hell and that it in turn sets on fire the course of nature. And that’s exactly what happens. The tongue of the demagogue stands before the people. He stands before the people, he moves his tongue in certain evil words, set on fire of hell, the intentions of hell. And that tongue sets on fire the course of nature, and you can see it. All there were in the middle 1930’s were the words of Adolf Hitler; that’s all, just the words and the public response. But then came the fire.

32: The New Testament says that Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh. So, with these things, you begin to get some idea of the place of words in the universe and the place of words also in society. And it’s the way we use words that determines the course of many events in many lives.

Now, I am not tonight standing before you as a Christian who happens to be employed by The New York Times. I am standing before you as a man who is employed by The New York Times as a Christian, because the Lord led me there. And every time I wanted out, and there were a dozen times I wanted out, He told me to stay.

Through most of the years I have been with that newspaper, for more than half of it, I could tell you this: I would have preferred to be working somewhere where the battle is less fierce, where the competition is less keen. You see, all the most ambitious souls in the nation are drawn to cities like Chicago and New York, get-ahead kind of people. And you have peculiar concentrations at all these great national centers of these most ambitious people.

34: And in places like the media, in places like the government, you have the notable, almost total absence of Christians. Now, this goes way beyond coincidence. It isn’t a coincidence that there are only a handful of Christian Congressmen and Senators. I can only name three; there may be more, but there aren’t many more. It isn’t a coincidence that Christians are as rare as Eskimos in the Amazon in the mass media. It isn’t a coincidence, it’s a strategy.

35: Now, it so happens that on any given working day, when I’m gathering a story, I go out and get that story and come back, say, at 4 PM. And I sit down at my desk at a typewriter. In the next hour or two hours or two hours and a half, I write that story. By 9 PM, three hours or less later, that story is on the presses, giant presses in the basement, turning out about 900,000 copies reaching—because newspapers, as you know, are read by more than one person in their homes: mother, father, junior, sister all take a look—reaching an estimated total audience of something about two million people that next morning. That isn’t all.

36: We have a New York Times syndicate, The New York Times news service that services 205 other papers in America, also others throughout the world. As the 900,000 copies are going out to every city in America of any size to every state and peculiarly and particularly going into the centers of power to the governments, to the corporate headquarter offices, to the universities, as that’s happening, other papers all across the nation are picking up the stories from The Times, syndicate wide. Those other newspapers have a total circulation of something over 30 million. But I’m told—I’m staggered by this, but I’m told it’s true—that those papers have a total readership of something over 100 million people in America. So that in less than 24 hours, one Christian sitting at one typewriter in that office can write one story that has a potential outreach in less than 24 hours of 100 million people. That is outreach.

37: The mass media of this country, which feed every single day the diet of words that the people of this country get, are not something wisely to be left in the hands of and in the control of unbelievers. Nor do we need anything like an inundation of Christian personnel. We need a few Christians with a certain amount of tenacity and a certain amount of faith to crack through these walls and to walk into these places and to stand there. Well, what can they do?

38: I was at one of the ten largest book publishing houses in New York several days ago and I happened to pick up there the cover of a new book to come out in about two and a half months, the title of which happens to be The Complete Art of Witchcraft by Sybil Leek. Now, this book, The Complete Art of Witchcraft, is going out under the imprint of this publishing house through an editor who is a recent Harvard graduate, I think, about 29 years old who, because he hasn’t any power of discernment whatever between truth and evil, can’t tell this from something very dangerous. He thinks it might run a profit and so puts it out to the public, where it will no doubt have a rather good sale.

39: Now, just supposing that that young man there, who is a chief editor of that house, just happened to be a Christian and the day when this book is proposed, he just happened to say, “No, thanks.” That book would go right where it belongs in that house. You don’t need a majority, but you do need a few.

40: There’s an exceedingly handsome and large magazine called Print Project Amerika, America spelled with a “k” in this case, a beautiful job, published at the time when three of the large size magazines in this country have recently reduced their size to cut costs, published by two students from Columbia University and two students from another university, who went around the country and raised $50,000 to begin putting this thing out last summer. And this is all about the media, about television, about video—see the big word “video” there? It’s all about the ambitions of these young people in the media and they talk at great length here about establishing these special frequency television stations. And the fellow proposing this says, “that we will show on this station such things as lovers making love in fields,” etc., etc. He says, “The new generation will not tolerate the miniaturized Vaudeville, the radio with a picture that is television as is now employed. We will seize the media.” “We will seize the media.” Now, where is the energy from that coming?

41: “The future of America is an open question,” this magazine says. “There are stirrings of a new American nation beyond the control and manipulation of corporate America. If violence is the midwife of social change, let us recognize that America is as yet in the first month of her pregnancy.”

42: “Never underestimate the power of woman,” was the slogan of a major magazine a few years ago. Yet it could say, “Never underestimate the power of a woman determined to use for her own ends the levers of power in a nation.”

When I went to high school, every morning first thing, the Bible was opened and the teacher would speak in a rather dull monotone some words from the Old Testament. And they never were very interesting to me, they never affected me very much and yet somehow it was something that we did: every day the Bible was opened.

43: Then there came a day where it was not allowed for teachers to open Bibles before students in classrooms. Why? Basically, because one woman expressing in her personality the historic enmity of Satan against the Word of God—because wherever he can he bans it, he makes it illegal—marched up to the courts of this nation and said, “The reading of the Bible in the public schools violates my rights as an atheist. I bid you throw it out.” One woman went to the lever of power and pushed it, and the Bible was expelled from the schools of America. All right.

44: One day, I was at my desk at the paper, it was about 2 PM. A very short piece of wire copy came across the wire, about four paragraphs, and it just gave in very quick essence something that was happening in upstate New York in a small town. It said that a man had tried to place an advertisement in the school yearbook with two quotations from the Bible, and the school principal had vetoed that as being a violation of the law of the nation. An editor said, “Look into this and see what there might be there.”

And I could sense that there was something of great interest here, so I made the phones hum for about three hours and I reached everyone up there: the school principal, the man who placed the ad, the kid who sold the ad. I got all the story together. Then I wrote as carefully as I could the most interesting summary of this for the chief editors. And when they got that summary, they said, “This is a page one story.”

45: And it told this tale that a certain man who had once been a drunkard and who had been converted and therefore no longer was a drunkard was in his house one evening when a student rapped on the door and said, “Sir, we’re putting out the school yearbook, would you please give us a $10 or $15 ad?”

And he thought for a minute and said, “Yes, I will. What I want you to put in that ad is two verses of Scripture.”

And the kid said, “Fine.”

He went back to the school and began to set this up and the school principal saw it and said, “No, listen, the Supreme Court said we can’t have this.”

And the pastor took exception and said, “You can have two dancehall advertisements where they serve beer for high school students, but you can’t have two quotes from the Bible, where’s the equity there?” But it was still no-go, and this was on page one of The New York Times. And I sensed that this could be the beginning of a march to the same lever of power, because the pastor said, “We’re going to take this into the courts and test it there and find out what’s what.”

46: And you could see what could have happened. Some courts could have said very easily, “No, this goes too far. It’s part of liberty of publication to have those two Bible verses,” and upheld that right. And then all over the nation, people would have realized that a principal, who had been frightened to put a couple of verses of the Bible before his students, had been wrong, that the courts say you can do this. And they could have taken it all the way up.

So I called back three months later and I said, “What did you do?”

And I was told this: “We dropped the case, because we figured it would be too expensive.” Well.

47: Last August, I was at the Christian Booksellers Convention covering a couple of stories there in Minneapolis, and I met one of the wealthiest Christian publishers in America. In the course of talking to him, he said, “You know I remember that interesting story you had on that upstate New York Bible case.” He said, “I got on the phone and I called and said, ‘If you need any money, just come to me.’” I didn’t know about that.

The money was there. The case was there. Everything was there, except the action and the energy to act.

48: It is always the objective of our adversary to energize and to propel forward in every possible way the unbelievers, the evangelists of evil, while inducing the maximum amount of torpor and inaction among believers to keep us always on a lower level than we must be to save the nation.

Now, with this I close. There was a time not too long ago when the door of opportunity for the gospel was wide open in China. Christian missionaries could go in in any numbers and they did. There was a move of the Lord to promulgate the gospel in China, marvelous thing, attended by miracles in many cases. And Christians set up an establishment, a Christian… evangelical realm in China and it had marvelous things in it. It had universities, it had grade schools and high schools. It had hospitals, it had small publishing enterprises, all kinds of works of mercy. It had evangelism and the preaching of the gospel.

49: And while Christians were busy at all these things, the Communists weren’t very busy with the hospitals, but they were very busy at getting a hold of the government. And when they got a hold of it, all the other things went right down the drain for the most part. They ran things down.

There’s been great Christian movements in this century in Chile. And while the Christian establishment was being built up, the extreme left-wing socialists were aiming for the governments, and who knows what the course in the next decade of liberty for the gospel will be in that nation?

50: Now, what is it that paralyzes Christians in this nation from getting sufficient numbers into our government? Why don’t we have at least 30 or ideally 50 born-again Congressmen sitting in Washington? On both parties, it doesn’t make any difference what party they represent. It’s the fact that when the crisis comes, you’ll have men there who care about the nation and the Lord, men who dare to pray and ask God.

You know, propaganda has made great sport of McKinley. He’s been portrayed as one of our weakest, least effective presidents. I read a story once that before he made a big decision about the Philippines, McKinley spent all night pacing up and down the White House praying to God to know what to do. And in the morning, he knew what to do, what policy to execute toward the Philippines. And that was one of the most brilliantly successful policies that paid off for decade after decade and it’s still paying off today. Because someone in the White House cared enough to pray.

51: People say, “Well, wouldn’t that be worldly? Should we really be there?” As to believers having the actual control of affairs, the Bible has these words, “When the righteous are in authority… are in authority, the people rejoice. But when the wicked bear rule, the people mourn,” Proverbs 29:2. And that is definitive.

52: Jesus did not tell us to be spectators until He comes. He did not say to occupy until the going gets too hot. He told us to “occupy till I come, until I come again.” So we ask this: by what means and to what degree shall we occupy? And the answer comes from Heaven itself: we shall occupy by every available means and to the highest possible degree. Thank you.