Page 1618 – Christianity Today (2024)

I'm not sure when I started hearing more about "the common good" from fellow Christians. But I'm pretty sure Christianity Today had something to do with it. This magazine spent 2005 exploring pastor Tim Keller's proposal that Christians be "a counterculture for the common good." Now we're in the midst of This Is Our City: two years' worth of articles, documentary films, and events for leaders in cities around North America. Our team has realized that what we're really looking for are what we are calling "common-good decisions"—times when Christians make choices, some small and relatively easy (say, volunteering in a neighborhood school), others major and costly (say, moving into a tough school district), to seek the good of their neighborhoods.

The phrase also comes up in the perennial but newly vigorous conversation about the role Christians should play in American culture. Gordon College president Michael Lindsay titled his 2011 inaugural address "Faithful Leadership for the Common Good." Gabe Lyons, who convenes diverse church and civic leaders every year at the Q conference, describes its mission as "ideas for the common good." (Full disclosure: Lindsay and Lyons are friends, and their organizations have been the recipients of my family's financial support and have paid me for speaking engagements.) The phrase appears three times in the National Association of Evangelicals' (NAE) 2001 "call to civic responsibility" titled "For the Health of the Nation," which CT editor in chief David Neff helped draft. After longtime vice president Richard Cizik left the NAE, he founded a new group called the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.

But a slogan isn't the same thing as a vision. And the more I've thought about and vigorously promoted the phrase "the common good," the less I'm sure we know what we mean by it.

The Common What?

All by itself, "the common good" is as vague as fine-sounding phrases tend to be. And being fine-sounding and vague, it easily becomes political pabulum to promote whatever policies the speaker wants to advance. Not surprisingly, it arises at times when politicians want to justify imposing costs on some part of society, as when Hillary Rodham Clinton told a group of donors in 2004, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." To some ears, "the common good" echoes communism's demands that all lesser goods yield to the construction of a people's paradise. At the least, when we hear that some sacrifice will serve "the common good," it's reasonable to ask, "Sez who?"

It's also reasonable to ask how far Christians can pursue a common good alongside people who believe in very different goods from us, or who question whether we can call anything "good" at all. It's not just Christians who wonder about this: Secular thinkers have pushed back against the phrase on the grounds that no pluralistic society has the right to dictate a vision of the good for all its members. That was fine for European societies in the Dark Ages, they imply. But in the diverse and doubting 21st century, we have to settle for something thinner, something we can all agree on without stepping on one another's metaphysical toes—allowing everyone "the pursuit of happiness" and calling it a day.

Christians, meanwhile, have reason to question visions of a world made right that omit the judgment, mercy, and grace of God. "The common good" has an awfully this-worldly ring to it. To believe we humans can achieve good on our own, even working together, without the radical intervention of God, is ultimately to deny the doctrines of Creation, Cross, Resurrection, and Second Coming, just for starters. To exchange the dramatic biblical vision of history for "the common good" might seem like trading our birthright for a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal.

So, with all these weaknesses, why should Christians embrace the phrase?

Because it was these very follies that prompted Christians to recover the language of "the common good" in the first place.

An Old Idea

To understand the revival of "the common good," we need to understand the man who did more than anyone else to restore it to Christian currency. Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci became Pope Leo XIII at a time when the papacy was descending. For a thousand years, the pope had been both a spiritual leader and a temporal ruler, commanding the allegiance of kings and directing affairs of state. But in 1870, Italian armies conquered the "Papal States," regions once ruled by the Church, leaving the pope to govern only a tiny enclave of Rome. If the pope was not a ruler among rulers, what was he? That was the question Leo confronted when he began his 25-year papacy in 1878.

"[Leo] saw himself as a teacher … who sought a dialogue with the emerging secular powers of Europe," Bradley Lewis, associate professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, told me. "Engaging with the culture was a key theme of Leo's pontificate. He wrote 85 encyclicals on all kinds of topics." (John Paul II wrote 14 of these authoritative letters during a papacy of comparable length.)

In Leo's circ*mstances, we recognize a parallel to the circ*mstances of North American Protestants over the past century—once dominant in cultural institutions but increasingly sidelined from direct control. But rather than retreating from defining the Christian voice in a secular world, Leo and his advisers rose to the challenge, above all by returning to the reasoned philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas's work, informed by Aristotle and conversant with insurgent Islam, was the high-water mark of Catholic thought. And it was from Aquinas that Leo borrowed the language of the common good for his most influential encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

If we are not offering our neighbors the ultimate common good—the knowledge and love of God—we are not taking the idea of the common good seriously.

Rerum novarum simply means "of new things," and the new things Leo had in mind were quite literally revolutionary: the rise of socialism and other workers' movements that addressed the inequities of the new industrial world. Beyond seeking just wages, socialists scorned church and family and invested nearly messianic hope in a new government that would collectivize property and give power to the proletariat. A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the flaws of the socialist vision (and the communism that followed it) are clear, but in Leo's time, the socialists seemed to have history on their side.

Rerum Novarum was a bold response to both the plight of workers and the scorched-earth progressivism of the socialists. Leo agreed that workers deserved a fair wage—indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to posit that wages should be sufficient to allow hard-working people to provide for their families. But he insisted that the socialist dream of a property-free world, liberated from traditional virtues and relationships, would be disastrous. In particular, Leo argued that private property was not just a matter of private interest; when individuals tended to their own land and possessions faithfully, they made a crucial contribution to "the common good."

Rerum Novarum launched the movement called Catholic social thought. Successive popes and other Christian thinkers picked up on Leo's themes, defining the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily." Two ideas are particularly significant in this definition. The common good is measured by fulfillment or flourishing—by human beings becoming all they are meant to be. And the common good is about persons, both groups and individuals—not just about "humanity" but about humans, and not just about individuals but about persons in relationship with one another in small groups.

While Rerum Novarum did not prevent the rise of communism in Eastern Europe, it did help Christians resist its totalizing worldview even through decades of repression. One of those Christians, a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyła, occupied Leo's chair and played a pivotal role in the demise of the system whose baleful consequences Leo had foreseen.

Small is Good

The common good can help us avoid two modern temptations—one on the left and one on the right. "Leftists tend to be concerned about 'humanity' as a collective," Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith told me via e-mail. "If some heads have to roll to improve humanity's lot, so be it. A commitment to the common good opposes that entirely. Each and every person has dignity—the good society is one which allows the thriving of all persons, especially the weak and vulnerable."

And yet, Smith pointed out, "the common good" challenges the libertarian stream of conservatism as well: "Individualists only want to see each individual live as they please, as long as they don't obstruct the ability of other individuals to do the same. They don't think anything is 'common,' except whatever minimal infrastructures are needed to create equal opportunity."

Focusing on the common good has another positive effect, Smith noted: It can both draw Christians into engagement with the wider society and prevent that engagement from becoming "all about politics." Essential to the common good, all the way back through Aquinas to Aristotle, has been the insight that the best forms of human flourishing happen in collectives that are smaller than, and whose origins are earlier than, the nation-state. Family above all, but also congregations, guilds, and clubs—these "private associations," with all their particular loyalties, paradoxically turn out to be essential to public flourishing. If we commit ourselves to the common good, we must become more public in our thinking and choices, and at the same time not too public. The common good is sustained most deeply where people know each other's names and faces—especially when it comes to the care of the vulnerable, who need more than policies to flourish.

Seeking the common good in its deepest sense means continually insisting that persons are of infinite worth—worth more than any system, any institution, or any cause. Societies are graded on a curve, with the fate of the most vulnerable given the most weight, because the fate of the most vulnerable tells us whether a society truly values persons as ends or just as means to an end.

And the common good continually reminds us that persons flourish in the small societies that best recognize them as persons—in family and the face-to-face associations of healthy workplaces, schools, teams, and of course churches. Though it is a big phrase, "the common good" reminds us that the right scale for human flourishing is small and specific, and that the larger institutions of culture make their greatest contribution to flourishing when they resist absorbing all smaller allegiances.

The Ultimate Good

For a while, the Q conference used the tagline, "Ideas that create a better world." But Gabe Lyons became dissatisfied with it. "I saw an ad for 'furniture that creates a better world.' I wanted something with much more Christian grounding, something that would give us a definition of what the 'better world' is." For Lyons, "the common good" in its Christian definition is especially valuable for insisting on the dignity of every person. Lyons distinguishes the common good—"the most good for all people"—from narrower ideas like "the public interest," which he paraphrases as "the most good for the most people." The common good, Lyons says, is not another word for utilitarianism—doing whatever would make the greatest number of people happiest, even if some people have to suffer. Instead, it is a bulwark against utilitarian calculations that might conclude, for example, that "a better world would be one without disabled people."

But Lyons also thinks "the common good" helps Christians better articulate their commitment to a pluralistic society. There was a time when Christians might have focused on "caring for those who believe like we believe," says the Liberty University alumnus. "But the common good requires us to care for all people—loving our neighbor no matter what they believe."

Seeking the common good, then, requires taking the phrase as seriously as its rich history demands. And this richer version of the common good could have beneficial effects.

First, the common good can give us common ground with our neighbors. We may not agree with them—indeed, Christians don't always agree with one another—about what exactly human flourishing looks like. But the common good is a conversation starter rather than a conversation ender. It can move us away from pitched battles over particular issues and help us reveal the fundamental questions that often lie unexplored behind them. In a time when many conversations between people with different convictions seem to end before they begin, we simply need more conversation starters.

But equally important, the common good allows us to stake out our Christian convictions about what is good for humans—and to dare our neighbors to clarify their own convictions. "In the simplest sense," Bradley Lewis said, "the common good is God. It is God who satisfies what people need, individually and communally." Adopting the language of the common good means owning this bedrock Christian belief and proclaiming it to our neighbors. If we are not offering our neighbors the ultimate common good—the knowledge and love of God—we are not taking the idea of the common good seriously.

Perhaps best of all, the common good is a matter of choices, not just ideas. And those choices are often local, not grand social schemes. My decisions about where to live and what to eat and buy, as well as what to grow and create, whom to befriend and where to volunteer, whom to employ and how much to pay, aren't just about my private fulfillment. They will also either contribute to others' flourishing or undermine it.

Indeed, all things that are truly good are common goods, meant to be shared and enjoyed together. And if the return of "the common good" reminds us of that truth and that hope, and shapes the way we live among our neighbors, it will have done a world of good.

Andy Crouch, executive producer of This Is Our City, is the author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity Press) and a forthcoming book on power.

Conservative Christians in Russia have started using crosses to replace Apple’s iconic “bitten apple” logo, a move that could cause problems for Apple product sales as the mostly Orthodox nation’s parliament weighs a blasphemy ban.

The original report from Interfax news agency states that several groups of Orthodox activists, including priests, replaced the logo for religious reasons, calling it “anti-Christian and insulting their belief.”

“According to them, bitten apple – the symbol is described in the Bible, original sin, it is anti-Christian, while the cross symbolizes the victory of Christianity over the death of the Savior, the redemption of their original sin of Adam and Eve,” Interfax reports.

This case arises at an important moment for religious freedom in Russia, as the Russian parliament prepares to weigh a law protecting religious expression. If approved, the ban on insults to religion potentially could allow Orthodox Christians to charge Apple with anti-Christian blasphemy.

More than 1,500 pastors explicitly broke the law last Sunday by endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. Amid a tense election year, their participation in the annual protest "could hold more sway than in previous years," CNN reports.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an annual event organized by the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund), flaunts an IRS tax code restriction stating that churches risk their tax-exempt status if they endorse specific political candidates or positions on ballot issues. The aim of the event is to "provoke a challenge from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in order to file a lawsuit and have its argument out in court."

The IRS has not responded with direct legal action against churches participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday since the event began in 2008.

But the event could foster tension among the majority of Protestant pastors who believe pastors should not foray into political endorsem*nts. New research from LifeWay indicates that "only 10 percent (of Protestant pastors) believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit." LifeWay Research president Ed Stetzer noted on his blog that this percentage is down from a similar survey conducted in 2010, when 15 percent of respondents supported political endorsem*nts by pastors.

"This is not to say that pastors approve of the IRS regulating the ability of pastors to endorse candidates," Stetzer wrote. "The question here is whether pastors SHOULD, not whether the IRS should have the POWER to keep them from doing so."

CT has previously reported on how pastors are double-daring the IRS yet punishment is unlikely, as well as the ironies of the ADF seeking punishment in order "to protect freedom".

European Baptist leaders recently voted overwhelmingly to move Europe’s only international Baptist seminary from Prague to Amsterdam given declining donor support and the rise of national Baptist seminaries that offer similar degrees.

The 63-year-old International Baptist Theological Seminary (IBTS) will relocate to the Netherlands over the course of two or three years.

Previously, IBTS trustees recommended to the European Baptist Federation that the seminary relocate “due to funding challenges and changes in the educational needs among European Baptists.”

But this would not be the first relocation for IBTS, which originally was started by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) International Mission Board in Switzerland in the wake of WWII. Following the decision by the SBC to de-fund the seminary in 1991, members of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship raised financial and faculty support for the school, and later supported its move to its current location in Prague.

Following the exoneration of Rimsha Masih, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl who made international headlines after she was falsely accusing of blaspheming the Qur’an, Pakistan appeared ready to discuss–and potentially weaken–its anti-blasphemy laws.

But that window of opportunity slammed shut on Sept. 11, when a portion of the Islamic world erupted in outrage over the anti-Islam Internet video “Innocence of Muslims,” which portrays Muhammad as a womanizer and false prophet.

“Much progress had been made,” attorney Tahir Naveed told Open Doors News, “but this film brushed everything aside.”

For a moment, Pakistani Christians may have thought the apparent collapse of the case against Masih had opened a narrow window of opportunity to weaken the country’s anti-blasphemy law. Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, used the Rimsha arrest as an opportunity to insist the blasphemy law must not be used as a cover to settle personal scores. Naveed, who is a member of the Punjab state legislature, said his All Pakistan Minorities Alliance party had started consulting other parties on proposals to reopen and reinvestigate all blasphemy cases.

Napolean Qayyum, a field director for World Vision in Progress, which describes itself as “a ground organization working for the rights of religious minorities in Pakistan” said the video undermined efforts being made to promote religious harmony.

“A church was burned down in Mardan by an anti-film mob,” he said. “They also burned down an adjacent school and a library, while the provincial government played the role of a silent spectator. Twenty-six people died in countrywide violent riots that day. The entire debate shifted to the film issue. A setback, indeed.”

But the opportunity to discuss anti-blasphemy laws may not be entirely closed. This week in Islamabad, attention turns to Khalid Jadoon, the imam of Meherabadi mosque, who faces allegations that he planted the damaged religious texts into Masih’s bag as a pretext for reporting her to police.

“The prosecution is trying its best to save Jadoon, but the case against him is watertight,” Naveed said.

Jadoon is due in court Oct. 11, which might open another window of opportunity.

“This is the first case of its kind when a person charged under the strict blasphemy laws is exonerated from the accusation,” Naveed said. “This case has also brought for the first time a debate on how these laws are misused to target innocent people.”

CT previously reported on the case against Masih, as well as on the violence caused by the anti-Islam film.

I love American cycling. I grew up watching Greg LeMond, who was Lance Armstrong before Lance Armstrong was Lance Armstrong. Except that LeMond simply won races, and opted out of becoming a "symbol" of anything or a public "inspiration" to anyone. I remember watching LeMond battle his French nemesis Laurent Fignon (ponytail, John Lennon glasses) up and down the Champs Elysees; though I'm sure it wasn't, the whole thing felt a little more innocent. I had a road bike then. I bought spandex. I took long training rides through the country with my dad. I even raced a little.

Fast forward to this week and the downfall of another modern idol, Lance Armstrong. Armstrong won seven Tours De France, after winning a highly publicized battle with cancer. There's nothing we love more than winners in this country, except, maybe, Inspirational Figures. Armstrong was both. Like anyone who loves sports and competition, I was thrilled when he stared down his rival, Jan Ullrich, on the side of a mountain before powering away and leaving Ullrich in the dust in what is now just referred to as "The Look." When I see it I still get chills. Honestly, I speak for most athletes when I say I'd love to do that to someone in competition.

Like anyone who loves marketing (are these people out there?) we were thrilled when Armstrong made the little rubber wristband a permanent part of American culture, and helped make Cancer Awareness a part of our everyday vocabulary and consciousness. In fact, it was becoming the de facto Godfather of Cancer Awareness that may have helped Armstrong keep the anti-doping dogs at bay.

American Idol

We found out this week that Armstrong was the greatest cyclist in an era in which nearly all of cycling was doping. We learned that Armstrong was the heavy-handed ringleader of what Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, has called the "most sophisticated … successful doping program sport has ever seen." We learned that Armstrong needed and encouraged his teammates to dope, so that they could support him at an elite level. We learned that he lied about almost all of it, repeatedly. We learned that the allure of winning and money was more than any of his teammates could deny, even though they all talked of their love for the sport of cycling, and their dreams of competing as professionals.

We also were reminded that God will not be mocked, and that idols eventually fall. Armstrong lived as a king of American culture for over a decade. He was one of those figures about whom people almost universally felt good. He was rich. He dated celebrities. He was photographed everywhere, with everyone. He raised money and he donated money. He was inoffensive to everyone outside his industry (cycling), though if media accounts are to be believed, he was reviled within it.

For a while, it seemed almost un-American to root against Armstrong. But this seemingly bulletproof American Idol fell. Indeed, God will not be mocked.

Losing All

Armstrong's many sins are now public. He sacrificed his integrity, he bore false witness, and he caused others (his teammates) to stumble into the same substance abuse that fueled his victories and enabled the idolatry in the first place. He gained the world, for a time, and seemed to forfeit his soul.

At the same time, as sinners who have all fallen short of God's glory, we've all done this at some level. I know I have. If I were still a child, powering around the back roads of Blackford County on my entry-level Trek road racer, I'd probably be crushed at Armstrong's recent downfall. But as a somewhat hardened adult cynic, I was neither surprised nor especially crushed. Let's be honest, to be an athlete or a fan today is to develop a certain comfort level with moral ambiguity. We cheer for corrupt college football programs weekly, and we hardly raise an eyebrow when our favorite baseball and football players are suspended for using performance enhancing drugs. We even regularly freak out at our own kids' little league games and chalk it up to just "being competitive."

Still, in all this, there is hope—the hope in the gospel. There is real forgiveness for sinners, for athletes and fans who are implicated in the moral ambiguity of sports. And of course, this is no cheap forgiveness but one that will require us to rethink how and in what ways we participate in these morally ambiguous situations, so that our play will be honoring to God as much as is possible in this life.

And there is forgiveness for the likes of Lance Armstrong, as reprehensible as his transgressions are. I wish Lance had repented years ago and come clean, but even today there is hope for him in the Cross. Even though Armstrong will have lost his reputation, his Tour de France victories, his well-cultivated image as a hero, and perhaps even his money, he still has a chance, in Christ, to lose everything. And in doing so, he might gain the most valuable prize of all.

Ted Kluck is the author of several award-winning books on topics ranging from Mike Tyson to the Emergent Church. Visit him online at www.tedkluck.com.

Most voters don't care very much about Romney's Mormonism.

A survey this summer by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 60 percent of voters who know of Romney's Mormonism are comfortable with his religion. Another 21 percent said it doesn't matter.

But the Pew survey also found that, along with atheists and agnostics, white evangelicals and black Protestants are the most uncomfortable with his religion. The vast majority of those who are already Republican will vote for Romney anyway, but only 21 percent of those who are uncomfortable with his Mormonism will back him strongly. Some may choose not to vote at all.

This could spell trouble for Republicans. CBS News found that half of the voters in the 14 GOP primaries from January through March were evangelicals. Their lukewarm support for John McCain in 2008—with many staying home on Election Day and around 30 percent of their 18-29 year-olds casting votes for Obama—helped give the White House to the Democrats.

The Pew survey found evangelicals evenly split on whether Mormonism is a Christian religion. Of those evangelicals who say Mormonism is not Christian, some fear it will advance Mormonism and blur the boundaries between true Christian faith and its counterfeits. They think this election will force them to choose between the nation and the gospel.

But are these evangelicals right to think that Mormonism is not Christian?

They are right to think that the God of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is different from the God of traditional Christian orthodoxy, but evangelicals have often been wrong in their reasons for believing this.

For example, they have sometimes thought Mormons deny the divinity of Jesus. Yet the Book of Mormon says it was "the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" who was "lifted up … and … crucified" (1 Nephi 19:10).

Evangelicals also typically protest that Mormons believe in salvation by good works. Some Mormons do indeed believe this, just as many Catholics and some Protestants believe they will be saved by being good Christians. Yet the Book of Mormon teaches salvation by Christ's work of grace: "There is no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah" (2 Nephi 2:8)

Mainstream Christians who condemn Mormons for teaching salvation by works sometimes forget that Jesus teaches the necessity of works as a fruit of true faith: "By their fruit you shall know them" (Matt. 7:16). "You are my friends if you do what I command you" (John 15:14). "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15).

At the same time, evangelicals have legitimate reasons to believe that Mormon beliefs are different from those of historic Christianity. For if Mormons believe Jesus is now fully God, they do not believe he was always God. Joseph Smith wrote that just as God "was once as we are now," Jesus over time grew into being God (Abraham 3:24).

The contrast with Christian orthodoxy is considerable: the Jesus of the historic church was always the second person of the Trinity, fully divine and fully equal to the Father, who in turn was always God. There never was a time when the Trinity was not fully God, each of the three Persons co-equal and co-divine. Jesus never moved from non-divine to divine, and did not gain divine attributes after not having them.There were times in his incarnation when he voluntarily "emptied himself" of some of his divine prerogatives, such as knowing the day and the hour of the end of all things (Phil. 2.7; Matt. 24.36). But these were powers which he had possessed until the Incarnation, and chose not to use while on earth in bodily form.

So, for the orthodox Christian tradition, the movement of divine attributes in Jesus is the reverse of that for the LDS view: Instead of gradually accumulating the divine nature, he always was divine. Only at a point long after the creation did he appear to have relinquished his divinity. But this was merely an appearance, camouflaging the "fullness" of deity (Col. 1:19) by a divine humility willing to forego certain privileges.

Another point of important theological difference is that Mormons do not believe Jesus is the same God as his Father. Christian orthodoxy says instead that Jesus and his Father are two persons in one God—they share the same divine substance. For Joseph Smith and the resulting Mormon tradition, on the other hand, the Father and Son and Holy Ghost are three divine "personages" or Gods amidst a "plurality of Gods," according to a sermon Joseph Smith gave just before he died. In other words, they are three different Gods. (As Mormon theologian Robert L. Millet put it, they are "beings," not persons in one being.) In that last discourse, Smith declared that the Father of Jesus has his own Father. The existence of other gods beyond the three is not in official LDS doctrine or its canon, but it is taught by LDS authorities that Jesus is one of three Gods.

Mormons also believe that Jesus is not different in nature from us mortals, but is one of our species. Like us, he started with divine potential and by his choices ended up as omniscient and omnipotent, just as we can. Christian orthodoxy in contrast teaches that the human Jesus is also divine by nature, but that we are not.

Mormons reject the Trinity and the traditional Christian doctrine that God created the world from nothing. Latter-Day Saints believe that God reordered pre-existing matter, which was eternal, into the world we now inhabit.

So Mormon doctrine is quite different from historic Christian orthodoxy on the Incarnation, the origins of Jesus' divinity, his relationship to the Father, the Trinity, monotheism, human nature, and the creation of this cosmos.

These differences must not be ignored or minimized. The Mormon views of Jesus and God are different from those of the classic Christianity. Therefore it can be said with accuracy that the Mormon Jesus and the Mormon godhead are not the ones which the mainstream Christian churches have been pointing to for 2000 years.

But if we should not ignore the differences, we must also not ignore the overlap between Mormon views and mainstream Christian views. For one thing, Mormons insist they believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.

They also affirm solidly—more so than many mainstream Christians today—the moral theology which historic orthodoxy has taught for two thousand years. They believe in what Luther called the third use of the law—that God's moral teachings in both Testaments help guide Christians in making moral decisions and knowing what a faithful life looks like. They believe, with the historic church, that the Ten Commandments are not simply ten suggestions.

One more important thing must be said on this question of the relationship between Mormonism and historic Christian orthodoxy. Some of our most beloved presidents have had beliefs about God that were a long way from orthodoxy.

George Washington was a deist who usually referred to the deity in vague and impersonal terms. He never seemed to have the personal relationship with God or Jesus that evangelicals think is necessary to true faith. John Adams, a Unitarian, wrote to his son John Quincy that the idea of an incarnate God suffering on a cross made his "soul start with horror at the idea." Thomas Jefferson believed the doctrines of the Trinity, atonement, and original sin were essentially pagan, and rejected the possibility of most miracles and any bodily resurrection. Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo reports that our 16th president also rejected the Trinity, believing hesitatingly in a "remote, austere, all-powerful, uncommunicative" God without either Son or Spirit.

So if evangelicals and other mainstream Christians vote for a presidential candidate whose theology they find objectionable, it won't be the first time.

In a May 1960 poll Gallup found that 21 percent of his respondents said they would never vote for a Catholic, even if he were well-qualified. In April 1967 after George Romney announced the formation of an exploratory committee, 17 percent of Gallup respondents said they would never vote for Mormon, even if he were well-qualified. In June of this year, an almost identical 18 percent of Gallup respondents said they would not vote for a well-qualified Mormon.

Can Mitt Romney do what John F. Kennedy did and his father could not? Can he win despite the religious opposition of nearly one-fifth of the American public?

Kennedy's election tells us something: it is possible, but the religious factor will probably make it too close for comfort.

Gerald McDermott, professor of religion at Roanoke College, debated Mormon theologian Robert Millet on the identity of Jesus in their book, Evangelicals and Mormons (Regent College Publishing).

In 1989, Ajith Fernando returned to his Sri Lankan home from a six-month sabbatical at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts. "It was heaven," he says of the time away.

Sometimes referred to as "the Asian John Stott," Fernando loves quiet study. The seminary offered an excellent library and very few of the interruptions that constantly occur at home in Sri Lanka. He wrote two books, Crucial Questions about Hell and Reclaiming Friendship: Relating to Each Other in a Frenzied World. Besides studying and writing, he taught from the Bible in many locations, and in his spare time he taught himself to type on a computer. His wife, Nelun, and two children, Nirmali and Asiri, were with him. It was a happy, busy, secure time.

Fernando returned to a nation at war with itself. Right in the heart of the capital, Colombo, not far from his home, he saw corpses floating in the murky Kelani River—bodies of young men he had tried to reach through his organization, Youth for Christ (YFC). At home or at the office, he met desperate family members seeking their missing sons.

Schools were closed, and public transport shut down. As Fernando drove the dingy, pothole-ridden streets, people would lean into his car window and ask for rides. He usually took them where they wanted to go, even knowing that if the police found that his riders were terrorist Tamil Tigers, he himself would be killed with them.

Many hours of each day went into driving YFC staff to and from their homes—Fernando hates driving—and the staff, too, were subject to accusations of terrorism. Why else would young people from different ethnic groups be gathering?

Angry young people bombarded YFC with despairing complaints. At a long, late meeting, the leadership hammered out a statement to the government. For many nights after sending it, Fernando woke up to some noise in the night, thinking that the police had come for him.

Friends and ministry colleagues were leaving the country, and for good reasons: their careers could not advance, their children could not get an education, their lives were in danger. Despairingly, Fernando watched the departure of Christian leaders.

One day a letter from Gordon-Conwell was handed to him as he stood in one of the open rooms of the YFC office. Fernando opened it and stared at the stiff, expensive paper and its sharp black lettering. The letter said the faculty of Gordon-Conwell had voted unanimously to offer him a position, and it outlined terms. He would make far more than the $500 a month YFC paid him. A light teaching load would allow time for writing and preaching.

He had not asked for the position, had not even imagined it, but it represented everything he dreamed of: To escape the harsh violence and paranoia of Sri Lankan life. To have all his hours dedicated to the things he loved: studying God's Word, writing, teaching, and preaching. To give his children all the education they could want.

Fernando lifted his eyes from the letter to find YFC colleagues watching, curious as to what so engrossed him.

Attuned to the Poor

Fernando is a tall, quiet man with light brown skin. His face is unexceptional except for large, sad, gleaming eyes, attentive to everything. He can remain almost silent—he has no gift for small talk—and yet his eyes speak.

He grew up among the Sri Lankan elite, his father heading the government's taxation bureau. It was a highly influential position. His family belonged to the Sinhalese, the ethnic majority that has dominated Sri Lankan politics since independence from the British in 1948. Fernando attended private schools with some of Sri Lanka's leading citizens, becoming part of the tiny minority who qualified to attend university, studying biology. English was his first language, even though hardly any ordinary Sri Lankans speak it.

Most Sinhalese are Buddhists, and Fernando attended a Buddhist university. But his parents were devout Methodists and their spacious home was a gathering place for foreign missionaries. His father was known as a man of great integrity and hard work; his mother, "the most influential Bible teacher in my life," constantly praised God. Both were outstanding in their own way, though the two did not get along and their painful quarrels may have contributed to Fernando's sensitivity.

Even as a child of affluence, Fernando was preternaturally attuned to the poor. He insisted on sleeping on the floor as a boy, to identify with those less fortunate. His mother was irate, but he was unbendable. Later he would argue fiercely with her about her treatment of their family's servants.

During his high-school years, Fernando joined YFC, newly launched in Colombo by a charismatic Sri Lankan, Sam Sherrard. As in many parts of the world, YFC was aggressively evangelistic, using youthful enthusiasm and modern entertainment to captivate young people. Sherrard stressed discipleship too, which soon made YFC a very intimate family.

Immediately after graduating from university, Fernando left to study at Asbury Theological Seminary, a Kentucky school with Methodist roots. Sherrard stayed in close contact and eventually invited Fernando to take over YFC leadership. It was a curious match. YFC was lighthearted; Fernando intensely serious. His seminary professors thought YFC would be a waste of his considerable talents.

Fernando felt, however, that reaching Sri Lanka's youth was a deeply serious business. Besides, YFC was his family, and its leaders his closest friends. After further studies at Fuller Seminary, he returned to become national director.

Schooled to Change

Fernando had an unusual way of leading. Others, he knew, related to youth culture far more effectively. Fernando saw his role as teaching biblical principles, not directing. Everything had to be done by consensus, which meant endless discussion.

Two biblical principles soon began changing everything. One was the primacy of the church. At that time, in the mid-70s, most Sri Lankan Protestants belonged to mainline churches that were increasingly liberal in theology and antagonistic to YFC's work. Fernando taught YFC leaders that they must be active in church, good or bad, and that they must lead new converts to join churches, even if it was hard to imagine how the churches would embrace them. It took years, but YFC played a major role in changing Sri Lankan churches and providing them with a new generation of leaders.

The second principle was that God had called YFC to the lost. To date, they had mainly reached the English-speaking, nominal Protestant population of Colombo—an elite minority. Most Sri Lankans lived in poor rural villages, spoke either Tamil or Sinhala, and were firmly ensconced in Buddhist or Hindu culture. They were much harder to reach, and YFC was badly suited to reach them. Fernando himself hardly spoke Sinhala, let alone Tamil. The music he knew and loved was Western.

He schooled himself to change—a long, slow transformation. Once, leading a YFC camp in a remote Sri Lankan village, he decided that years of study had finally made him ready to lead music in the Sinhala language. Afterwards, he stumbled into an informal gathering of young YFC volunteers. As he entered, he overheard them laughing at his Sinhala singing and mimicking him.

He lived simply. YFC salaries were based on family size and experience, not on position. Fernando made no more than others, and he made sure his home and lifestyle were in no way intimidating to the most simple village people who might visit.

Not only did he change, his teaching changed. Considering the prevailing liberalism, he began to teach about the supremacy of Christ, a difficult and controversial message in a country where most religions are pluralistic. He was convinced that without belief in hell and the unique power of Jesus to save, Christians lost the urgency of witness. "I still preach about [those topics] in the West," he says, although the rise of Pentecostalism means that they are no longer pressing issues for the Asian church.

Bombs, Hatred, Hostility

Under Fernando's leadership, YFC grew. As the unchurched came to Christ, new leaders began to emerge, and as they did, the difficulties of consensus leadership increased.

Many of these new believers had grown up in poverty, violence, and drug abuse. They only knew a culture of revenge and lying, which could destroy relationships. Fernando's style of leadership required endless patience, with constant teaching about community and long-suffering.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka began to unravel. A naturally beautiful island of silky beaches and high, green mountains became a place known for suicide bombers and bitter ethnic hostility. In July 1983, the secessionist Tamil Tigers ambushed and killed 15 government soldiers. In reaction, well-organized Sinhalese mobs moved systematically through neighborhoods in Colombo, killing Tamils and burning their homes and businesses.

Fernando returned as quickly as he could from a preaching trip in Pakistan, finding smoke still rising from blackened ruins all over the capital. Thousands had died and an estimated 18,000 buildings were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled the country. By most accounts, the Sri Lankan civil war began with this "Black July." It lasted more than 25 years.

A YFC colleague, Kumar Abraham, had been burned out of his home and brought his family to stay with the Fernandos. Both Nelun and Abraham's wife were pregnant, and they lacked money to buy food. Once they had only a single egg, which they divided. But Abraham was angry. This was the second time Sinhalese mobs had burned down his house. His anger poured out on Fernando, who could only listen. Abraham would eventually pull up stakes and relocate to Australia.

When Fernando speaks before huge audiences at Urbana, at Cape Town, at Keswick, listeners sense that they are hearing a holy man.

It was often so. Anger and suspicion ran deep, and trying to hold together a multi-ethnic ministry, Fernando could only listen and pray.

By the time Gordon-Conwell's offer reached Fernando, the civil war had gone on for six years. Travel was restricted, especially in the war zones, which made the logistics of a national ministry extremely difficult. Frequently YFC leaders got arrested simply on suspicion: They were young, they were traveling, and they were meeting with other young people.

Whenever he heard of an arrest, Fernando dropped whatever he was doing to go to the police station. As an educated Sinhala, he had some clout, but going to the police station meant up to six hours of waiting. He took papers and books to work on while he stood in line or sat in waiting rooms. Usually, he could get YFC personnel released. But not always; some spent months in prison.

"Frustration is a daily experience for us who live in a land submerged in the crises of war, corruption, and a crumbling economy," Fernando wrote in his acclaimed 2007 book Jesus Driven Ministry. "I sense this acutely when I return to Sri Lanka from a trip to the West. It takes so long to get things done. Sometimes because we don't pay a bribe, things never get done! … Yet I have to keep reminding myself that these experiences of frustration are part of identifying with my people for whom disappointment is a daily experience. I have to believe that these frustrations will help me minister more effectively to these people… . We preachers should not try to avoid frustration by handing over unpleasant things to others so that we can concentrate on our preaching ministry. Facing frustration is part of our preparation for penetrative preaching." That is why Fernando never hesitated over the offer from Gordon-Conwell. He told those standing by him what it said, and he told them he would decline.

"He could have gone anywhere he wanted to," says Brian Stiller, global ambassador of the World Evangelical Alliance, "during an age when people from the Third World would find the good life in Europe and America and stay. Ajith was never attracted to staying where it was financially more bountiful. He had a commitment to his nation and his people and to the community in which he was raised, which was YFC. He went against the grain in the '70s and '80s. Then he became so ingrained nothing would move him."

Infectious Passion

Life has hardly been easier in the 23 years since. The 2004 Christmas tsunami decimated the island's coastline, killing thousands.

Everything Ajith Fernando writes and teaches is forged on the anvil of poverty, suffering, ethnic strife, and war—and tedious, patient administration.

Persecution put constant pressure on Christians doing ministry, threatening their organized existence. Through everything the war ground on until, in a frenzy of violence, the Tamil Tigers were annihilated in 2009.

Through all this, Fernando continued as national director of YFC. He believes (and others confirm) he was never good at administration. Despite repeated attempts, however, his plans for a replacement went awry. Finally, a young Tamil leader, Leonard Fernando (no relation), has taken the job. Thirty-five years of administrative frustration have ended and Fernando can now do exclusively what he felt called to do all along: teach the Bible and provide pastoral mentoring to YFC staff.

"Biblical spirituality/religion has a low tolerance for 'great ideas' or 'sublime truths' or 'inspirational thoughts,'" writes Eugene H. Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, "apart from the people and places in which they occur. God's great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards …."

And also in our nations.

When Fernando speaks before huge audiences at Urbana, at Cape Town, at Keswick, listeners sense that they are hearing a holy man. Sincerity, transparency, and a passion for the gospel pour out of him. What audiences may not grasp is how that holiness was formed. Fernando has persisted at youth evangelism for 35 years as national director of YFC, in a poor country racked by vicious civil war and ethnic and religious hostility. He has kept the organization growing and strong through deadly riots, arrests, funding crises, family breakdowns, natural disaster, and organizational heartbreak.

Everything Ajith Fernando writes and teaches is forged on the anvil of poverty, suffering, ethnic strife, and war—and tedious, patient administration.

A Bible teacher of conservative Wesleyan convictions, Fernando speaks of holiness and obedience in a mode our grandparents would recognize. His message is so orthodox and familiar some might take him for an American evangelical in Sri Lankan clothing, as one British church leader did accusingly in a review of The Supremacy of Christ.

Except that his frame of reference never comes from the West. (In fact, he can be very critical of the West, though he is a gentle prophet.) Whatever Fernando preaches is transparently the product of struggle, and his venue for struggle is his home in Sri Lanka. While deeply appreciative of an evangelical legacy gained from Western missionaries, he is wary of the West's influence. "I have a great fear that a [Western] church in decline, reacting to its decline, will bring us a theology that does not suit a church in springtime."

Though he speaks all over the world, he carefully limits that to 20 percent of his time, with half in Asia. Where he lives and breathes and theologizes is Sri Lanka, with all its pain.

For many in the West, a message of holiness and servanthood is hard to preach and difficult to hear. In an affluent, entertainment-driven society, an affluent and entertainment-driven church can't get much traction on those topics. We flee frustration.

Through Fernando, we hear an authentic voice restoring the truth to us, like an echo from our past. It happens because he made the choice to stay.

Tim Stafford is a senior writer for Christianity Today.

Ajith Fernando responds:

“I am grateful for the generous profile of me in your magazine. But I am worried that one paragraph may give the wrong impression about my dear friend Kumar Abraham who left the country after his house had been burned for the second time. The truth is that he did leave and ministered in Philippines and Australia, but has now returned to Sri Lanka and is doing a very significant ministry among our people.”

Baseball was Aaron Klusman's first career. A Phoenix native, he played while attending Brophy, a private Jesuit school downtown, then became an All-American pitcher at Arizona State University (ASU) before signing as a top prospect with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004.

But sports is an especially front-loaded career, and when injuries began sidelining him, Klusman was forced to face the reality of life without baseball. "I had fully planned on being the best baseball player in the world," he says. "Then I started asking: If I don't have baseball, who am I?"

Some of Klusman's ASU teammates were Christians, and through involvement with the campus chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes during his freshman year, Klusman began reading the Bible for himself. "God was working on a lot of different fronts, opening my eyes to the truth of who he is," Klusman says. "Life suddenly had color, and I discovered a purpose greater than myself."

A Broken Theology of God and Business

While playing at ASU, Klusman tried his hand at business by starting a retail clothing company, which grew to include sales representatives nationwide. As the business took off, and as doubts about a future in baseball mounted, Klusman began sensing that God may have uniquely equipped him to be a businessman. But he struggled to reconcile this new sense of calling with his budding faith.

"I was your poster child for a broken theology of God and business," he says. "I was in this horrible spot, feeling God had wired me for business, but with a theology that said God's against money."

Klusman considered becoming a pastor or otherwise "going into full-time ministry." Eventually, however, he realized he might not be gifted for pastoral ministry and that even pastors aren't immune to the sins of pride and greed. "We can't outrun our sin circ*mstantially," he says.

As he took steps to develop his entrepreneurial ventures, Klusman began meeting for coffee with a longtime friend and former teammate who had become a pastor in the area, to discuss what it might mean to engage the city of Phoenix, looking at it "from two sides of the coin" – one as a pastor, the other as an entrepreneur.

The Camelback Society

Amid those conversations, Klusman concluded there had to be others in Phoenix asking similar questions about faith and business. And he was right. Soon, a small group of young businessmen started gathering to discuss marketplace dynamics in light of their faith, primarily based on a sampling of books about the integration of faith and work. Klusman began envisioning "a really rich relational platform in Phoenix where, over the course of their careers – over 20, 30, or 40 years – guys could work on honing their worldviews together."

In January 2011, after five years of meeting informally, the group became the Camelback Society, led by Klusman along with an advisory board made up of entrepreneurs and executives with decades of experience in Phoenix. The Camelback Society provides a forum for young businessmen to explore how God has uniquely "wired" them for business. "Know your strengths and weaknesses," Klusman tells members, "and then start cultivating your craft."

Intentionally setting a high bar for membership, the Camelback Society asks members to sign a covenant, affirming a core doctrinal statement including the Nicene Creed, as well as specific commitments to prioritize their families, to build lifelong friendships of mutual accountability, to maximize God-given leadership potential, and to live lives of faithful presence in the Phoenix marketplace.

The group's 25 members meet weekly for breakfast to review life goals and to discuss assigned readings, which include both theological and business perspectives. Recently, they discussed a chapter on the sin of pride from Mere Christianity, along with a surprisingly similar article from the Harvard Business Review arguing that exceptional business leaders "[blend] the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will."

The Camelback Society also hosts a monthly Civic Leader Breakfast, which is open to the public and often features a guest speaker representing government or civil society, intended to facilitate connections with those in different spheres of society for the common good. One recent speaker was Don Cardon, a real estate and public administration leader who also serves on the advisory board of the Camelback Society. Cardon's real-estate business focuses on mixed-use development and other urban projects in Phoenix. He recently served as director of the Arizona Department of Commerce, during which time he transformed the department into a public-private economic development organization renamed the Arizona Commerce Authority.

During his talk at the Civic Leader Breakfast, Cardon advised young business leaders to be careful what they wish for. Sharing candidly from the highs and lows of his own experience, he warned that lingering insecurities often become all the more pronounced the more successful someone appears to be. "As you're granted success," he said, "you become increasingly aware how little it is about you and how much it is about the grace of God."

When entrepreneurs reach their 30s and early 40s, says Klusman, 31, they often begin to gain real traction in their businesses. This success, however, requires long hours, competing with families for time and attention.

"We experience this tension," Klusman says, "and it often goes in one of two directions. Some decide they can't handle family pressures, so they dump themselves into their work, which happens subtly over time. Or they decide they can't handle the pressure of business, and they just settle for a paycheck somewhere."

Faced with these tendencies, a key priority for Camelback members is to develop life plans and commit to monthly reviews, including any needed changes before problems escalate beyond the point of repair.

Business and the Flourishing of Phoenix

Married with small children, Klusman is forced to practice what he preaches – and to make mid-course corrections along the way. A self-described "serial entrepreneur," his business involvement runs the gamut from real estate to financial services to private equity. He is CEO of IPO Solutions, an online investment bank that aims to do to investment banking "what eTrade did to the brokerage business." And, as co-founder and managing partner at HWK Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm, Klusman helped to facilitate a $15 million investment in a Hollywood film company. He is also managing partner at Camelback Realty Group, specializing in land and commercial development in Phoenix, with transactions upwards of $75 million. He's also the founder of Zoyo, a self-serve frozen yogurt franchise with eight locations across Phoenix and a ninth in the works. And together with business partner and mentor Bert Hayenga, he is the largest Dunkin Donuts franchisee west of the Mississippi.

"Aaron has been highly competitive in a very humble way," says Cardon, a mentor of Klusman's. "He doesn't live just for the moment. He has the rare ability to have a macro understanding, blending patience with a capacity to aggressively move forward when the time comes for that as well."

Klusman works hard to turn a profit, as success in business requires, but the dividends extend beyond his investors. As he sees it, thriving businesses are instrumental to the flourishing of any vibrant city, and Phoenix is no exception. "If you're going to talk about the well being of the city, the reality is that you have to understand economics," he says. "A city flourishes as its economic engine thrives."

'If you're going to talk about the well being of the city, you have to understand economics. A city flourishes as its economic engine thrives.'—Aaron Klusman

Michael Barth works for Klusman as Zoyo's director of operations, overseeing current stores and working to expand the franchise to new locations. He also joined the Camelback Society after Klusman personally invited him. "He's a very caring, relational guy," Barth says of his employer. "He's always asking everyone how they're doing."

Barth has also been impressed by Klusman's innovative approach to business. "He's got a new idea every day," Barth says. "There's always something that someone else hasn't thought about."

The belief that the work of our hands is a way of honoring God has become foundational to Klusman's theology of work. "There's intrinsic value in making a table," he says. "You can take joy in that each day. You don't need to slap a Bible verse on the leg of the table for it to be stamped with the approval of God."

Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Craft

Klusman recognizes that like any endeavor, business can be twisted to serve destructive ends, which leads to difficult questions – especially for an entrepreneur, for whom there are tangible implications. As an investor in a film company, he wonders what faithful presence in that sector looks like, as his seat at the table seldom warrants him a say in the kinds of movies made. And while Dunkin Donuts and Zoyo provide great environments for families, he wonders about the merits of selling foods that aren't particularly healthy.

"When you start to think through all the ways you can influence culture, you realize everything can also influence in the wrong direction," he says. "Everything can be abused."

Even so, Klusman recognizes daily opportunities to seek the common good, beginning by affirming that all relationships – with customers and employees, with business partners and neighbors – provide opportunities to serve. These distinctions may seem insignificant, but Klusman believes choices like these do shape the culture of a company. Given enough time, and taken together with the common-good decisions of others, the economic culture of Phoenix may even begin to change.

It's easy to disparage the licentiousness of Hollywood or the greed of Wall Street from a distance. But Klusman isn't content doing that. Alongside his mentors and peers, he's made the decision to practice faithful presence in Phoenix, where God has placed him, cultivating his craft as an entrepreneur.

Tim Høiland is a writer and communications specialist working in the field of international development. He lives in downtown Phoenix with his wife, Katie, where together they enjoy palm trees, sunshine, dry heat, and most recently, frozen yogurt from Zoyo. He explores the intersections of faith, development, justice, and peace in the Americas at tjhoiland.com.

Earlier this year the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta released a report to reassure Americans that there is, in fact, no impending zombie apocalypse. Although the CDC certainly had its tongue firmly in cheek, it was also answering a number of genuine internet queries about zombies. Apparently, some people were seeing a connection between the incident of a Miami man eating another man’s face in a drug-induced frenzy, and one in which a Maryland man killed his roommate and then ate his heart and brain. While of course there is no evidence that actual zombies exist, zombie-themed entertainment has freely proliferated. We have books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Zombie Combat Manual, and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. There are innumerable computer games, apps, movies, television shows, and comic books. We have become, it seems, a zombie nation. Why?

Most of it is just for fun. As gamers know, zombies make for a great frag fest. But it is also the case that zombies, like all topoi of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, indirectly get at something that is actually quite serious in the culture in which they appear. Just as vampires have always been about sex, zombies have always been about death—both the inevitability of actual death, and the symbolic suggestion that we are trapped in a living death. There are, it would seem, some fears and frustrations bubbling up under the crust of American satiety, and the zombies are coming out to pierce the pie.

While much of the proliferation of zombie entertainment on television is as B-grade as you might expect, there is one notable exception: AMC’s The Walking Dead. I have not watched a television premiere in over ten years, but I am going to be watching as the show begins its third season this fall. While the show is certainly not for everyone (it is very violent, and the camera never shies away from spilled brains and black zombie guts), those who can stomach the gore will be rewarded with a lot to ponder and appreciate.

First, The Walking Dead is a brilliant adaptation of a multi-volume survival-tale graphic novel (or comic, depending upon your proclivities) by the same title, written by Robert Kirkman, well-known to fans of the genre. While often translations of graphic novels are disasters on the big screen—Watchmen and Surrogates were unworthy of their sources—The Walking Dead succeeds by capturing the best of the static images from the original, and by making important changes when action dictates. The images are unforgettable not because of the horror, but because they frame poignant moments. Each scene makes the most of space, contrast, color, and shadow. In the best Hitchco*ckian tradition, things unseen are as important as things seen, and a first-rate soundtrack is used deliberately and sparingly for emotional emphasis.

At one point a man and his son are boarded up in a house, afraid of leaving, horrified by the zombification of their wife and mother, who is now roaming around outside with the other walking dead. When she hears noises coming from the house, she stumbles toward it (zombies have just a bit of brain stem left, and will respond to noise). From inside, we see a character look through the peephole, his eye illuminated by an eerie glow. Then we see what he sees: the zombie woman’s distorted face, leaning into the peephole, staring blankly back at us. In the next sequence, we see the slow turning back and forth of the door knob, which is gleaming slightly in the dark. It is truly creepy. The show is equally good at creating and returning to iconic images: there is a shot of cars piled up on a highway in front of Atlanta, which is smoking in the background; and a shot of a windmill in front of a idyllic country farm and barn, hiding its joys and secrets alike. And my favorite: the protagonist’s broad sheriff hat with its shining gold tassles. As long as someone is wearing it, it seems, we have a chance.

The Walking Dead is great precisely because it knows that it is not about zombies. It even defends itself by never once using the word “zombie”; they are instead “walkers,” “roamers,” or “geeks.” Like the best survival fiction, the show insists that it doesn’t really matter what causes the apocalypse; what matters is the battle to remain human when the world around you completely tanks.

To tell that story, you must develop characters that viewers care about, and The Walking Dead does the trick within the first ten minutes of the first episode. We meet two of the primary characters: the sheriff, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), and his partner, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal). It’s before the apocalypse has taken place, and the two are talking in their patrol car, unknowingly eating the last french fries they will probably ever eat. Shane asks Rick if he knows the difference between men and women, and then laughs as he sermonizes about how women don’t know how to turn off light switches in the house. As the two men talk, Shane gets Rick to admit that his marriage with Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) is in trouble because he has difficulty communicating his feelings. Rick reports that Lori had blurted out to him, in front of their seven-year-old son, that “sometimes I wonder if you care about us at all.”

These few minutes not only draw us into these characters’ lives, they also reveal why post-apocalyptic narratives are inherently interesting to a late-modern culture like ours. In a world where everything is handed to us with little work or risk, we become the walking dead. We are soulless people who go through lives and relationships on autopilot, with little gratitude, and few challenges to our mettle. But when life suddenly becomes a simple matter of survival, a person’s true character emerges, for better or for worse. On the day of this conversation, Rick gets shot, falls into a coma, and recovers weeks later, only to find the world as he knew it completely overrun by zombies. He immediately becomes love-in-action. He searches for his wife and son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), actually manages to find them, and then emerges as the leader of a ragtag group of survivors. The comic’s promotional material describes it well: “In a world ruled by the dead, we are finally forced to start living.” By the end of the first season, Rick is able to express the love that he has lived, making him come alive, in some ways, for the first time.

But the show doesn’t end there. Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Walking Dead reveals how exceptional suffering forces all the tough Job-like questions to the surface. “Why so much death now?” “Why death in this horrible way?” “Where were you, God, when this happened?” All these questions lead inevitably to “Why am I even alive to begin with?” and “Why bother now?” The characters do not have much time for metaphysical speculation, so when such moments emerge, they are particularly poignant.

At the beginning of the second season, Rick and his group have survived a harrowing escape from Atlanta, which they had erroneously thought to be under control and in search for a cure. They barely escape from a herd of walkers, and they lose one of the children, who they now believe to be dead. Almost as an afterthought, Rick goes into a church to pray to a figure of Jesus on the cross, covered with blood (that such a crucifix would not likely appear in a Baptist church apparently did not occur to the writers). He looks up to it, asking God for a sign, a nudge, something to let him know that he is doing okay in leading this group. Shortly thereafter, he and his son, Carl, are walking in the woods and come across a deer. Carl is enchanted; his life prior to this point has been filled with fear, and here is a moment of pure beauty and grace. We see Rick watching his son from behind, wondering if this could be the sign he asked for. Carl walks slowly up to the deer, a smile on his face for the first time we can remember. The camera stays focused on the deer, and … and …. (spoiler alert!) … BLAM! Carl and the deer drop to the ground. There are no zombies in sight; Carl was shot by another survivor who was stalking the deer. The episode ends, leaving the audience unsure of Carl’s fate.

Like the Book of Job, the show is not going to provide any answers to horrific contingencies like these. Some characters have faith and hope, others do not, and the choice becomes a grid through which they see everything that happens to them, good and bad. Carl does not die; he is saved (through surgery) by a Christian named Herschel (Scott Wilson), who encourages Rick to view the fact that his son survived the bullet as a grace. The audience, like Rick, is left with a difficult question: which story is more true? The despairing one, in which your son manages to escape all kinds of evil, only to get shot during an otherwise transcendent moment; or the hopeful one, in which you thereby happen to land on the property of a veterinarian who knows how to remove the bullet and repair the damage? Or is the story told by Carl’s mother the truest one, when she wonders aloud why they are saving him at all, when the world is full of such evil?

If all this is starting to sound like a zombie version of every novel Cormac McCarthy has ever written, that is exactly my point. McCarthy insists that fiction must be about matters of life and death because those are the only things that matter. He also stares unflinchingly at raw human nature in the face of death. An episode from the second season, “Pretty Much Dead Already,” highlights the show’s interest in these issues (and here I give another spoiler alert). The group of survivors discovers that Herschel has been keeping walkers in his barn because when he looks at them, he sees them for the people they once were—including his wife and stepson—not the corpses they have become. Herschel, because he has been relatively safe on his farm, has been isolated from the worst of the world “out there” and so can afford to hope for a “cure.” This is a perspective on the walkers that the show itself has not permitted to this point, and it is stunning to recognize how quickly we had accepted a video game dichotomy of good and evil, how quickly we had assumed that the only thing to do in this situation is lock and load. As the episode progresses, viewers are reminded again that the challenge of a world dominated by walkers is merely an exaggerated version of our own. In the face of the unfolding horrors of real life and inevitable death, who will we become? A Darwinian animal or a civilized human being?

Survivor fiction is something of a reversal of the usual story of growth in a protagonist because the key is to learn how not to be changed. Rick succeeds in that he strives to remain the best version of himself in apocalypse (though compromised in many ways); Shane, however, slides almost completely into mad despair and selfishness. Shane sacrifices someone else to keep himself alive, later saying that it doesn’t much matter if he shoots anyone, because “when you think about it in the cold light of day, you’re pretty much dead already.” But, of course, it does matter if you shoot someone or not. Characters are forced to choose, all the time, whether to become Rick or Shane. The importance of this choice is why the show often zeroes in on the seven-year-old Carl. He is the one whose humanity hangs in the balance. Every time he is forced to “put down” a zombie to keep himself or others alive, he slips away from the child who had looked with wonder upon the deer, toward becoming a man who would say, as he does to his mother, “we are all food for something else.” In this way, the show does McCarthy’s The Road even one better, for in that story, the boy’s hope and faith in some kind of goodness seem never to be in question. With Carl, both his life and his humanity are in grave danger.

Finally, The Walking Dead is successful because it effectively employs an ancient artistic strategy used by writers ranging from Francois Rabelais to Flannery O’Connor to Cormac McCarthy: the grotesque. The grotesque works by the shocking and revelatory conjunction of things that we do not normally put together: a gargoyle peering down from a cathedral; a child who looks prematurely ancient; a man with a string of human ears around his neck; God distorting himself into the form of a man. It exaggerates the incongruence in order to get us to pay attention to something significant, something that we would rather not notice. It works like a proverbial train wreck, or like a Jerry Springer episode featuring a 600-pound man: you don’t really want to see it, but you somehow can’t stop looking at it, either. The Walking Dead is that kind of show. It unrelentingly sticks death in your face. This is why I can’t help but imagine that Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated it, for reasons beyond the rural Georgia setting and some great backwoods characters. O’Connor was brave enough to write a story in which an entire family is brutally murdered, including a grandmother, and to have the murderer declare that “she would of been a good woman … if it had just been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” O’Connor knew that it is far better to look death in the face, pump your fist at God and ask him the hard questions, than it is to wander through life in a satiated haze. We need the walking dead because we have met the walking dead, and they are us.

Christina Bieber Lake is associate professor of English at Wheaton College.

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